French doctor in court to defend the Dukan diet

The French diet doctor famous for helping shape the figure of England's sweetheart Pippa Middleton appeared in a Paris court yesterday to defend himself against allegations from a rival dietician that his advice can lead to "alimentary destruction".
 
Pierre Dukan, who also counts Jennifer Lopez, Gisele Bundchen and Pippa's mother Carole Middleton among his followers, is suing Jean-Michel Cohen for libel after Cohen told a French health magazine that Dukan's diet was dangerous. Dukan is seeking a modest €15,000 in damages.
 
Cohen insisted that Dukan’s popular diet causes health problems such as heart disease and breast cancer. He also added that the only people who benefited from the diet were "the slimming industry, doctors, pill salesmen, publishers, newspapers".
 
Dukan advocates a low-fat, high-protein regime, not unlike the Atkins diet. It bans calorie-counting and allows unlimited consumption of certain protein-rich foods. It rocketed to fame in France a few years ago, and has since been put forward by the Daily Mail as the "ultimate diet".

His lawyer, Sebastian Dufay, argued yesterday that his client only wanted to give people "slimming methods capable of bringing them ways of fighting obesity for their whole life".
 
But Cohen's lawyer, Richard Malka, dismissed the diet as a reverse fairy tale" in that "you lose your kilos very rapidly and one day, poof, you get all your kilos back".

His case was supported by the findings of an online survey of 5,000 people who had used the Dukan diet, released on Monday. The survey suggests that 80 per cent of the diet’s followers regain any lost weight within four years.  Dukan claims that only 40 per cent regain the lost weight.

Parisians were able to see for themselves that the diet can work when Pippa Middleton turned up at the Roland Garros tennis tournament the previous day, to watch reigning champion Rafael Nadal triumph over Croatia's Ivan Ljubicic.

A verdict in the libel case is expected on July 5. ·