Wouldn’t it be great if there was a natural substance you could eat that suppressed your appetite so you didn’t feel hungry, and had no side effects?  You eat it once a day, drastically reduce the food you eat because you aren’t hungry, and you lose weight effortlessly, with no hunger!  There would be no better way to lose weight!

 That wonder drug may be Hoodia.  I’ve been doing some research on Hoodia, and here’s what I’ve found:

 Hoodia suppresses the appetite, because it contains a molecule that fools your brain into believing you are full.   Best of all: it has no known side effects.

 Hoodia comes from a cactus-like plant, called the Hoodia, that grows deep inside the African Kalahari desert.  It thrives in extremely high temperatures, and takes years to mature.  (The most common variety is the Hoodia gordonii; it is from the plant family Apocynaeae, a stem succulent, referred to as “Cactiform” because of their remarkable similarity to the unrelated Cactus family).

 The San Bushmen of the Kalahari, one of the world’s oldest and most primitive tribes, had been eating the Hoodia for thousands of years, to stave off hunger during long hunting trips.

 Hoodia has been used by the indigenous populations of Southern Africa to stave off hunger, and to treat indigestion and small infections.

 The Western world discovered it a few years ago, and since then mega drug companies like Pfizer and Phytopharm have been attempting to synthesize extracts to create a pill to be used as an appetite suppressant, to aid in weight loss.  Pfizer had difficulty synthesizing P57, the  and is believed to have stopped working on the project.

 As I write this I can find no evidence that any scientific tests have been conducted on humans to prove the the safety or effectiveness of Hoodia gordonii in pill form as a nutritional supplement.

 And at the moment, that’s the point.  Hoodia probably works great if you can cut a plant in half and eat it raw, like the San Bushmen of the Kalahari do.  Unfortunately, since the plants don’t grow wild outside of Africa, the rest of us have to rely on synthesized extracts in pill form, and there is as yet no proof that these are effective.

 In fact, it appears that there are many fakes on the market, so buyer beware.  I will update this weight loss blog as more information becomes available.