Hoodia Gordonii is a succulent plant that grows widely is Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. The San Bushmen, who live on the fringes of the desert, eat this plant to suppress hunger when they go on long hunting trips.

CSIR, the South African Research Institution, realized the importance of this plant and investigated it. They isolated a long molecule, P 57, that actually suppressed hunger. The patent was sold to a British company called Phytopharm. Phytopharm in turn teamed up with Pfizer to produce a synthetic pill containing P 57.

Phytopharm conducted clinical trials, first with rats and then with humans. They claim that the Hoodia powder, 400 mg, taken for 15 days reduced calorie intake by 1,000, compared to control group. As Pfizer could not produce synthetic P 57 economically, Phytopharm arranged for cultivation of the Hoodia plant in the Kalahari Desert, and set as its target to market the product by the year 2008. The plant takes five to seven years to be ready.

Meanwhile, many companies are producing Hoodia Gordonii Pills, capsules or tincture. There is a lot of demand for this product. Many suppliers are harvesting the wild plants and exporting to USA. Compared to the demand, the supply is not enough, and there are a lot of suspicions that the manufacturers of these products are cheating the consumers.

Since Phytopharm has purchased the patent taken by CSIR of Hoodia Gordonii as a weight-loss medication, other companies are very cautious. They do not market it as a weight-loss medicine but just as Hoodia Pills or capsules, without any other claim. Their advertising about the appetite-suppressing effects of Hoodia is more than enough to make the consumer understand that Hoodia is an aid for a weight-loss program. Phytopharm has tied up with Unilever, a food product giant, to market Hoodia shakes and bars. But that would not be available until 2008.

In the meantime, users of other products need to be very careful if they do not like to be disappointed. There are twenty varieties of Hoodia plants, and only Hoodia Gordonii is effective in use as a weight-loss aid. But any manufacturer of diet medication can claim that their product is 100% Hoodia, using any one of the other nineteen plants. They would be legally correct, and it is up to the consumer to be vigilant.