Hoodia Gordonii Weight Loss Pill – Is It Hype or Is It Real?

Show me a diet pill fad and I’ll show you millions of innocent people who have been taken in by slick marketing.  Nowadays everybody’s talking about the hoodia gordonii weight loss pill.  So is the hoodia gordonii weight loss pll real or is it just hype?

If you ever saw “The Gods Must Be Crazy” (a really good movie), you saw the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.

Thousands of years ago their ancestors discovered the magical qualities of a succulent plant that eliminates hunger and relieves thirst.  This plant, hoodia gordonii, fools your brain into thinking you’re full.

Specimens of hoodia, called “Xhoba” by the San, sat in a laboratory for 30 years before being properly analyzed.  During preliminary studies Pfizer (the huge pharmaceutical company that produces Viagra) introduced hoodia to the media.

Another company, Phytopharm, owned the patent.  When the two couldn’t come to terms Pfizer ended their research.

Phytopharm then bought the rights from the San Bushmen to harvest, test, and produce a drug they call P57.  Phytopharm’s goal wasn’t to produce a natural hoodia gordonii weight loss pill but to manufacture a synthetic drug.

Phytopharm sold the use of their patent to Unilever, who intended to introduce synthetic hoodia into their Slim Fast product.

So how does hoodia work?

When you eat your blood sugar rises.  Then glucose sensing nerve cells in the hypothalamus in your mid brain are stimulated and send a signal that tells us we’re full.  Hoodia stimulates the same nerve cells.  Take a hoodia gordonii weight loss pill and you feel full without eating.

During double-blind tests people taking the pure hoodia gordonii weight loss pill ate 1,000 fewer calories than those who took a placebo.

Since one pound of body fat is approximately 3,500 calories, when you take the hoodia gordonii weight loss pill you could lose a pound of fat every three and a half days.

Unilever’s product isn’t on the market.  However you can get a natural hoodia gordonii weight loss pill made from real hoodia gordonii from the Kalahari Desert.

But there’s a snag.  Hoodia has become so popular that in 2005 CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna) put it on its list of protected South African plants.  A permit is now required to export the plant from its homeland.

South Africa is the only place to get real hoodia gordonii and it takes up to six years to grow before it can be harvested.  There is expected to be a shortage of the plant as worldwide demand surpasses the available supply.

A word to the wise

With the shortage of real hoodia, some companies have come out with pills that use hoodia grown in Mexico, China, and the U.S.  Those hoodia plants do not have the hunger suppressing ability that certified South African hoodia gordonii does.

Possible additional benefits

Hoodia has no known side effects.   The San also claim that hoodia is an aphrodisiac and say it ends abdominal cramps and heals hemorrhoids.  They drink hoodia tea for indigestion and also use it as a treatment for diabetes, hypertension and tuberculosis.

To my knowledge the other attributes of hoodia haven’t been tested.  But what we do know is that the hoodia gordonii weight loss pill does work if you want to lose weight.

Who knows if Unilever will ever market their product?  But, at least for a limited time, you can still get the real thing.