How did hoodia gordonii become so popular? After all, the African bushmen had been using it for years and no one had ever noticed earlier. It was a Dutchman anthropologist who first realized how wonderful this plant was way back in the 1930s. He was studying the San Bushmen when he saw that they used this to suppress their hunger. In the sixties, the national scientific laboratory in South Africa began studying the hoodia plant and they soon saw that the animals they were testing started losing weight,
The scientists began more studies with a British pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm and together, they discovered the active ingredient in this plant and isolated it. They called this P57 and they applied for and got a patent for it. Then Pfizer joined hands with them to manufacture this herb for commercial purposes but the rights were sold back to Phytopharm after a while and today for hoodia Unilever is the company that works alongside Phytopharm.
Phytopharm set up a trial with eighteen people and it was this trial where it was found that doing nothing else to lose weight, hoodia meant that the persons who had taken it lost around a thousand calories a day. Some in the group were given placebos and the hoodia group was compared to the behavior of the placebo group. However, this was just a study they did and it was never published or subjected to scrutiny by any recognized body. All we have going is the number of calories that a person ate less a day because his hunger was suppressed.
When the whole hoodia plant news first hit the stands, a correspondent from 60 Minutes went to Africa to cover it. The team went out with a local bushman to find and test hoodia. She found that the plant tasted like cucumber but what amazed her was that she never felt hungry or thirsty for a long time. There were no side effects that she experienced. Once she came back and talked about it, the whole hype grew to huge proportions.
There was a study later where the active ingredient from hoodia P57 was injected into rats’ brains to see if there was any change in their eating patterns. It was found that the rats that were given this ate much less than the ones that weren’t. Since this was injected into the brain and the hoodia available is to be ingested orally, they felt that no comparisons could be made and no conclusions could be drawn.
Today hoodia capsules as well as hoodia powder and hoodia liquid are available all over. You can buy hoodia online too and you might get it in a tea form as well. There are diet pills too which use hoodia as one of the ingredients in their mix.