Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
MEGHAN’S WAR ON DIET PILLS SCAMMERS
Palace crackdown on bogus ads claiming she uses products
MEGHAN Markle is fighting to stop scammers using her name to sell diet pills online.
Buckingham Palace yesterday vowed to crack down on websites falsely claiming she used the tablets to get in shape.
BUCKINGHAM Palace has vowed to stop a raft of “illegal” web adverts claiming Meghan Markle is behind a brand of diet pills.
Officials are set to act after a Sunday Mirror investigation revealed the scam.
The bogus online campaign for “Keto Weight Loss” tablets features YouTube images of Meghan before and after her pregnancy.
And a fake quote on a site called First Level Fitness says: “Post pregnancy my body had lost its shape. But, with keto body tone, I came back.”
A second site promoting the pills – branded as potentially dangerous by experts – even has Meghan claiming in an interview the Royal Family wanted to stop her “pursuing my own weight loss line”.
And cruelly one ad even has the Duchess posing with the Queen and calling the tablets her “passion project” – a phrase she actually used in a speech about the launch of her Grenfell disaster charity cookbook.
Last night a spokesman for Meghan thanked us for alerting her to the scam. A royal source added: “This is obviously not true and an illegal use of the Duchess’ name for advertising purposes. We will follow our normal course of action.”
PRESSURES
First Level Fitness – one of the diet pills’ main promoters – describes itself as a “one stop fitness site”. But many pages on the portal are dedicated to selling male sex drugs.
Sellers linked to it claim the “Meghan” pills “melt fat fast without diet or exercise”. But yesterday experts warned against taking them.
Tam Fry, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, told us: “Nobody, but nobody, should go near diet pills advertised on the web – even when your favourite celebrity ‘endorses’ them.
“If you want to diet, it should be mandatory to seek advice from regulated professionals and use what they recommend.”
The second website involved claims that Meghan gushed about the keto pills’ benefits to a US publication called Entertainment Today, which does not exist.
The Duchess is quoted as saying of the diet tablets, costing £19.99 for 60: “All my life I’ve been passionate about taking care of my weight due to the pressures of Hollywood to stay young and look fit.
“For the last 10 years I’ve been travelling the world and sourcing organic ingredients and weight loss remedies.
“The culmination is the launch of my all-female-owned weight loss line which combines the world’s richest and most sought after ingredients at affordable and everyday prices.”
Bizarrely, the fake interview goes on: “The Royal Family is not happy with me splitting my time up. They made me decide on which direction I was going to focus on the future. Being so turned off by the reaction of their power move I have decided to pursue my new weight loss line and dream.”
In reality, the Duchess has not publicly discussed her weight since she began dating Prince Harry in 2016. Before that she spoke about following a plant-based diet with plenty of yoga, inspired by her instructor mother Doria Ragland. In 2014, Meghan told Australia’s news.au site she works out five times a week and enjoys hot yoga to keep her legs lean.
In 2013 she told Shape magazine how she loves green juice and Pilates, as well as following fitness guru Tracey Anderson’s DVDs.
She added: “I definitely try to eat as clean as possible… I avoid the things that are going to make me sluggish, but I’m also a foodie – so at the weekend all bets are off.
“If you deprive yourself of anything you’re going to crave it. So for me it’s finding that balance.”
No mention of pills, but back in the scammers’ world we found claims Meghan told royals she was dedicated to profiting from the keto tablets.
One advert was illustrated by a picture of Meghan with the Queen.
A bogus quote from the Duchess said: “We were clear from the beginning keto would be my passion project.
“I wanted to have creative control and run a business that was women centric. I didn’t feel like it was my obligation to make them (the Royal Family) feel comfortable to pursue my ambition.
“They know how much I obsess over weight loss and I put my entire heart and soul into this product to make it perfect.”
Meghan’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, has also been used by scammers to plug the pills.
And similar online pages falsely link