Robert Ligon, 68, begins a 15-month jail sentence today for claiming, fraudulently, that his “carob-coated” doughnut contained only three grams of fat and 135 calories. In fact, the chocolate-glazed treat contained a belt-busting 18 grams of fat and 530 calories.

Honest bakers say that the low-fat doughnut is an impossible dream: the pastries are, after all, rings of batter deep-fried in spitting-hot oil. Jim Dahl, an investigator who helped prosecute Ligon, told The Wall Street Journal: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Ligon’s lawyer, Rick Halprin, expressed surprise at the sentence: “I’ve had people go to jail before, but never over doughnuts.”

He said that prosecutors had failed to prove that anyone had been harmed by the mislabelling. “They didn’t bring in 10,000 overweight people,” he said.

Between 1995 and 1997, Ligon bought normal, high-fat rolls and pastries from wholesalers, relabelled them as low-fat and sold them to American health-food retailers under the name of Nutrisource Inc. The packaging claimed that the doughnuts’ coating was made of yoghurt. Ligon committed “mail fraud” by using the postal service to distribute his doughnuts.

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