Saturday, July 15, 2006
The product has several celebrity endorsers.
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
PHILADELPHIA -- 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' "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 cactuslike plant used for generations by the San people of southern Africa to stave off hunger on 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.
As for evidence that the bitter, gooey plant works, only one peer-reviewed study of Hoodia's effects appears in 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 that all the offerings are real.
Low supply
Attempts to make P57 in the laboratory so far have yielded too little of the ingredient to be commercially viable. For now, the plants simply are 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.
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 SiteAdvisor'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.
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.