Hoodia for Weight Loss

When I put out a call for ingredients that people wanted more information about I was not expecting to get questions on Hoodia. In the world of natural products for weight loss, ingredients come and go - there is always a "hot" trend" - and Hoodia really hit that status 3 or 4 years ago.

Nonetheless, I got more requests to talk about Hoodia than anything else, so here we go.

First, some history. Hoodia, primarily the species Hoodia gordonii, is a traditional plant of Southern Africa. The San people of the Kalahari Desert would eat this plant to ease thirst and hunger when they were traveling, and short on readily available food sources. Literature also suggests that the San found Hoodia to be helpful for indigestion and other mild GI complaints.

In the 1960s, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) took an interest in Hoodia and other indigenous plants for their possible medicinal properties. CSIR later contracted with a British pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm LTD to continue the investigation of Hoodia as a drug for appetite suppression. Phytopharm isolated a compound called p57, which they felt was the active ingredient responsible for the appetite-suppressing qualities of the plant. They licensed this to pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in 1998. Pfizer dropped the product after early clinical trials for vague reasons. Reports/rumours later circulated that the levels of Hoodia required to suppress appetite in rats and dogs was extremely large and produced severe liver damage. It may have also caused kidney damage. (You can read about that here, but remember, most of this is not validated: Hoodia Report from Fatnews)

Take two. After the failed attempt with Pfizer, whatever the reasons, Phytopharm entered into a contract with Unilever. Unilever was researching p57 as an addition to its popular SlimFast line of diet products. After 4 years of research, Unilever followed Pfizer and dropped p57 in late 2008. The publicity following this split often quoted executives from Unilever as saying that "clinical study concluded that Hoodia could not meet Unilever’s safety and efficacy standards." (read more here: Hoodia Finds Life After Unilever)

But wait, you ask, Hasn't Hoodia been available as a dietary supplement for years?? Yes it has. Concurrent to all this negotiation over the patented p57 (this patent expires in 2017, by the way), the natural products industry (reeling from the loss of Ephedra in 2004) jumped all over Hoodia as a traditional weight loss ingredient - and this created another set of problems.

Hoodia has long been acknowledged by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), as a fragile species. It is apparently slow growing and hard to harvest. When it began to boom in popularity two things happened: 1) you had a lot of plant poaching - literally people stealing the herb to sell - and 2) you had a lot of product showing up here in the US that probably was not Hoodia at all (read more about fake Hoodia here: Fake Hoodia Fears Easing as Market Stabilizes). Fortunately, for the past few years, this seems to be improving. Methods for farming Hoodia have improved as have methods for identifying the genuine ingredient.

So what is the good news? Those who have practiced traditional herbal medicine will tell you that when you take a plant that has had a long history of being used for "condition x", try to isolate a chemical out of it and then expect the same results, you may not get what you are looking for. There are many great examples of this such as hypericin from St John's Wort and lobeline from Lobelia inflata. The San people ate whole Hoodia, not p57. But you can't patent the plant...

So if you are going to use Hoodia as part of your weight management strategy, you are actually likely to be better off with the whole plant extracts that are present in dietary supplements and not the isolated p57 - at least until if/when research proves otherwise. Also if you are going to take Hoodia, take a certified product - for example Naturex's HoodiaPure® - or others with CITES certification.

In Health,

Dr. Jacques