A survival guide to Hoodia products
by
site editor Elias J. Derrick, last update: 2/18/2012 4:31:54 PM.
hoodia
While there are about a thousand and one Hoodiaa products being offered both in stores and online there are only a handful of effective and affordable Hoodiaa products. The history of how we arrived at modern Hoodiaa products is quite a long one, so let’s start from the beginning.
Before we were able to take it, extract it, put it in bottles and ship Hoodiaa products all over the world, the local tribes had been using the plant for centuries. Hoodiaa come from the Kalahari Deserts of South Africa and Namibia, and to put it simply, food is not always available in the middle of the desert; not hundreds of years ago anyways. So during particularly difficult times, like on a hunting trip away from the village, the tribesmen would cut off small pieces of the plant and eat them. They would only need the tiniest bit and their hunger was satisfied, then they could concentrate on their hunting efforts.
This continued for hundreds of years until the 1960s when the first research into Hoodiaa and creating a viable Hoodiaa product began. Unfortunately this research was put on the back burner until a study on the diet of the Kalahari Bushmen reignited interest in the plant in the mid 90s. By 1997 scientists had isolated the active ingredient in Hoodiaa gordonii, P-57, and were ready to make marketable Hoodiaa products. The company which owned the rights to Hoodiaa products, Phytopharm, was doing studies on the substance and had shown that subjects who used their Hoodiaa products were decreasing their daily caloric intake by an average of about 1000 calories per day. This was enough to get the attention of Pfizer who was interested in finding a way to synthesize the molecule P-57 and create a pharmaceutical Hoodiaa product which could be produced at a much cheaper cost than growing the plant and harvesting extract was. It seemed however that creating an artificial Hoodiaa product was much easier said than done, as the molecule turned out to be an extremely challenging one even for the leading chemists in the field and eventually Pfizer withdrew their partnership with Phytopharm. It seems that if there is ever going to be pharmaceutical Hoodiaa products they are still years away.
The only Hoodiaa products available are the natural extracts of the plant, which can be looked at as a good thing or a bad thing. Hoodiaa in its natural form has no side effects, or risk of addiction, or risk of overdose. The bad part is that the process of growing, harvesting and manufacturing natural Hoodiaa products is a very costly one; and you should be skeptical of any Hoodiaa product offered at a significantly lower price than other sites. More likely either the Hoodiaa has been mixed with something else, or the “Hoodiaa product” actually contains no Hoodiaa at all. With 40 billion dollars being spent on weight loss by Americans alone, Hoodiaa products have attracted a lot of scam artists in addition to genuine merchants of the plant. One of the best ways to tell if you are getting a genuine Hoodiaa product is to ask about a CITES certificate from the South African government, which is attached to all Hoodiaa which is exported from the country.