60 Minutes recently aired a report on Hoodia. If you browse hoodia sales websites, they are all proudly quoting “As seen on 60 Minutes!” They are hoping you didn’t really SEE the program, but assume their product was recommended. To clear matters, here is the transcript from the program. As you will see, these products were not recommended at all, because they are either fake or contain too little of the active ingredient to do any good.
STAHL: Each year, we spend over $40 billion on products designed to help us slim down. But none of them seem to be working very well.
But now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon it`ll be tripping off your tongue, because hoodia is a natural substance that they say 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.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) STAHL (voice over): Hoodia is a bitter-tasting, cactus-like plant.
We were told that if we wanted to try it, we`d have to go to Africa, because the only place in the world where hoodia grows wild is here in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.
Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and our interpreter, hired an experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local aboriginal Bushman, to help us find it. The Bushmen, who were featured in the movie, “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” speak a click language. Oba (ph) is their word for hoodia.
Toppies led us out into the desert.
(on camera): So, Toppies, do you eat hoodia all of the time?
NIGEL CRAWHALL, LINGUIST: He says, “I really like to eat them when the new rains have come. Then they`re really quite delicious.” STAHL (voice over): Toppies says there is a lot less hoodia than there used to be, because of the recent droughts. It was like being on safari and coming upon a tiger — sort of.
CRAWHALL: OK, here we go.
STAHL (on camera): Here?
CRAWHALL: Yes, right here.
STAHL: Right here.
CRAWHALL: This is a small one.
STAHL: This is it?
CRAWHALL: This is a baby.
STAHL (voice over): Toppies cut off a stalk that looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed the sharp spines.
(on camera): Now, let me ask, is that little amount is going to be enough to suppress my appetite for a full day?
CRAWHALL: OK, he says, “This is enough to make you lose your appetite. You won`t have any desire for hunger,” is what he said.
STAHL: All day?
(voice over): In the interest of science, I ate it.
(on camera): Ready, aim, fire. They do pay me for this. A little cucumbery…
CRAWHALL: Yes.
STAHL: … in texture, but not bad. I`m feeling extremely brave.
OK? Toppies, I`ve done it.
(voice over): The next day, I was ready to report.
(on camera): So, did the hoodia work? Well, first of all, I had no after-effect — no funny taste in my mouth, no queasy stomach, no racing heart. Nothing. And secondly, I wasn`t ever hungry all day. Even when I would normally have a pang, say, around lunchtime or dinnertime, I didn`t.
I had no particular desire to eat or drink for the entire day. So, I guess I`d have to say it did work.
(voice over): Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating it for a very long time. After all, they were living off the land in southern Africa for over 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.
Hoodia may or may not have anything to do with it. But you never see an overweight Bushman.
The first scientific investigation of the plant was conducted here at South Africa`s national laboratory. Because Bushmen were known to eat hoodia, it was included in a study of indigenous foods.
DR. RICHARD DIXEY, PHYTOPHARM: And what they found was that when they fed it to animals, the animals ate it and lost weight.
STAHL: Dr. Richard Dixey heads an English pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm that`s trying to develop weight-loss products based on hoodia.
(on camera): Was its potential application as an appetite suppressant immediately obvious?
DIXEY: No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original research was done in the mid 1960s.
STAHL (voice over): 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.
(on camera): Phytopharm has spent about $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 less a day 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.
DIXEY: If you take this compound every day, your wish to eat goes down. And we`ve seen that very, very dramatically.
STAHL: If it`s a plant and it grows, why a patent?
DIXEY: 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.
STAHL: And so, no one else can use hoodia for weight loss?
DIXEY: As a weight-management product without infringing the patent, that`s correct.
STAHL (voice over): But what does that say about all these weight- loss products? Each one claims to have hoodia in it.
Trimspa says its X32 pills contain 75 milligrams 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.
DIXEY: 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.
STAHL (on camera): You`re saying other people have gone out and extracted the hoodia plant and put it out for me to buy somewhere?
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.
STAHL: But you`re saying that small amount…
DIXEY: Does nothing at all.
STAHL: … has no effect.
DIXEY: None whatsoever.
STAHL (voice over): But Dixey isn`t the only one who has 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.
ROGER CHENNELLS, ATTORNEY: The San did not even know about it.
STAHL: And this was something that was in their tradition.
CHENNELLS: They had given the information that led directly towards the patent.
STAHL (voice over): The taking of traditional knowledge without compensation is called bio-piracy.
(on camera): You have said — and I`m going to quote you here — “That the San felt as if someone had stolen the family silver.” CHENNELLS: I did say that.
STAHL: So what did you do?
CHENNELLS: Well, 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.
STAHL: But letters were written and threats were made.
CHENNELLS: Yes, we engaged with them. They had done something wrong, and we wanted them to acknowledge it.
STAHL (voice over): 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, nearly annihilated.
CHENNELLS: Around 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.
STAHL (on camera): Hunted Bushmen?
CHENNELLS: Yes, yes.
STAHL: Hunted as if they were animals?
CHENNELLS: It`s well documented.
STAHL (voice over): 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. And so Chennells threatened to sue the national lab on their behalf.
CHENNELLS: We knew that if it was successful, many, many millions of dollars would be coming towards the San.
STAHL (on camera): Many millions of dollars.
CHENNELLS: Many, many millions. They have talked about the market being hundreds and hundreds of millions in America.
STAHL: You seem pretty sure, I must say.
CHENNELL: Yes, I am quite sure.
STAHL (voice over): In the end, a settlement was reached. The Bushmen will get a percentage of the profits — if there are profits. And 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.
(on camera): Can`t you make it synthetically?
DIXEY: It can be made. We`ve made milligrams of it.
STAHL: You have?
DIXEY: 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, which is the sort of quantity you`d need to actually start doing something about obesity in thousands of people.
STAHL: Unable to make a synthetic pill, Phytopharm decided it would market hoodia in its natural form, in diet shakes and bars. That meant they needed the hoodia plant itself.
But given the obesity problem in the United States alone, it became obvious that what was needed was a lot of hoodia — much, much more than was growing in the wild in the Kalahari. And so they came here.
(voice over): This is one of Phytopharm`s hoodia plantations in South Africa. They`ll need a lot of plantations like this 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. But he admitted that starting up the plantation has been quite a challenge.
(on camera): Why is it so hard? I can see you`ve got some empty spaces here. What`s the problem?
SIMON MACWILLIAM, AGRONOMIST: 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. So we have no experience. So it`s different diseases and pests which we have to deal with.
STAHL: How confident are you that you will be able to grow enough?
MACWILLIAM: We`re very confident of that. We`ve got an expansion program, which is going to be hundreds of acres. And we`ll be able — we`re ready to meet the demand.
STAHL (voice over): Which 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.
(on camera): Are these the same thing that I tasted when I was with the Bushmen in the Kalahari?
MACWILLIAM: No. I think you have had a slightly different species.
STAHL (voice over): This species has the advantage of growing a lot faster, but…
MACWILLIAM: It`s actually more bitter than the plant that you tasted.
STAHL: More bitter, huh? But I was planning on another day without thinking of food. How bad could it be?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you ready?
STAHL (on camera): One, two, three, OK. Yes, it`s not good.
(END VIDEOTAPE)