Chrissy Teigen has a friend in Meghan Markle.

Speaking exclusively with PEOPLE about her advocacy for type 1 diabetes screening at Hello Sunshine’s Shine Away event on Saturday, Oct. 11, the 39-year-old model recalled making an appearance on season 2 of the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix series, With Love, Meghan, and their friendship since.

“I adore her,” Teigen said of Meghan, 44. “I really adore her. I think she is so incredibly strong.”

“It is insane to me how polarizing she is for so many different people, when she really is just such a kind, good person that wants the best for all her friends and the best for people around her, and the best for her own relationship and for her children,” she added.

Teigen told PEOPLE that none of Meghan’s “polarizing” actions have been made for public perception. According to her, the Duchess of Sussex just “[lives] simply.”

“She just wants those things,” Teigen explained. “And people come up with all these different things that she could be about or what she wants, … [but] it’s not that complicated.”

“People are always going to read into what they want to read into, and they’re going to hyperfocus into what they want to believe,” she added.

Teigen — who appeared at the event as a spokesperson for Sanofi’s Screen For Type 1 movement, which encourages people to talk to their doctors about the importance of type 1 diabetes screening — also acknowledged that no matter what, “People are just going to come up with their own story.”

“I think it’s cool that [Meghan] is just like, ‘Listen, say whatever you want. I’m happy and I’m healthy and I feel good,’ ” she continued.

When asked if she and her husband John Legend organize play dates for their kids — daughters Luna, 9, and Esti, 2, plus sons Miles, 7, and Wren, 2 — with Meghan and Prince Harry’s two children, Prince Archie, 6, and Princess Lilibet, 4, Teigen joked that while it would be a fun get-together, she doesn’t “leave the house.”

“I’m not joking,” she added to PEOPLE with a laugh. “I don’t go anywhere. I try to do every photo shoot, every everything at our house. So no. But if the time came up, absolutely.”

Teigen’s advocacy for diabetes care and early screening comes after son Miles’ diagnosis with the disease.

“We’re so lucky to have had Sanofi engage us in being able to talk about early detection and early screening for T1D, because it itself created a community — where we felt like we had people that genuinely cared about the questions that we had,” the mom of four told PEOPLE. “And we had a lot of them.”

“When Miles was first diagnosed, we were really scared, we were really nervous,” Teigen added. “I probably played it really cool, just because I’m used to a lot of chaotic things happening all the time, but I had no idea how much I would have to learn, how quickly.”

According to Teigen, being able to learn about early detection and screening for type 1 diabetes “means a lot to me, because I know how much it would have meant to have a few extra months, or weeks even, instead of being completely thrown into something that you had no idea about.”

“To be able to build the community that we’ve found around it earlier would have been really wonderful, because that happened so fast for us as well,” she continued. “People were like, ‘We have help for you. We know all these tips and tricks for everything.’ We didn’t have those things in our arsenal. Those weren’t things we had purchased yet. It just would help so much.”