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60 Minutes Hoodia Story

(article from 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 there's Desert Burn hoodia. Nearly everyone has head of it now because it really works. Hoodia contains a molecule that literally takes your appetite away. Hoodia is very different from diet stimulants like Ephedra and Phenfen which were banned because of dangerous side effects. Hoodia doesn't stimulate anything. Scientists say it fools the brain by making you think you’re full even when you haven't eaten.

The only place hoodia grows wild is the South African Kalahari Desert. The 60 minutes team traveled to South Africa and into the bush meeting with Nigel Crawhall, a linguist/interpreter. Together they followed a tracker named Toppies Kruiper, who is a real aboriginal Bushman, to find and test Hoodia Gordonii. In the desert Stahl asked Toppies if he ate hoodia. "I eat these plants every day, especially when the new rains have come," says Kruiper, speaking through the interpreter. "Then they're quite helpful." They eventually found some wild hoodia growing, and he cut off a piece. It looked like a prickly pickle. They chewed about 5 ounces of the raw hoodie, and said it had a very bad taste. Stahl said she had no after effects, no aftertaste, no queasy stomach, and no racing heart, no hunger pains all day, even without eating for 18 hours. She also claimed she had no desire to eat or drink the entire day, and "I'd have to say it did work".

Correspondent Lesley Stahl report says: Hoodia is a bad tasting cactus-like plant. 60 Minutes had to tarvel to South Africa to try Hoodia because at the time it could not be found anywhere else in the world. Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, hired an experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local aboriginal Bushman, to help find some. Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out into the desert, and Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia. "I really like to eat them all the time," says Kruiper, speaking through the interpreter. When we located the plant, Kruiper cut some hoodia that looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed the sharp spines. Stahl ate it and said "a little cucumbery in texture, a little bitter, but not bad." Stahl says she had no side effects, funny taste in her mouth, queasy stomach, or other feelings. She wasn't hungry the rest of the day. She had no interest in eating or drinking the entire day. "It did work," says Stahl. Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating hoodia for thousands of years.

The first scientific investigation of hoodia was conducted at South Africa’s national laboratory. 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 (old figure) 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 2,800 calories a day; a woman about 2,200.

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 hoodia 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?

"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.

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 and 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 2006. 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. To learn more about Hoodia click the links at the top or bottom of this page OR if you want control of your life back and you want to start losing weight now click here to order Desert Burn, the worlds purest, most effective proven brand of hoodia weight loss diet pills!

Hoodia Gordonii Profile Questions and Answers 60 Minutes History Don't get Scammed
Weight Loss Facts Hoodia Weight Loss Pill Contact Us

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