Celebrity health and endorsements

A lot has been written about Paula Deen this week. Deen is a Food Network chef known for her Southern cooking, which is often heavy in butter, cream and sugar. Deen announced this week that she was diagnosed three years ago with Type II Diabetes. This by itself perhaps did not raise a lot of eyebrows, though some commented that Deen could have helped a lot of people in the last 3 years by being open about her illness and modifying some of her recipes for her audience. But it's a medical condition and if Deen wants to keep that private, that's her prerogative. What did raise eyebrows was that she announced her condition and at the same time announced an endorsement deal with a pharmaceutical company that promotes a diabetes drug. This generated a lot of reaction about celebrity and responsibility.

Most of the arguments about this seem to stem from the fact that Type II diabetes is affected by an unhealthy diet and the effects of diabetes can by lessened with a healthy diet and exercise. So does Deen, a celebrity chef, have a responsibility to promote a healthy diet instead of a drug? Does she have a responsibility to her viewers to discuss how the foods she cooks may affect their health? Does the pharmaceutical endorsement change her responsibility? Or should we just let the celebrity chef be a chef?