The Cooking Guru’s Health Problems

You can deep fry just about anything and it will taste good.  Ask just about anyone who lives in the south.  Twinkies, cheesecake, pickles, or whole turkeys.  Maybe even an old tennis shoe.  Nothing is exempt!

This woman has grown a Southern comfort food empire by cooking deep fried cheesecake and other things I am unlikely to eat.  She did not go public with her Type II Diabetes until three years after she learned of it. Now someone from some group for science in the public interest says she should have come forward earlier.

Her empire can’t be doing that well, for I bought a little bottle of her mint jelly at some deep discount store about a week ago.  I liked it, but it wasn’t any better than anyone else’s mint jelly. Admittedly, I’ve never watched her on television.  I don’t watch cooking shows because I don’t care about food the same way I used to.  I remember when all I could think of after one meal was what I would get for the next.  And I was never even the primary food preparer at home.  My honored husband has always taken that in hand for me.

Apparently the rest of America has turned this woman into an icon.  I’ll even bet there are plenty of adults out there who actually believe that sports stars use the products they endorse.  More or less, I find that people are materialistic and will do things that are over the top to make some money.  Not me.  Sometimes I tend to act like a religious mystic.  Initially, this blew my husband away.  He expected me to act more like a “scientist”, at least when we first married.  But now he knows what he got.

I gotta be real. This woman doesn’t.

I wish everyone were real.  There are, for me, some things I cannot do. For example, I cannot work in a marijuana clinic.  I don’t think it is good therapy or that there is anywhere near enough real science to show that it works on any of the things on which it is supposed to work.  Sometimes I am “between jobs,” but would rather be like that than do something which I do not think is good for folks.

This woman has not been “real.”  Most people who accept the obscene amounts of money that go with mass communications and business empires simply aren’t.  Amazingly, many people who watch television think they are. There are lots of people getting paid lots of money to say lots of things. We mental health professionals call this a “hidden agenda.”  People have reasons for saying or doing things that are simply not what they are or appear to be.

We are good at finding them, as seriously trained mental health professionals. Everyone likes to pretend that they know more about what we do than we do. I do not understand why people consistently miss this one. Okay, so this woman is a hypocrite.  Is she more so than any other?

People have told me a lot about what “eating healthy” means to them.  Most of it reminds me of Mark Twain, who said something to the effect that if you want to lose weight, all you have to do is eat food that you hate.  I last heard that one a few years ago, from a man who was plunked down in front of a rhubarb salad somewhere in Fargo, North Dakota.  He told me how much he had paid for that knowledge and suggested I ought to follow suit. Compulsive dieting is contrary to human nature, unless someone happens to be obsessive-compulsive.  I dumped half of my body weight and some alleged Type II Diabetes without measuring and counting like diets.  I just avoided foods that were processed.  Processing is for sales, not nutrition.

So before you let someone like this woman convince you that dropping your cheesecake into the deep fryer is a good idea, just stop.  Instead, get simple.  Get real.  Your body will thank you for it.