NEW YORK – Paula Deen, the Southern belle of butter and heavy cream, is making no apologies for waiting three years to disclose she has Type 2 diabetes while continuing to dish up deep-fried cheesecake and other high-calorie, high-fat recipes on TV.

She said she isn’t changing the comfort cooking that made her a star, though it isn’t clear how much of it she’ll continue to eat while she promotes health-conscious recipes along with a diabetes drug she’s endorsing for a Danish company.

“I’ve always said, ‘Practice moderation, y’all.’ I’ll probably say that a little louder now,” Deen said Tuesday after revealing her diagnosis on NBC’s “Today” show. “You can have diabetes and have a piece of cake. You cannot have diabetes and eat a whole cake.”

Deen added her support of the Novo Nordisk company to a collection of lucrative endorsements that include Smithfield ham and Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

Among her recipes: deep-fried cheesecake covered in chocolate and powdered sugar, and a quiche that calls for a pound of bacon. While Deen has cut out the sweet tea she routinely drank straight through to bedtime and taken up treadmill walking, she plans few changes on the air.

Health activists and one fellow chef called her a hypocrite for promoting an unhealthy diet along with a drug to treat its likely effects.

Anthony Bourdain, a chef who has never been a Deen fan, told Eater.com: “When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you’ve got Type 2 diabetes; ... it’s in bad taste if nothing else.”

Government doctors say that being overweight (as Deen is), over 45 (as Deen is) and inactive (as Deen was) increase the risk for developing Type 2 diabetes. Roughly 23 million Americans are believed to have the most common Type 2 diabetes.

Patients’ bodies either do not produce enough insulin or do not use it efficiently, allowing excess sugar, or glucose, to accumulate in the blood.