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| Hoodia Diet 60 minute report on Hoodia |
(CBS) Each year, people spend more than $40 billion on
products designed to help them slim down. None of them
seem to be working very well.
Now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon it'll be
tripping off your tongue, because hoodia is a natural
substance that literally takes your appetite away.
It's very different from diet stimulants like Ephedra
and Phenfen that are now banned because of dangerous
side effects. Hoodia doesn't stimulate at all.
Scientists say it fools the brain by making you think
you're full, even if you've eaten just a morsel.
Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
"Hoodia, a plant that tricks the brain by making the
stomach feel full, has been in the diet of South
Africa's Bushmen for thousands of years."
Because the only place in the world where hoodia grows
wild is in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.
Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, hired an
experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local
aboriginal Bushman, to help find it. The Bushmen were
featured in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy." |
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Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out into the desert. Stahl
asked him if he ate hoodia. "I really like to eat them
when the new rains have come," says Kruiper, speaking
through the interpreter. "Then they're really quite
delicious."
When we located the plant, Kruiper cut off a stalk that
looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed the sharp
spines. In the interest of science, Stahl ate it. She
described the taste as "a little cucumbery in texture,
but not bad." | |
So how did it work? Stahl says she had no after effects
- no funny taste in her mouth, no queasy stomach, and no
racing heart. She also wasn't hungry all day, even when
she would normally have a pang around mealtime. And, she
also had no desire to eat or drink the entire day. "I'd
have to say it did work," says Stahl.
Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the
Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating it for a very
long time. After all, they have been living off the land
in southern Africa for more than 100,000 years.
Some of the Bushmen, like Anna Swartz, still live in old
traditional huts, and cook so-called Bush food gathered
from the desert the old-fashioned way.
The first scientific investigation of the plant was
conducted at South Africa's national laboratory. Because
Bushmen were known to eat hoodia, it was included in a
study of indigenous foods.
"What they found was when they fed it to animals, the
animals ate it and lost weight," says Dr. Richard Dixey,
who heads an English pharmaceutical company called
Phytopharm that is trying to develop weight-loss
products based on hoodia.
Was hoodia's potential application as an appetite
suppressant immediately obvious?
"No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original
research was done in the mid 1960s," says Dixey.
It took the South African national laboratory 30 years
to isolate and identify the specific appetite-suppressing
ingredient in hoodia. When they found it, they applied
for a patent and licensed it to Phytopharm.
Phytopharm has spent more than $20 million so far on
research, including clinical trials with obese
volunteers that have yielded promising results. Subjects
given hoodia ended up eating about 1,000 calories a day
less than those in the control group. To put that in
perspective, the average American man consumes about
2,600 calories a day; a woman about 1,900.
"If you take this compound every day, your wish to eat
goes down. And we've seen that very, very dramatically,"
says Dixey.
But why do you need a patent for a plant? "The patent is
on the application of the plant as a weight-loss
material. And, of course, the active compounds within
the plant. It's not on the plant itself," says Dixey.
So no one else can use hoodia for weight loss? "As a
weight-management product without infringing the patent,
that's correct," says Dixey.
But what does that say about all these weight-loss
products that claim to have hoodia in it? Trimspa says
its X32 pills contain 75 mg of hoodia. The company is
pushing its product with an ad campaign featuring Anna
Nicole Smith, even though the FDA has notified Trimspa
that it hasn't demonstrated that the product is safe.
Some companies have even used the results of
Phytopharm's clinical tests to market their products.
"This is just straightforward theft. That's what it is.
People are stealing data, which they haven't done,
they've got no proper understanding of, and sticking on
the bottle," says Dixey. "When we have assayed these
materials, they contain between 0.1 and 0.01 percent of
the active ingredient claimed. But they use the term
hoodia on the bottle, of course, so they -- does nothing
at all."
But Dixey isn't the only one who's felt ripped off. The
Bushmen first heard the news about the patent when
Phytopharm put out a press release. Roger Chennells, a
lawyer in South Africa who represents the Bushmen, who
are also called "the San," was appalled.
"The San did not even know about it," says Chennells. "They
had given the information that led directly toward the
patent."
The taking of traditional knowledge without compensation
is called "bio-piracy."
"You have said, and I'm going to quote you, 'that the
San felt as if someone had stolen the family silver,'"
says Stahl to Chennells. "So what did you do?"
"I wouldn't want to go into some of the details as to
what kind of letters were written or what kind of
threats were made," says Chennells. "We engaged them.
They had done something wrong, and we wanted them to
acknowledge it."
Chennells was determined to help the Bushmen who, he
says, have been exploited for centuries. First they were
pushed aside by black tribes. Then, when white colonists
arrived, they were nearly annihilated.
"About the turn of the century, there were still hunting
parties in Namibia and in South Africa that allowed
farmers to go and kill Bushmen," says Chennells. "It's
well documented."
The Bushmen are still stigmatized in South Africa, and
plagued with high unemployment, little education, and
lots of alcoholism. And now, it seemed they were about
to be cut out of a potential windfall from hoodia. So
Chennells threatened to sue the national lab on their
behalf.
"We knew that if it was successful, many, many millions
of dollars would be coming towards the San," says
Chennells. "Many, many millions. They've talked about
the market being hundreds and hundreds of millions in
America."
In the end, a settlement was reached. The Bushmen will
get a percentage of the profits -- if there are profits.
But that's a big if.
The future of hoodia is not yet a sure thing. The
project hit a major snag last year. Pharmaceutical giant
Pfizer, which had teamed up with Phytopharm, and funded
much of the research, dropped out when making a pill out
of the active ingredient seemed beyond reach.
Dixey says it can be made synthetically: "We've made
milligrams of it. But it's very expensive. It's not
possible to make it synthetically in what's called a
scaleable process. So we couldn't make a metric ton of
it or something that is the sort of quantity you'd need
to actually start doing something about obesity in
thousands of people."
Phytopharm decided to market hoodia in its natural form,
in diet shakes and bars. That meant it needed the hoodia
plant itself.
But given the obesity epidemic in the United States, it
became obvious that what was needed was a lot of hoodia
- much more than was growing in the wild in the Kalahari.
And so they came here.
60 Minutes visited one of Phytopharm's hoodia
plantations in South Africa. They'll need a lot of these
plantations to meet the expected demand.
Agronomist Simon MacWilliam has a tall order: grow a
billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a couple
of years. He admitted that starting up the plantation
has been quite a challenge.
"The problem is we're dealing with a novel crop. It's a
plant we've taken out of the wild and we're starting to
grow it,' says MacWilliam. "So we have no experience. So
it's different? diseases and pests which we have to deal
with."
How confident are they that they will be able to grow
enough? "We're very confident of that," he says. "We've
got an expansion program which is going to be 100s of
acres. And we'll be able - ready to meet the demand.
This could be huge, given the obesity epidemic.
Phytopharm says it's about to announce marketing plans
that will have meal-replacement hoodia products on
supermarket shelves by 2008.
MacWilliam says these products are a slightly different
species from the hoodia Stahl tasted in the Kalahari
Desert. "It's actually a lot more bitter than the plant
that you tasted," says MacWilliam.
The advantage is this species of hoodia will grow a lot
faster. But more bitter? How bad could it be? Stahl
decided to find out. "Not good," she says.
Phytopharm says that when its product gets to market, it
will be certified safe and effective. They also promise
that it'll taste good.
For more information visit:
http://www.hoodiadietreview.com/?aid=829107 |
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