Pulp up the volume

THERE is, it seems, only one way to lose weight if you are a celebrity and that is to avoid food. Or at least to avoid chewing it. Dukan, Atkins and other diet fads that advocate the restriction of a food group come and go out of fashion, but the only steadfast route to super-skinniness appears to come in liquid form.

From the maple syrup diet, reportedly favoured by Beyoncé, which requires followers to subsist on daily drinks alone, and the cabbage soup diet to the ‘blend’ trend for consuming pureed baby food — Cheryl Cole is a fan — and the ‘broth’ diet followed by Angelina Jolie, it’s a case of not so much nil by mouth as swill (and then swallow) by mouth when it comes to achieving that A-lister body.

Not that all nutritionists see it that way. Many are scathing about diet plans that involve ditching solids, claiming we have a physiological need to chew food and that the act of masticating helps to release and assimilate molecules of nutrients from food. Their argument is that the longer a food remains in the mouth, as it does with solids, the more adept our tongues become at recognising its flavours, eventually sending messages to the brain to release the necessary digestive juices.