By Sarah Jackson
Herald Writer
H oodia gordonii is hot, hot, hot.
If you haven’t encountered Internet advertisements, TV news personalities or friends buzzing about this South African plant – pronounced who-dee-uh or hood-ee-uh – it likely won’t be long.
Dan Bates
Its dried form, stuffed into capsules, is supposed to help you lose weight by curbing your appetite by “fooling” your brain into thinking you are full.
Though it comes from a natural plant source and has been eaten fresh by the tribesmen of the Kalahari Desert in Africa for ages, hoodia the supplement has stirred a whirl of controversy and skepticism in its first major year on the market.
CBS’s “60 Minutes” broke news of the herbal remedy’s commercial development last year.
Now, one year later, many hoodia products are available at markets such as General Nutrition Centers nationwide and many health food stores, including the Sno-Isle Natural Foods Co-op in Everett.
Word is definitely catching on in Snohomish County.
Julie Brown of Everett read about hoodia in Prevention Magazine and decided to stop taking her prescription weight-loss medication Meridia so that she could start taking hoodia. That was in October.
“It definitely does curb your appetite. It lasts all day. You kind of have to force yourself to eat,” Brown said, still a bit surprised at the results. “It appears to give you a lot more energy, but not any nervous energy. I have high blood pressure, so there’s a lot of stuff I can’t take.”
Lately, when Brown gets off work, she has more get-up-and-go to do things around the house, but she can still sleep at night and doesn’t have daytime jitters or “jimmy legs.”
Though Meridia was working to suppress Brown’s appetite as promised for the past two months, it was costing her about $144 a month, despite her insurance coverage. Hoodia Supreme from Nature’s Benefit, claiming to contain 100 percent dried hoodia, cost her $40 for a two-month supply of 60 capsules.
Brown admits she should have talked to her doctor before switching to a product not tested by the Food and Drug Administration. But like many Americans, Brown was – and still is – eager to shed pounds.
She had lost 80 pounds about a year ago by horseback riding and eating right, but she gained half of that weight back. Now about 50 pounds overweight, Brown hopes that hoodia and regular exercise will gradually dissolve her extra pounds again.
Stories like Brown’s are common in America, a nation struggling with an obesity crisis, costing consumers billions in health-care costs every year.
But herbalists and doctors say it’s just too soon for hoodia, despite success stories.
Pharmacist Gary Elmer, a professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Washington, said people should avoid hoodia products.
“We see this a lot in this industry,” Elmer said of the new star on the supplement market. “You have a fad herbal, be it for memory or weight loss, and the origin of it usually stems from some observation of a remote culture. Marketers recognize they can spin this into a very profitable item. I would think there’s a pretty high element of risk with this material because we know so little.”
While there have been studies of the effects of the plant and its extracts, none of the studies on humans have been published yet in reputable peer-reviewed medical journals, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, Elmer said.
That hasn’t stopped hoodia companies from citing study results from Phytopharm, a United Kingdom-based pharmaceutical company that patented the active ingredient in hoodia gordonii in 1997 and named the organic compound “P57.”
Phytopharm’s 2001 test of its patented hoodia extract reportedly showed that daily caloric intake in humans decreased by about 1,000 calories per person.
Details about the test, however, such as how many people were involved for how long and how much weight they lost and kept off and for how long, haven’t been widely released.
“Wouldn’t you think if the results were that good that there would be a huge push to publish this thing and get it out into the media and scientific press?” Elmer said. “We just don’t have the documentation or the analytical material on this issue. I’d like to see those studies and make sure the controls were done right.”
Though the San people of South Africa have eaten fresh cucumberlike hoodia for millennia, they’ve used it sparingly to fight hunger and illness, and certainly not as a method of weight loss.
Americans taking a powdered version of the plant daily is quite another thing. Pregnant women or people taking prescription drugs won’t have any guarantee that hoodia won’t cause harm or interact badly with other compounds.
St. John’s Wort, for example, can decrease the effectiveness of birth control pills and anti-HIV drugs because of its effect on drug metabolism, Elmer said.
“We’re training pharmacists now to be aware of drug interactions with herbal products,” he said. “Consumers need to tell their physicians and their pharmacists that they’re taking herbal products.”
Natural products can be just as dangerous as manufactured drugs, Elmer said, hoodia included.
Kava kava – a plant in the pepper family, long used for various ailments by Pacific Islanders – has recently come under fire because of risk associated with liver damage, especially in combination with alcohol or acetaminophen painkillers such as Tylenol.
Hoodia’s newness to the Western world, however, shouldn’t overshadow its incredible potential, emerging science and undeniable results in helping people lose weight, said Dr. Stephen Holt, a New York based gastroenterologist who is part owner of Nature’s Benefit, which manufactures Hoodia Supreme.
“We have no records of adverse effects,” Holt said. “This is going to be huge. To have a nonstimulant appetite suppressant is wonderful. It would overshadow any other drug in terms of its practical application.”
Holt expects hoodia to become an ingredient in weight-loss products and foods by 2008 thanks to Phytopharm, which partnered with Slim-Fast manufacturer Unilever last year in a joint development agreement for “anti-obesity” products.
Proponents and critics agree on one thing: Hoodia isn’t a magic bullet.
Kelly Lockwood, owner of JEC Nutrition, the maker of H57 hoodia, said hoodia products – even his – don’t work for everyone.
But he sees very few returns of H57. It works slowly by decreasing calorie intake, which can mean losing a few pounds a week or month, depending on what people taking hoodia eat.
Consumers who want to speed the weight-loss process, Lockwood said, can add regular exercise to their routines.
“The real key to anybody losing weight is exercising more and eating less,” Lockwood said. “We give you 50 percent of the answer.”
Hoodia’s powers – or at least belief in its powers – could lead to hoodia’s demise, said Eric Yarnell, a naturopathic doctor and herbalist in private practice in Seattle and an adjunct faculty member at Bastyr University, an academic center for natural health sciences in Kenmore.
Hoodia, which looks like a cactus but is actually part of a family of drought-tolerant plants called succulents, is widespread in southern Africa.
The hoodia gordonii species, however, is harder to come by. It is a slow-growing, rare plant found wild almost exclusively in South Africa, though it grows in some neighboring countries such as Namibia, according to the South African National Biodiversity Institute.
“It’s kind of an ecological catastrophe. It only grows one small place on the Earth,” Yarnell said. “I really couldn’t recommend it in good conscience to anyone unless there was a sustainable source for it.”
While some farmers in the United States, Mexico, Africa and elsewhere are trying to cultivate the increasingly popular plant, it will be a while before such plants can be harvested – if they survive.
Meanwhile, the San people, known as Bushmen, are reportedly receiving portions of the proceeds made from their native plants. But critics of hoodia say the benefits to the struggling San will be minimal and not worth the risk of the plant’s ruin.
Holt isn’t worried.
He said the South African government is keenly aware of the need to regulate the hoodia harvest and export.
“We would not do anything to compromise the availability of this product,” said Holt, who has a vested interest in keeping hoodia on Earth. “I don’t fear extinction.”
Yarnell also has concerns about a natural compound that affects the part of the brain that controls appetite.
“It’s the classic suppression of the symptom instead of dealing with the cause approach,” Yarnell said. “Appetite is so complicated. When you try to change appetite, you very quickly start affecting other things. What I’ve found to be most effective is to really force people to change their lifestyle.”
Despite risks, people such as Brown are desperate to lose weight for a better quality of life.
Brown knows the supplement isn’t going to fix everything, so she’s walking on the treadmill at her apartment complex during the week and swimming at the pool on the weekends.
“Some of the stuff that you read says you can take it and just sit there,” Brown said. “You’re still going to have to exercise. But so far, it’s made me feel a little bit better.”
Reporter Sarah Jackson: 425-339-3037 or sjackson@heraldnet.com.
Yes. Keep your doctor and pharmacists informed if you are taking regular doses of any herbal or supplement products. Prescription drugs such as birth control pills and over-the-counter drugs such as Tylenol can interact with herbal remedies and vice versa.
You don’t. Manufacturers do not need to register their products with U.S. Food and Drug Administration or receive FDA approval before producing or selling dietary supplements. Instead, the FDA is responsible for taking action against any unsafe dietary supplement product after it reaches the market. Manufacturers are responsible for ensuring that a dietary supplement is safe before it is marketed. They must also make sure that product label information is truthful and not misleading.
Most manufacturers selling hoodia say they have the real “uncut” plant powder in their products, but there are many misleading claims, especially on the Internet.
Hoodia, because it must be dried and imported, isn’t cheap. Some of the best-selling brands of hoodia cost about $40 for a 30- or 60-day supply. If you see a product that’s particularly inexpensive, be suspicious.
Dosage recommendations vary wildly, from 800 milligrams daily to 1,000 milligrams three times a day for best results.
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