Hoodia Gordonii emerges as natural appetite suppressant with weight loss potential

Monday, November 29, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: hoodia, health news, Natural News

This is part three of our investigative report into Hoodia Gordonii, a natural appetite suppressant. (If you missed part 2, click here to read it.) In this part, we're exploring how hoodia works to control appetite and actually help people lose weight. Understanding hoodia is easier when you consider your own weight loss goals: how much easier do you think losing weight would be if you didn't have to battle hunger?

For most people, that's the whole solution right there. Turn off the hunger and almost anybody can lose weight. If you have absolutely no craving for food, and your body isn't tricking you into eating another tub of ice cream by creating the illusion of hunger, then you've got the problem solved.

If you add in a bit of exercise -- say, 30 minutes of walking each day -- suddenly you're boosting your metabolism naturally and you're not stuffing your face with twice as many calories as you burned during the walk.

If you could turn off your hunger, you could lose weight without needing military discipline. I hate to say the word "automatically," because I think you still have to be responsible in how you approach your diet, but turning off the hunger is as close to automatic weight loss as you can get.

A double-blind placebo trial showed rapid, consistent weight loss

Although the hoodia trials conducted so far have been rather small, researchers put this to the test in a clinical trial in Leicester, England. Volunteers were either given a placebo or an extract of the hoodia gordonii plant, then were told to go about their business. None exercised at all. They watched TV, read books, ate and slept.

After 15 days, the results showed that the group on the hoodia extract had reduced their caloric intake by 1,000 calories per day, automatically, with no effort whatsoever. They weren't even aware of the effect. But they were automatically eating less, and they weren't exercising at all.

Now let's put this into perspective with two facts:

1. The average American needs around 2,200 calories per day.
2. There are around 3,500 calories in a pound of body fat. Burn an extra 3,500 calories, and you've lost a pound of fat.

In this study, people taking the hoodia extract automatically ate 1,000 fewer calories per day. Do that for 3.5 days and you've lost 3,500 calories, right? That's a pound of body fat.

Do that for a week and you've lost two pounds of body fat. Two pounds of fat a week is twice the weight loss rate attempted by most weight loss strategies. It's aggressive weight loss. It means you could lose eight pounds a month, or as much as 100 pounds a year.

Eight pounds a month is extraordinary. Most people who are serious about weight loss are thrilled with one pound a week. Yet people are apparently achieving twice that with hoodia.

The great hoodia shortage

As you might expect from the situation, there's skyrocketing demand for hoodia (and most people still haven't heard of it yet!). Hoodia plants are extremely difficult to come by. I personally spent over eight hours searching for plants, and finally found a small 2" high hoodia plant which I had to pay $65 to get (most succulents that size sell for around five or six dollars) from eBay. I actually had to bid on this plant!

I also paid $15 for fifteen hoodia seeds, which are microscopic, almost like dust. That makes hoodia seeds more valuable than gold, ounce per ounce.

All over the world, people are trying to buy hoodia, and there just isn't enough supply to go around. The succulent growers have been wiped out. The seed providers have virtually no inventory left. And since hoodia takes more than six years to grow to harvesting height, there's going to continue to be a great hoodia shortage until at least 2010, maybe beyond.

Hoodia is also known by horticulture experts as being extremely difficult to cultivate in captivity. The plants rot easily, and they won't grow in regular soil -- they need sandy soil with excellent drainage. Also, to make things even more difficult, these plants aren't pollinated by bees, they're pollinated by flies. To attract the flies, their blooms emit a strong, repulsive odor that smells a lot like rotting flesh (no kidding). It's so repulsive that some growers claim, "It makes you want to chuck your cookies." And as a result, there's not a whole lot of people who want to grow this plant in their backyards or indoors. As you might have guessed, it remains rare.

So buying hoodia is very difficult. It's expensive. And, naturally, there are a lot of fakes on the market.

In part four of this investigative report, we'll reveal how much of the hoodia being sold on the 'net is actually counterfeit hoodia and what you can do to protect yourself against hoodia con artists. 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 available so far).

Continue with part four.