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SUPPRESS YOUR
APPETITE NATURALLY
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African Plant May Help Fight Fat
Nov. 21, 2004
Lesley Stahl of CBS Reports On
Newest Weapon In War On Obesity
(CBS) Each year, people spend
more than $40 billion on products designed to
help them slim down. None of them seem to be
working very well.
Now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon
it'll be tripping off your tongue, because
hoodia is a natural substance that literally
takes your appetite away.
It's very different from diet stimulants like
Ephedra and Phenfen that are now banned because
of dangerous side effects. Hoodia doesn't
stimulate at all. Scientists say it fools the
brain by making you think you’re full, even if
you've eaten just a morsel.
Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
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The hoodia plant in the Kalahari Desert could become
the newest weapon in the war against obesity. (CBS)
Lesley Stahl tries just a few bites of the plant,
which
is already listed as an ingredient in several
weight-loss products on the market now. (CBS)
The hoodia plant in the Kalahari Desert could become
the newest weapon in the war against obesity. (CBS)
Quote
Hoodia, a plant that tricks the brain by
making the stomach feel full, has been in the
diet of South Africa's Bushmen for thousands of
years.
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Hoodia is a
bitter-tasting cactus-like plant. 60
Minutes was told that if it wanted
to try hoodia, it would have to go to Africa. Why?
Because the only place in the world where hoodia
grows wild is in the Kalahari Desert of South
Africa.
Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, hired an
experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local
aboriginal Bushman, to help find it. The Bushmen
were featured in the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”
Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out
into the desert. Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia.
"I really like to eat them when the new rains have
come," says Kruiper, speaking through the
interpreter. "Then they're really quite delicious."
When we located the plant, Kruiper cut off a stalk
that looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed
the sharp spines. In the interest of science, Stahl
ate it. She described the taste as "a little
cucumbery in texture, but not bad."
So how did it work? Stahl says she had no after
effects – no funny taste in her mouth, no queasy
stomach, and no racing heart. She also wasn't hungry
all day, even when she would normally have a pang
around mealtime. And, she also had no desire to eat
or drink the entire day. "I'd have to say it did
work," says Stahl.
Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the
Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating it for a
very long time. After all, they have been living off
the land in southern Africa for more than 100,000
years.
Some of the Bushmen, like Anna Swartz, still
live in old traditional huts, and cook so-called
Bush food gathered from the desert the old-fashioned
way.
The first scientific investigation of the plant was
conducted at South Africa’s national laboratory.
Because Bushmen were known to eat hoodia, it was
included in a study of indigenous foods.
"What they found was when they fed it to animals,
the animals ate it and lost weight," says Dr.
Richard Dixey, who heads an English pharmaceutical
company called Phytopharm that is trying to develop
weight-loss products based on hoodia. |
Was hoodia's potential
application as an appetite suppressant immediately
obvious?
"No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original
research was done in the mid 1960s," says Dixey.
It took the South African national
laboratory 30 years to isolate and identify the
specific appetite-suppressing ingredient in
hoodia. When they found it, they applied for a
patent and licensed it to Phytopharm.
Phytopharm has spent more than $20 million so
far on research, including clinical trials with
obese volunteers that have yielded promising
results. Subjects given hoodia ended up eating
about 1,000 calories a day less than those in
the control group. To put that in perspective,
the average American man consumes about 2,600
calories a day; a woman about 1,900.
"If you take this compound every day, your wish
to eat goes down. And we've seen that very, very
dramatically," says Dixey.
But why do you need a patent for a plant? "The
patent is on the application of the plant as a
weight-loss material. And, of course, the active
compounds within the plant. It’s not on the
plant itself," says Dixey.
So no one else can use hoodia for weight loss?
"As a weight-management product without
infringing the patent, that’s correct," says
Dixey.
But what does that say about all these
weight-loss products that claim to have hoodia
in it? Trimspa says its X32 pills contain 75 mg
of hoodia. The company is pushing its product
with an ad campaign featuring Anna Nicole Smith,
even though the FDA has notified Trimspa that it
hasn’t demonstrated that the product is safe.
Some companies have even used the results of
Phytopharm’s clinical tests to market their
products.
"This is just straightforward theft. That’s what
it is. People are stealing data, which they
haven’t done, they’ve got no proper
understanding of, and sticking on the bottle,"
says Dixey. "When we have assayed these
materials, they contain between 0.1 and 0.01
percent of the active ingredient claimed. But
they use the term hoodia on the bottle, of
course, so they -- does nothing at all."
But Dixey isn’t the only one who’s felt ripped
off. The Bushmen first heard the news about the
patent when Phytopharm put out a press release.
Roger Chennells, a lawyer in South Africa who
represents the Bushmen, who are also called “the
San,” was appalled.
"The San did not even know about it," says
Chennells. "They had given the information that
led directly toward the patent."
The taking of traditional knowledge without
compensation is called “bio-piracy.”
"You have said, and I'm going to quote you,
'that the San felt as if someone had stolen the
family silver,'" says Stahl to Chennells. "So
what did you do?"
"I wouldn't want to go into some of the details
as to what kind of letters were written or what
kind of threats were made," says Chennells. "We
engaged them. They had done something wrong, and
we wanted them to acknowledge it."
Chennells was determined to help the Bushmen
who, he says, have been exploited for centuries.
First they were pushed aside by black tribes.
Then, when white colonists arrived, they were
nearly annihilated.
"About the turn of the century, there were still
hunting parties in Namibia and in South Africa
that allowed farmers to go and kill Bushmen,"
says Chennells. "It's well documented."
The Bushmen are still stigmatized in South
Africa, and plagued with high unemployment,
little education, and lots of alcoholism. And
now, it seemed they were about to be cut out of
a potential windfall from hoodia. So Chennells
threatened to sue the national lab on their
behalf.
"We knew that if it was successful, many, many
millions of dollars would be coming towards the
San," says Chennells. "Many, many millions.
They've talked about the market being hundreds
and hundreds of millions in America."
In the end, a settlement was reached. The
Bushmen will get a percentage of the profits --
if there are profits. But that’s a big if.
The future of hoodia is not yet a sure thing.
The project hit a major snag last year.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had teamed up
with Phytopharm, and funded much of the
research, dropped out when making a pill out of
the active ingredient seemed beyond reach.
Dixey says it can be made synthetically: "We've
made milligrams of it. But it's very expensive. It's
not possible to make it synthetically in what’s
called a scaleable process. So we couldn’t make a
metric ton of it or something that is the sort of
quantity you’d need to actually start doing
something about obesity in thousands of people."
Phytopharm decided to market hoodia in its natural
form, in diet shakes and bars. That meant it needed
the hoodia plant itself.
But given the obesity epidemic in the United States,
it became obvious that what was needed was a lot of
hoodia - much more than was growing in the wild in
the Kalahari. And so they came here.
60 Minutes visited one of
Phytopharm’s hoodia plantations in South Africa.
They’ll need a lot of these plantations to meet the
expected demand.
Agronomist Simon MacWilliam has a tall order: grow a
billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a
couple of years. He admitted that starting up the
plantation has been quite a challenge.
"The problem is we’re dealing with a novel crop.
It’s a plant we’ve taken out of the wild and we’re
starting to grow it,' says MacWilliam. "So we have
no experience. So it’s different— diseases and pests
which we have to deal with."
How confident are they that they will be able to
grow enough? "We're very confident of that," he
says. "We've got an expansion program which is going
to be 100s of acres. And we'll be able – ready to
meet the demand.
This could be huge, given the obesity epidemic.
Phytopharm says it’s about to announce marketing
plans that will have meal-replacement hoodia
products on supermarket shelves by 2008.
MacWilliam says these products are a slightly
different species from the hoodia Stahl tasted in
the Kalahari Desert. "It's actually a lot more
bitter than the plant that you tasted," says
MacWilliam.
The advantage is this species of hoodia will grow a
lot faster. But more bitter? How bad could it be?
Stahl decided to find out. "Not good," she says.
Phytopharm says that when its product gets to
market, it will be certified safe and effective.
They also promise that it’ll taste good. |
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