Hoodia Gordonii is one of the twenty types of Hoodia plants that grow in Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. They are succulent and belong to the family of Aselepiadaceae. Although they look like a cactii they are not. Hoodia gordonii has a unique property, that blocks the sense of hunger and makes you feel full. The San tribe of the Kalahari Desert eats this plant when they go on a long hunting trip to prevent hunger and thirst. CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) Institute of South Africa investigated this property of the plant and isolated the active ingredient that caused it and named it P 57. This is a long molecule that imitates glucose, but about 10,000 times more so. Its presence makes the hypothalamus, a part of the brain, to fire nerve cells to give a feeling of full stomach. CSIR naturally realized the great potential of P 57 as help in weight loss programs. They patented P 57 as a weight loss drug and sold the rights to a Cambridgeshire pharmaceutical company in U.K named Phytopharm. Phytopharm tied up with Pfizer, a multinational pharmaceutical company of America to develop P 57 synthetically and do the marketing. Pfizer after spending tens of millions of dollars has opted out of the deal. They concluded that it is not economically viable to produce P 57 synthetically. Meanwhile Phytopharm conducted many trials with the Hoodia plant as a weight loss medicine. In a double blind study, they showed that Hoodia powder administered at 400mg a day for 15 days reduced the calorie intake by 1000 calories compared to the control group. As the attempt to make synthetic P 57 is given up, Phytopharm is tied with plantation companies in South Africa to cultivate Hoodia. It takes about five to seven years for the plant to be ready. They have promised to put Hoodia Gordonii weight loss medication on the supermarket shelf by 2008. There are three or more other companies, which manufacture a range of products containing Hoodia using imports of Hoodia from naturally grown plants of the Kalahari Desert. |
