Consumer interest in hoodia gordonii skyrockets, but can it really help with weight loss?

Monday, November 22, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: hoodia, health news, Natural News

It's a bold promise: a plant that can turn off your hunger like a light switch. The ultimate appetite suppressant. The "sure thing" strategy for losing weight. Almost sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Pfizer didn't think so: they spent $32 million just for the rights to a patent on chemical compounds they could extract from hoodia. The plan, of course, was to create the next blockbuster drug for treating patients who are overweight or obese.

And that's a lot of people. Nearly 2/3rds of adults in the United States are now overweight. Almost a third are clinically obese. People are gaining pounds like never before, all across the world, and doctors are being asked to get more actively involved in helping people shed those pounds.

What people need, we all seem to believe, is a miracle drug. A magic bullet solution. Pop it in your mouth and you'll magically lose weight, even while chomping down another bag of greasy potato chips or that second tub of ice cream.

What we all seem to desire is a chemical savior... a substance to redeem us from our unwillingness to exercise. Something to save us from ourselves.

Enter hoodia gordonii

And then, like a lone flower blossoming in the desert, a plant quietly appears from the desert itself: hoodia gordonii. Used by thousands of years as an appetite suppressant by the San tribe in South Africa, hoodia seems to turn off the human appetite. Your hunger drive just vanishes. You simply don't want to eat. And the pounds fall off without even trying.

The magic bullet has arrived, it seems, and everybody who has heard about hoodia suddenly wants some. Yet there are hucksters and con artists at work. Some are selling worthless products. Others are exaggerating or mislabeling their ingredients. It's a dangerous market and, of course, entirely unregulated.

But to tell you that story, I have to back up for a minute and tell you a different story -- one we all know too well: the recurring nightmare of trying to lose weight.

Weight loss strategies all share the same fault

They tell you to work out to lose weight. They tell you to take metabolism boosting supplements. They tell you to stop eating sugar, ice cream, saturated fat and carbohydrates. Sound familiar?

You can do all that and still pack on the pounds. Because what the experts don't tell you is that in order to burn the excess fat off your body, you're going to have to experience extreme hunger. The kind of hunger that's simply impossible for any reasonable human being to resist...

Eventually, no matter how badly you want to lose weight, you're going to eat. And chances are, if you're like me, you're going to eat and eat and eat. You'll gain back whatever pounds you lost, and you'll add a few more pounds on top of that.

Can you stand the hunger?

Every weight loss product, gimmick, diet or contraption you've ever seen shares the same fatal flaw: no matter how much you diet or exercise, and no matter what pills you take, you're going to feel extremely hungry, day in and day out.

Think those metabolism boosters will make you lose weight? Sure, they burn calories for a few hours, and then your blood sugar drops and you feel hungrier than ever. So you eat to make up for it, and you're right back where you started.

Think those fat blockers or carbohydrate blockers are going to help you? All they do is stop your body from digesting the food you've swallowed. So you're still hungry anyway and you soon find yourself eating again.

Have you tried the Atkins diet? I bet, like most people, you eventually caved in and headed straight for the carbs, right? That's because our bodies crave carbohydrates.

Tried to exercise your way to being slim? If you're like most people, though, the more you exercise, the hungrier you get.

The real problem turns out to be appetite control. And that's what we'll explore in part 2 of this investigative series about Hoodia Gordonii. Watch NewsTarget.com for the next article, or just use the Google search box below to search for hoodia (which will bring up all the articles on hoodia).

Continue with part 2.