Dieta Hoodia

Diet miracle from an African plant is a spam special

By Erika Engelhaupt

For The Inquirer

If you haven't heard of Hoodia yet, you must have a great spam filter on your e-mail.

The diet pill has been clogging computer screens across the continent since Lesley Stahl of CBS's 60 Minutes told viewers in 2004 that it worked for her. This year, actor Joseph Gannascoli of HBO's The Sopranos said it helped him drop some of his pasta-fed girth.

The fuss is over a traditional remedy made from Hoodia gordonii, a cactus-like plant used for generations by the San people of southern Africa to stave off hunger during long hunting trips.

The South African government has patented the plant's active ingredient, enabling the San to share in future sales. (No earnings have materialized so far.) And now Slim-Fast maker Unilever hopes to reduce hunger pangs in this country by testing its safety and effectiveness.

Couple the slim evidence for Hoodia's effects with U.S. angst over jiggly thighs, and presto: a digital frenzy is born.

Dozens of firms crowd the Internet claiming to sell Hoodia, pronounced WHO-dee-ah. Yet the plant grows only in a limited area, and supply doesn't appear anywhere close to meeting demand.

A popular brand called Trimspa EF, hawked by newly svelte model Anna Nicole Smith, allegedly did not contain Hoodia's active ingredient P57, according to an ongoing suit in California. Trimspa's parent company, Cedar Knolls, N.J.-based Goen Technologies Corp., denies the accusations and says that its newer product, Trimspa X32, is its first labeled to contain Hoodia - and that it does.

If the Internet is the new Wild West, Hoodia could be its prickly emblem.

So far, the Federal Trade Commission has logged at least 100 complaints about Hoodia sellers and products through its consumer-fraud monitoring system.

The pills' potency and consistency are largely unregulated. Because they are sold as dietary supplements, not drugs, the FDA does not require testing of Hoodia pills before they are sold.

Nor does the agency test whether pills contain what they claim. An ongoing review of Hoodia pills by the Costa Mesa, Calif.-based testing firm Alkemists Pharmaceuticals found that at least half contained no Hoodia, said the firm's laboratory director, Sidney Sudberg. But some retailers hire his lab to test their Hoodia imports, he said, and reject batches that don't pass muster.

"Consumers should put pressure on retailers and ask for proof that products contain Hoodia," Sudberg said.

As for evidence that the bitter, gooey plant works, only one peer-reviewed study of Hoodia's effects appears in the the National Library of Medicine's online database, PubMed. That research, conducted on rats, found that P57 increased the content of energy-carrying molecules called ATP in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain thought to control hunger. Doctors don't know whether this means P57 would be safe or effective in humans.

The study's lead author, David MacLean of Brown University, said in an e-mail that although he is in favor of understanding botanical products, so much Hoodia is being sold on the Internet that he doubts whether all the offerings could be real.

Attempts to make P57 in the laboratory have so far yielded too little of the ingredient to be commercially viable. For now, the plants are simply dried and powdered.

Sellers are rushing to grow the native Kalahari Desert plants in China and Mexico. But Hoodia takes at least five years to mature, and no one is sure what growing conditions the plant needs to produce its active ingredient.

Poaching for African Hoodia has taken off to fill the supply hole. In May, a farmer was arrested with eight tons of Hoodia plants cut down in the wild, worth about $300,000, according to the Web site of South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

The council formed an agreement with representatives of the San people to share profits from Hoodia sales. But the San do not receive royalties from products now sold on the Internet because the agreement covers only future products licensed through Unilever and its partner, the British company Phytopharm.

Meanwhile, scams abound. The Internet security company McAfee SiteAdvisor released a list June 27 of 75 "Miracle Diet" Web sites that engage in misleading advertising or deceptive billing practices.

Hoodia products were prime offenders on McAfee's list. The firm's free downloadable software evaluates a site as red, yellow or green. In a Google search for "Hoodia pill," about one quarter of the first 20 Web sites get "yellow" or "red" ratings, meaning they appear to use deceptive practices such as bait-and-switch schemes or claims of scientific proof for their product's safety where none exists.

"Where the consumer goes, bad guys follow, so if Hoodia is popular, they'll go there," said Shane Keats, market strategist for McAfee SiteAdvisor.

Here's a typical too-good-to-be-true e-mail: "HOODIA is the miracle diet pill: ZERO APPETITE. ZERO SIDE AFFECTS[sic]. And now you can get it at NO COST!"

The e-mail guides readers to Pure Health Labs Hoodia, which advertises that shoppers pay only shipping and handling. But the fine print discloses that buyers are automatically enrolled in a program costing $99.41 for a 60-day supply.

Hoodia typically sells online for $40 to $60 for a one-month supply of 60 capsules.

The chance of being scammed hasn't slowed interest in Hoodia. There are about 25 million searches for diet pills or Hoodia each month, according to McAfee SiteAdvisor's estimates from Yahoo searches.

A Google search for "hoodia" yielded 12.7 million hits last month. Trolling eBay yields about 1,200 hoodia products for sale under more than three dozen trade names.

One of the many who have given Hoodia a try is Gannascoli, the actor whose character, gay mobster Vito Spatafore, met an untimely demise at the business end of a set of pool cues on The Sopranos. Before that, Vito melted off the pounds while whacking the mob competition.

Gannascoli said he lost 140 pounds after surgery that put a band around his stomach, and wants to lose at least 60 pounds more. He's become a spokesman for H57 Hoodia since he started using the product in May.

"There's no magic bullet," Gannascoli said, but he believes that Hoodia has helped curb his cravings for pasta while he sticks to a sensible diet and exercise plan.

As for his Sopranos character, "Vito, he'd probably like to hijack a truck of Hoodia and try to sell it," Gannascoli said.

Red Flags for Diet Schemes

Bogus weight-loss products often make these seven science-defying claims, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Lose weight no matter what you eat.

Lose at least two pounds a week without diet or exercise.

Block the absorption of fat or calories.

Lose weight permanently (even after you stop using the product).

Lose more than three pounds a week for more than four weeks.

Everyone will lose weight.

Lose weight by wearing a patch or rubbing on a cream.

SOURCE: Adapted from www.ftc.gov.

Published in The Philadelphia Inquirer