I’ve heard that there’s a veggie version of the Atkins diet. Would it help me to lose weight quickly before my holiday next month?

The diet you’re referring to is the Eco-Atkins plan, which has just been researched by Dr David Jenkins and his team from Toronto University — the people who first brought us the low-glycaemic way of eating and the cholesterol-busting Portfolio eating plan. They have discovered that you can still lose an average of 8½lb within four weeks, which is similar to the original Atkins, through swapping animal protein for vegetable protein in the form of soy, nuts and gluten (the protein in wheat), with the added bonus of significantly lowering bad cholesterol levels and blood pressure .

A typical, traditional high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins-style diet will certainly help you to shed pounds rapidly, but is likely to also raise your “bad” LDL cholesterol levels. Even though the Atkins people now promote the use of lean cuts of meat and more fish rather than cheese and sausages as ways to pack in the protein, the diet still seems to have a negative effect on bad cholesterol.

The million-dollar question, of course, is how easy is the Eco-Atkins plan to follow? While you can live a relatively normal life on the standard Atkins diet by having, for example, scrambled eggs for breakfast, lots of salmon with a little bit of salad for lunch and a big juicy steak with a few florettes of broccoli for dinner, you will undoubtedly have to work harder at making the “eco” version work.

Breakfast, for example, would need to be something such as oat bran with soy milk followed by specially formulated, gluten-enriched nutbread with tomatoes and avocado. For lunch you could have vegan-style chicken and turkey breast slices with more nutbread, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, cucumber and almonds and for dinner you could rustle up a pearl barley and tofu stir-fry using aubergine, onions, pepper, broccoli and cauliflower. Snacks would need to consist of strawberries and almonds.

Unlike the original Atkins plan, which allows just 20g of carbohydrate in its initial phase, this essentially vegan-based version increases the intake of carbohydrate to 130g, a level that is now considered by the Institute of Medicine in America to be the minimum needed (most of us eat much more than 250g daily). This higher carbohydrate intake means that your body is unlikely to go into the state known as ketosis, considered to be a key advantage of the Atkins diet because it helps to keep you feeling full. The good news however is that in spite of not triggering ketosis — which gives you that unpleasant Atkins breath — Eco-Atkins dieters still felt satisfied, probably because of the fibre-packed foods.

Jenkins acknowledges that sticking strictly to his Eco-Atkins plan may be hard, but he thinks that even if people occasionally stray, they are still likely to take some of its rules into their everyday life and so reap benefits for their long-term weight and cholesterol. And as he points out, it could benefit both sustainability and humanity; music to the ears of Paul McCartney and fellow vegans and green campaigners everywhere.

As yet there are no Eco-Atkins diet books published. Until they arrive, switching to a soy-rich, strictly vegetarian diet containing 60 per cent of your usual calories is a pretty good way of emulating the plan and will certainly help to whip your body into shape.

The higher carbohydrate intake of the eco version of the Atkins diet may be beneficial to our brains. Scientists say that traditional low-carbohydrate diets can impact negatively on memory and reaction times because this vital organ is dependant on glucose, which comes largely from carbohydrate foods, to work optimally and that 20g daily is just too low to cover its needs.

Standard high-protein plans can put a strain on our kidneys. The eco version has much fewer sulphur-based amino acids (protein building blocks found mainly in animal proteins) and is believed to be much gentler on the kidneys.

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