A lot of money each year is spent on different products promising to help with weight loss. According to CBS, $40 billion are spent on these products, which don’t seem to have good results. Here comes hoodia – natural appetite suppressant which is really effective. Don’t confuse it with stimulating diet products, such as Phenfen or Ephedra. These drugs have severe side effects and now their use is prohibited. hoodia natural products have quite different effect: they don’t stimulate, but suppress the hunger. In fact they trick the brain and make it think that you are already full even if you’ve ate just a little bit. Although hoodia is not yet widely used in the West, the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert have used it for many years. They live in South Africa for more than 100,000 years. Some of them, like Anna Swartz, still keep up to the traditional way of life, living in a hut and cooking the so-called Bush food got from the desert.
As Lesley Stahl (correspondent) reports, hoodia plant for centuries was used by the South-African tribe, known as Bushmen. They use it because of it being a natural appetite suppressant, which help them during the long trips. Originally, hoodia cactus only grows in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. You may see the Bushmen in the film called “The Gods Must Be Crazy”. So, Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, and Toppies Kruiper, a local man from the Bushmen, were hired in order to help with finding hoodia. They started their 60 minute journey into the desert. Kruiper have told, that hoodia is more delicious after the rains. After finding the hoodia plant, Kruiper cut off the stalk and removed the sharp thorns. Stahl tried to eat it and realized that its texture in some way resembles the cucumber. After eating it, Stahl found no side effects: he didn’t feel seek, the taste was alright, and his heart felt good as well. She felt the appetite suppressing effect on her own back: she didn’t feel hungry or thirsty for the whole day, even during her usual meal hours. So, she realized that hoodia plant is a natural appetite suppressant which actually works.
The first scientific research of hoodia cactus was performed by the national laboratory in South Africa. As long as hoodia was a usual food of the Bushmen it was studied along with other local foods. They noticed that animals which were fed with this cactus began to loose weight. Dr. R.Dixey is the head of an English pharmaceutical company named Phytopharm. The company is trying to develop hoodia supplements, which would help to lose weight. Dr. Dixey reports that the wonderful effects weren’t discovered at once, and the first research was held in 1960s. The national laboratory of South Africa spent 30 years in order to isolate the molecule which provides the appetite suppressing effect. Phytopharm have bought the rights for using this isolated molecule in its product line.
Phytopharm performed a study, which cost more than $20 million. They hired fat volunteers to try using Hoodia, and the results were really good: people who used hoodia ate about 1000 calories a day less than those who didn’t take hoodia. Compare it with the fact, that an average American man takes in about 2600 calories a day, and an average woman consumes about 1,900 calories. So it’s obvious that using hoodia supplements will considerably reduce the amounts of food taken a day.
As long as Phytopharm has bought the patent, can other companies use hoodia as a component of their weight-loss products? Actually, the patent is not on the plant itself, but only on its application as a weight-loss substance and the application of the active compounds of the plant. So it seems that no other companies except Phytopharm are able to use hoodia as a weight-managing substance without contravening the patent. Still some companies advertise their weight-managing products and don’t hide the fact that hoodia is used in their composition. For example, Trimspa speaks openly that its X32 product contains 75mg of hoodia. In spite of the fact that the FDA has informed Trimspa about the lack of evidence of the product being safe, Trimspa is marketing X32 and holds an advertising campaign featuring Anna Nicole Smith. What is more, some companies in the marketing of their products openly refer to the results of clinical tests, originally performed by Phytopharm. Dr. Dixey declares it to be a straightforward theft, as these companies refer to results which they haven’t got. What is more, they don’t have a clear understanding of hoodia and its effects. For example, Phytopharm examined the materials, which contained up to 0.1% of the active substance of hoodia, while other companies the whole bottle call hoodia.
Still, Dr. Richard Dixey is not the only one who felt he was robbed. Roger Chennells, a South-African lawyer who represents the Bushmen, was shocked by the news that Phytopharm have bought the patent on hoodia plant. He says that the Bushmen weren’t aware of it, they simply gave information and then the patent was sold. This act is called “bio-piracy”, as long as there was no compensation for the use of the traditional knowledge, so the Bushmen felt that something valuable was stolen from them. So some letters were written and some threads were made so that the fact of bio-piracy was acknowledged. Roger Chennells was the one to help the Bushmen, who were exploited for many years. At first, the black tribes have pushed them aside, and then white colonists almost destroyed the Bushmen. It’s a documented fact that even in the turn of the century farmers were allowed to kill the Bushmen in Namibia and South Africa. Nowadays the stigmatization of the Bushmen still appears in South Africa, so they are often not permitted to be employed, they have little education and suffer from alcoholism. Now it seems that an additional harassment was appended to their long oppression – they didn’t get even the smallest part of hoodia bunce. So, Chennells threatened to sue at law the national laboratory in order to protect the interests of the Bushmen. Finally, they have come to an agreement, that the Bushmen or the San, as they are also sometimes called, will get a share of the hoodia gain. Of course, if there will be any gain, because now it’s not clearly seen if hoodia will bring the gain of millions and millions of dollars.
Anyway, the future of hoodia plant use is still undecided. Last year the project met a huge obstacle. When the development of a pill containing the active ingredient of hoodia seemed impossible, Pfizer, a pharmaceutical giant which cooperated with Phytopharm and funded a large part of the research, have quitted. Still, Dixey says that a synthetic counterpart could be made. He reports that some milligrams of this synthetic counterpart have already been obtained. Still, they require a very expensive process which can’t be scaled, so it can’t be produced in really large amounts suitable for providing thousands of obese people with an appetite suppressing product. That’s the reason why Phytopharm decided to use a natural appetite suppressant isolated from hoodia cactus.
So, it’s obvious that now Phytopharm needed the hoodia itself. Taking into account the huge numbers of obese people in the USA, it was clearly seen that a lot of hoodia will be needed. The wild-growing plants in the Kalahari Desert couldn’t meet the needs in this plant. The answer was making a lot of hoodia plantations to provide Phytopharm with the necessary amounts of hoodia. Simon MacWilliam, an agronomist, was entrusted with this difficult task. He was to organize plantations, where billions of hoodia will be grown within just a few years. The main problem was the lack of experience, as it was a new plant which wasn’t ever cultivated. They were to take the wild plant and start growing it in huge amounts, without knowing it peculiarities and diseases which hoodia may suffer from. It’s a hardly reachable but possible task. Simon MacWilliam has in his disposal 100s of acres and he is sure to reach a success and meet the needs of Phytopharm.
Phytopharm has bold plans, according to which by 2008 hoodia natural products will appear on the shelves of the supermarkets. As long as it’s possible to say that America is going through the epidemics of overweight, hoodia supplements being natural means of the suppression of appetite would find a profitable place on the market. macWilliam says that the species they grow on the plantations are in some way different from those wild-growing. The species on the plantations grow much faster but taste bitter. It might be a problem, you may think. Still Phytopharm promises to supply really effective and success-brining products with a good taste. They’ll also be tested and certificated in order to prove their safety and effectiveness.
To get more information visit Hoodia Website
