Stick It, Haters: Paula Deen's Laughing All Way to Bank

Reactions to Paula Deen's diabetes diagnosis—including ours!—have been largely derisive, but she's going to have the last laugh … "all the way to the bank," predicts Josh Ozersky in Time. If health nuts think this experience will finally teach Deen a lesson, they're dead wrong. We're talking about the woman who figured out a way to deep-fry butter (just add cream cheese to it!), after all; she has never given a second thought to little things like cholesterol. "The woman just didn’t care; she was going to deep fry some Twinkies, and that was the end of it," Ozersky writes. Why should she change now?

Deen's "freewheeling indifference to health concerns" got her where she is today, and she demonstrated that same indifference when revealing her diagnosis. The only change to her diet that she's actually revealed? Cutting back on sweet tea. But the money is still coming in—indeed, her son is even making some of it by hawking "Paula lite recipes on the Cooking Channel"—and it's sure to keep coming. Americans have a love-hate relationship with food, living "in a state of perpetual shame," but Deen "doesn’t seem to feel any shame at all. And there’s something in us, I suspect, that can’t help but like her for it, even though we know we shouldn’t." (More Paula Deen stories.)