Jenny Craig agrees to end ad campaign to settle lawsuit

February 6, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

NEW YORK (AP) — Jenny Craig has agreed to end an ad campaign featuring actress Valerie Bertinelli as part of a legal settlement with Weight Watchers International, the dueling companies said Friday.

Bertinelli, clad in a white lab coat, tells viewers a “major clinical trial ... run by some serious lab geeks” found dieters using the Jenny Craig approach lost twice as much weight as those using the nation’s largest weight-loss program.

The problem was no such study existed, Weight Watchers said in a federal lawsuit filed in January. At that point, the campaign had run for less than a month on TV, in print and online, and a federal judge in Manhattan temporarily barred Jenny Craig from broadcasting, publishing or distributing the ads.

Weight Watchers said Jenny Craig’s claim was not supported by fact or science.

The purported trial actually was two separate studies, each comparing one company’s program to do-it-alone diets. And they were conducted 10 years apart, looked at different outcomes and didn’t include Weight Watcher’s current diet methods, Weight Watchers said.

Jenny Craig CEO Patti Larchet said in a statement that her company — a subsidiary of Swiss food maker Nestle SA — admitted no wrongdoing and has agreed not to compare the results of its own research to past data about the Weight Watchers method.

Weight Watchers, which is based in New York, also alleged the Jenny Craig ads’ launch was deliberately timed at the height of the diet season. Late December is a crucial period for both companies because it’s when people are mostly like to seek help losing weight.

Jenny Craig’s method is based around company-provided food and one-on-one meetings with a coach. Weight Watchers uses a points-based system for food and exercise and offers group meetings.