Is food TV making us fat?

Paula Deen shook her hips and said, "I feel like I'm being bad, y'all."

And in one sense, she was. The Food Network's Doyenne of Butter had just made a breakfast for her "Paula's Home Cooking" show: Bananas Foster French toast, one-eyed sailor with cheese sauce, hash brown casserole and a hot mocha float for dessert.

Total calories: 2,881 per person. That's more than most men need to eat all day to maintain their weight, and far more than most women need.

If you look at some of the scale-tipping chefs on the Food Network and cooking shows on other networks, and then you look at the expanding waistlines of Americans everywhere, you have to ask: Is food television making us fat?

The Food Network doesn't think so.

Kathy Alford, director of the Food Network Test Kitchens, said, "People are looking at this as entertainment, and it is giving people a large group of things to choose from. It's a starting point for people to make their own decisions. We know people will be turned on by one recipe on a show, and not do all the recipes. . . .

"If you look at one isolated recipe, you could say that Thanksgiving is ridiculous, but you don't want to do that every day."

Deen represents Southern cooking, which is often high in fats and sodium, Alford said. Other shows on the network, such as "Grill It! With Bobby Flay" and Ellie Krieger's "Healthy Appetite," offer recipes that aren't as fattening.

"The most important thing is balance, to get people into the kitchen. I don't believe in a super austere way of eating all the time, because if you do that, life isn't interesting. Neither do I believe in overeating all the time."

But Bonnie Taub-Dix, a national spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said watching the wrong cooking shows can lead to unintentional overeating.

"People are not realizing that these dishes can be very high in calories. There is a tendency for the public to think that because it is on TV or they read it in a magazine or newspaper, that it is true.

"However, I don't think that we could blame Food Network or any network or magazine. A lot has to do with the eye of the beholder," Taub-Dix said.

Some of the cooking on the shows appalls her, she said, and she wishes more shows were hosted by registered dietitians -- Krieger is one -- who would emphasize leaner foods and better methods of preparation.

"I love that there is a Food Network, and I do like a lot of the chefs that are on the Food Network who emphasize less fat-laden foods, healthier foods."

San Francisco Bay-area dietitian Susan Bohanan, a nutrition instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, Calif., said cooking shows have a beneficial impact on our health. It gets people interested in cooking, and it gets them to eat at home.

"If it's drawing people to cook at home, you're going to have less portion distortion," she said. "If I'm going to try a new recipe, I'm going to try that one recipe and not have dessert. If I go to a restaurant, I'm going to be seduced by that dessert and an appetizer."

Bohanan said people who watch food television should use their common sense to determine what is healthful, what is not, and what they can physically afford to eat.

"If I am going to sit down and watch the Paula Deen show, I know she is a Southern chef; I am not going to expect a low-fat meal from her. My expectation would be that it was going to be more indulgent and more fattening, but also that it was going to taste really, really good."

If Bohanan thinks viewers should be able to determine for themselves what recipes to follow, others are not sure that they do. A company that caters to diabetics advertises on "Paula's Home Cooking," and so does the weight-loss company Jenny Craig.

Steve Bellach of Jenny Craig Inc. said his company does not specifically buy time on Deen's shows or most other shows.

"Rather, our media buy on the Food Network is part of our strategy to reach our core target audience," Bellach said. "And we know they are watchers of the Food Network."

Even Deen herself does not eat like Paula Deen. In the October issue of Ladies' Home Journal, she is quoted as saying, "I don't eat my own cooking every day! My lord, I'd be wider than the table if I ate chicken and biscuits and gravy every day."

Contact Daniel Neman at (804) 649-6408 or dneman@timesdispatch.com.