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If you haven't heard of Hoodia yet, you must have a great spam filter on your e-mail.
The diet pill has been clogging computer screens across the continent since Lesley Stahl of CBS's 60 Minutes told viewers in 2004 that it worked for her. This year, actor Joseph Gannascoli of HBO's The Sopranos said it helped him drop some of his pasta-fed girth.
The fuss is over a traditional remedy made from Hoodia gordonii, a cactus-like plant used for generations by the San people of southern Africa to stave off hunger during long hunting trips.
The South African government has patented the plant's active ingredient, enabling the San to share in future sales. (No earnings have materialized so far.) And now Slim-Fast maker Unilever hopes to reduce hunger pangs in this country by testing its safety and effectiveness.
Couple the slim evidence for Hoodia's effects with U.S. angst over jiggly thighs, and presto: A digital frenzy is born.
Dozens of firms crowd the Internet claiming to sell Hoodia, pronounced WHO-dee-ah. Yet the plant grows only in a limited area, and supply doesn't appear anywhere close to meeting demand.
A popular brand named Trimspa EF, hawked by newly svelte model Anna Nicole Smith, allegedly did not contain Hoodia's active ingredient P57, according to an ongoing suit in California. Trimspa's parent company, Goen Technologies Corp., denies the accusations and says that its newer product, Trimspa X32, is its first labeled to contain Hoodia -- and that it does.
If the Internet is the new Wild West, Hoodia could be its prickly emblem.
So far, the Federal Trade Commission has logged at least 100 complaints about Hoodia sellers and products through its consumer-fraud monitoring system.
The pills' potency and consistency are largely unregulated. Because they are sold as dietary supplements, not drugs, the FDA does not require testing of Hoodia pills before they are sold.
Nor does the agency test whether pills contain what they claim. An ongoing review of Hoodia pills by Alkemists Pharmaceuticals in Costa Mesa, Calif., found that at least half contained no Hoodia, said the firm's laboratory director, Sidney Sudberg. But some retailers hire his lab to test their Hoodia imports, he said, and reject batches that don't pass muster.
"Consumers should put pressure on retailers and ask for proof that products contain Hoodia," Sudberg said.
As for evidence that the bitter, gooey plant works, only one peer-reviewed study of Hoodia's effects appears in the National Library of Medicine's online database, PubMed. That research, conducted on rats, found that P57 increased the content of energy-carrying molecules called ATP in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain thought to control hunger. Doctors don't know whether this means P57 would be safe or effective in humans.
The study's lead author, David MacLean of Brown University, said that although he is in favor of understanding botanical products, so much Hoodia is being sold on the Internet that he doubts whether all the offerings could be real.
Attempts to make P57 in the laboratory so far have yielded too little of the ingredient to be commercially viable. For now, the plants simply are dried and powdered.
Sellers are rushing to grow the native Kalahari Desert plants in China and Mexico. But Hoodia takes at least five years to mature, and no one is sure what growing conditions the plant needs to produce its active ingredient.
Poaching for African Hoodia has taken off to fill the supply hole. In May, a farmer was arrested with eight tons of Hoodia plants cut down in the wild, worth about $300,000, according to the Web site of South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
Hoodia typically sells online for $40 to $60 for a one-month supply of 60 capsules.
The chance of being scammed hasn't slowed interest in Hoodia. There are about 25 million searches for diet pills or Hoodia each month, according to McAfee SiteAdvisor's estimates from Yahoo searches.
A Google search for "Hoodia" yielded 12.7 million hits last month. Trolling eBay yields about 1,200 Hoodia products for sale under more than three dozen trade names.
Source: By Erika Engelhaupt, from The Philadelphia Inquirer |
