Hoodia gum - a weight-loss wonder?

Apologies - this was supposed to have been posted yesterday, but two hours of sleep on Sunday night (Thanks Kiwis and All Blacks) put paid to a few plans.

I'm always suspicious of flyers left under the car windscreen. They're usually advertising cheap rug sales or wanting me to start a new part-time business to earn b1g D0ll4r$.

Usually the kids get them and they end up in bits on the back floor. But not on Saturday.

After a tortuous 45 minute grocery shop with the kids in tow, I was met with a folded A4 colour printed advertisement for Hoodia Gum, a 'medically proven weight-loss wonder!'.

Being a little on the large side, I'm always interested in losing weight without having to actually exercise and cut out eating of crisps and chocolate.

But, as the vast majority of us know, there's no magic bullet that's going to cause the weight to drop off. So with my skeptical-sense tingling I went for an exploration of the internet and the amazing plant that was the ingredient in the wonderous chewing gum, Hoodia gordonii.

So what did I find? Well, pretty much what I expected for a product promising the earth - lots of adverts and sites wanting to sell it to me and not a lot of information on peer-reviewed studies showing the stuff actually does what it's supposed to.

First up, the scientific studies on the traditional South African plant are sparse. Well, when I say sparse there appears to be one published study on rats, an "efficacy" study on seven people and one double-blind study undertaken by a company who manufacture Hoodia products which showed people taking the active ingredient (P57) consumed an average of 1000 calories less per day than those not taking it.

The real lack of clinical data and a single study (which may or may not have been peer reviewed as I haven't found the study online) is hardly convincing for a so-called weight-loss wonder. . .

I'm not going to go into too much further detail here (because as good skeptics you should do your own digging and reading on this) - but some other things I found disturbing about the product was the sheer amount of competing information the different manufacturers/sellers provided (like how quickly the product was effective, how much to take, how their product was the best because it contained certified Hoodia gordonii).

Here are a selection of the sites I visited (but obviously not all):

Slimfast Hoodia
Hoodia diet-pills
Hoodia Advice
Hoodia gordonii's Wikipedia entry

These are provided for illustrative effect and all (and many more dealing with Hoodia) are available through Google.

The fact that so many of the sites I visited were keen to point out the huge number of forgeries available on the internet also set alarm bells ringing - apparently there's just not enough Hoodia gordonii available to provide for the amount of products on the market.

Most also referenced a handful of media 'appearances' of Hoodia - mainly CBS's 60 minutes, the story of a BBC reporter (who ate a banana-sized piece of the plant, not a supplement) and an appearance in Oprah Winfrey's 'O' magazine. Wikipedia has a few more references, but those three tend to be the most popularly cited and all are a number of years old.

(Were this plant truly the answer to the world's obesity problem, is it too much to expect to see some recent information?)

While all of these may be interesting, again there is very little science there. When the majority of the advertising is centred on personal testimonials, you have to question whether the science supports what's been stated.

Now let's look at the Hoodia gum in the advert I received. The website I was directed to says the gum contains 120mg of 'pure Hoodia'. First up, that doesn't fill me with confidence especially as most products on the internet seem to indicate they contain more than this.

The flyer also claims that 'its benefits have been proven through the strict testing methods of western medicine'. For thit to be true I'd need to see some peer-reviewed double-blind studies showing some statistical significance - and as I wrote above, this just isn't the case.

So the conclusion? Hoodia gordonii, or to be precise it's active ingredient, may have some appetite suppression affect.

Exactly how much of the active ingredient this gum supplies is unknown and can't be deduced based on the information supplied. And with the lack of clinical study information freely available, a direct comparison of amount required to show any appetite suppresant effect versus amount supplied is impossible.

That, alongside the exaggerated claims, the warnings of fake Hoodia proliferation and the lack of reputable brands means I'll be avoiding Hoodia gordonii in any of its forms in my quest for the perfect body. I recommend you do too.

Note: I spent approximately 3 hours visiting and reading websites on Hoodia based on internet searches. I just don't have time to review all the information provided so I zeroed on the commonalities and differences I could find.

It goes without saying that, like all good skeptics, I would be prepared to re-evaluate my position based on scientific evidence if someone can point me in the right direction.