Appetite for destruction?

(From Bristol Evening Post)

THERE'S one at every dinner party. Someone who turns away part of the meal saying they are on a diet that doesn't allow them to eat certain things.

Whether its the Grapefruit Diet or the Cabbage Soup Diet, or, more recently, The Atkins Diet or the South Beach Diet, many people try to stick to a strict eating plan to shed excess pounds.

Astonishingly, a recent poll for ITV1's Tonight with Trevor McDonald revealed that three million people in Britain are now trying to lose weight on the Atkins Diet.

The fact that 10 per cent of women and seven per cent of men are on, or have tried, the fashionable eating plan shows just how many of us are unhappy with the size of our waistlines.

And there are millions of others following different methods in a bid to lose weight.

The National Centre of Eating Disorders estimates that in the past 10 years around two-thirds of women and a third of men will have gone on a diet, most to no avail.

Over half of us are overweight, says the British Nutrition Foundation, and the figure is rising.

Yet such is the concern about fads in dieting that the British Dietetic Association and the American Institute for Cancer Research are telling people that dieting could be as damaging to their health as being overweight.

So do any of these popular diets, which make millions for their creators, actually have the miraculous results they promise?

Or is severely limiting your food intake as damaging as being overweight?

Nutrition expert Sue Baic, who lectures at Bristol University, said: "These diets all recommend either cutting out or severely restricting a…