Today, I will reveal exactly why the consumer goods giant Unilever made the decision to dump the alleged appetite-suppressing supplement Hoodia gordonii despite spending €20 million over four years developing it.
First, let me start at the very beginning: What is hoodia and why should you care?
Hoodia gordonii is a small cactus-like plant found in the South African Kalahari Desert. The San Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating hoodia for thousands of years to stave off hunger during long hunting trips.
The fleshy, finger-like stems are peeled and chewed by the Bushmen as they prepare to spend days without food in the desert.
They cut a piece of the plant, which is about the size of a cucumber, and eat it. It takes a piece of fresh hoodia, about 2 or 3 inches long, to get the appetite suppressing benefit.
I first heard about hoodia when I saw a BBC documentary about it back in 2003. I was working for the supplement company Maximuscle at the time, and they’d asked me to take a look at the research on hoodia to see if it was worth using in one of their supplements.
In the documentary, BBC correspondent Tom Mangold drove into the desert so he and his cameraman could try it for themselves.
“Once there, we found an unattractive plant which sprouts about 10 tentacles, and is the size of a long cucumber. Each tentacle is covered in spikes which need to be carefully peeled. Inside is a slightly unpleasant-tasting, fleshy plant.”
“At about 6.00pm I ate about half a banana size — and later so did my cameraman. Soon after, we began the four hour drive back to Capetown.”
“The plant is said to have a feel-good almost aphrodisiac quality, and I have to say, we felt good. But more significantly, we did not even think about food. Our brains really were telling us we were full. It was a magnificent deception.”
“Dinner time came and went. We reached our hotel at about midnight and went to bed without food. And the next day, neither of us wanted nor ate breakfast. I ate lunch but without appetite and very little pleasure. Partial then full appetite returned slowly after 24 hours.”
How is hoodia supposed to work?
In the 1990s, South African scientists isolated what they believed to be an active ingredient in Hoodia gordonii responsible for the appetite reducing effect, which became known as P57.
In 1997, P57 was licensed exclusively to British pharmaceutical company Phytopharm by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
According to former Phytopharm chief Dr Richard Dixey, P57 targets the satiety centre in the brain, known as the hypothalamus.
“There is a part of your brain, the hypothalamus,” says Dixey. “Within that mid-brain there are nerve cells that sense glucose sugar. When you eat, blood sugar goes up because of the food, these cells start firing and now you are full.”
“What the Hoodia seems to contain is a molecule that is about 10,000 times as active as glucose. It goes to the mid-brain and actually makes those nerve cells fire as if you were full. But you have not eaten. Nor do you want to.”
Phytopharm initially pinned its hopes for hoodia on the diet drug market. It sold the worldwide marketing rights to Pfizer (the company behind Viagra), which intended to study the molecule and develop a synthetic version for use as an oral prescription drug to treat obesity.
However, Pfizer discontinued clinical development of P57 after a restructuring led to the closure of its Natureceuticals group and returned the rights to Phytopharm in 2003.
The British-Dutch multinational Unilever obtained the global rights to P57 in December 2004. The first new hoodia products were supposed to “reach the market in three years,” coming under the Slimfast or other Unilever brands.
But this agreement ended in 2008 when (despite spending more than €20 million over four years) Unilever concluded that the plant extract “did not meet both safety and efficacy requirements.”
According to Phytopharm, testing on liquid products revealed that the ingredient metabolized too quickly, making it unsuitable for use in Unilever’s Slimfast range.
Despite all the money spent on its development, hoodia has been dumped by Unilever, Pfizer and now Phytopharm, who returned patents for extracts from the plant to the South African government in late 2010.
No effect on appetite
However, it now appears that Phytopharm was being more than a little economical with the truth when it claimed that Unilever ditched hoodia because it “metabolized too quickly” in liquid products.
Research just published in the November issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition — which Unilever (and presumably Phytopharm) was aware of at the time it pulled out of the hoodia deal in 2008 — shows that hoodia is no better than a placebo for reducing appetite.
For the study, Unilever researchers assigned a group of healthy but overweight women to one of two groups. Both groups stayed in a clinical research centre for 15 days. They were given two servings of a yogurt drink one hour before breakfast and dinner. Only one of the group’s yogurt drinks contained hoodia extract.
Although the women were allowed to eat as much as they wanted during the study, there was no significant difference in calorie intake or weight loss between the two groups.
Not only did hoodia fail to decrease appetite, the researchers observed that it “was less well tolerated than the placebo” because of episodes of nausea, vomiting, and weird skin sensations.
What about all these hoodia supplements on the market right now? Are they real? And do they actually work?
Given that there’s no accepted standard for assessing the quality of hoodia as an ingredient, the quality of these supplements remains largely uncertain. I’m guessing that many don’t contain any hoodia gordonii at all.
And even if they did, there is no legitimate research data to show that hoodia has any significant impact on appetite or weight loss. Given that it’s also been linked with some rather unpleasant side effects, I have no idea why anyone would want to use the stuff.
About the Author
My name is Christian Finn. I run a private "members only" website designed to help people burn fat, build muscle and get strong. If you want accurate, honest and in-depth reviews on the latest "hot topics" in the world of fitness, you're confused by all the conflicting advice out there, or you just want some training routines that will give you better, faster results, click here now to learn more about how I can help you.
