How to lose weight the maple syrup way

With the carb-hating Dr Atkins dead and his fans still reeling from revelations that he ended his days overweight, faddish dieters the world over have been looking for a new regime to follow. They may have found it in the maple syrup diet.

The programme has all the right ingredients to become an instant dieting success story; celebrity endorsement, a little bit of dubious science and a stomach-churning combination of foods.

Related articles

• Dieting can make cellulite worse, say doctors

Health-food shops have reported soaring sales of pots of the Madal Bal syrup on which the diet is based, and its UK distributor says orders have soared from 500 pots a year to more than 2,000 a month.

Fans of the diet, which basically consists of replacing normal meals with a liquid made up of maple and palm syrup, lemon juice, water and cayenne pepper, claim it purifies the body and can lead to weight loss of almost a stone in 10 days.

The syrup is made in Switzerland from the sap of maple trees and four rare Asian palm trees. The singer Beyoncé Knowles used it to lose 20lb before filming the movie Dreamgirls.

Azmina Govindji of the British Dietetic Association said: "Fasting for that length of time is likely to give you drastic weight loss anyway because it is all about the deficit of calories."