Processing Methods For The Hoodia Gordonii Plant
The South African Bushmen would pull off the spines, peel the skin, and eat the heart of the Hoodia gordonii plant before they left for long journeys or hunting trips. The plant is said to have a slightly bitter taste and the Bushmen would chew on a piece of Hoodia about the size of a cucumber and go all day without being thirsty or hungry. We in the Western world cannot go out and find a Hoodia plant to peel and eat to control hunger so we depend on other processing methods.
There are three methods of processing the Hoodia gordonii plant. The first is using a method of extracting the molecule credited with the appetite suppressant. The Hoodia gordonii plant that is native to the Kalahari Desert is the only one of the more than thirteen Hoodia species to have this molecule. The Phytopharm Company is a British company who first isolated the molecule and named it p57. The South African government received a patent for the extraction process and granted the license to the Phytopharm Company. The makers of Viagra were interested in developing the Hoodia program because it was said to also have an aphrodisiac quality in it. They hoped to make a synthetic Hoodia that could be sold as a weight loss product. The Pfizer Company finally gave the license back to Phytopharm because they did not believe it was cost-effective to make a synthetic of the natural product. Phytopharm is now working with Unilever to develop a weight loss product that has the p57 molecule. Unilever expects to bring out their Hoodia Slim-Fast products in 2008.
The second method of processing Hoodia is to take the whole plant and grind it into a powder. Most of the products being sold today are processed with this method. They claim the Bushmen ate the whole plant and so they grind the entire plant, spines and skin into a powder they place in pill form. In reality, the Bushmen pulled off the spines and peeled the skin and ate only the heart of the Hoodia gordonii plant. This method of processing is the easiest to do and most likely the least effective of the three methods.
The third processing method is to extract the ingredients that work as an appetite suppressant and discard the rest. This concentrated method can be either 10:1 or 20:1 ratio. That means one gram of concentrate was made from 10 or 20 percent of the Hoodia plant.
Which method is the recommended to be the most effective? Most herbalists and those who practice natural medicine believe the liquid extract is more effective than the pill. The liquid does not need to be digested by the stomach and can go right to work suppressing appetite for faster results. The powder grinding method would include the woody parts of the roots, the spine, and the skin. These are harder to digest and may cause problems for people with existing digestive problems.
Whichever form of Hoodia you decide to buy, it will be expensive. Hoodia gordonii is a protected plant and is rare. A company has to have an agreement with the South African government to export the plant and it takes more than five years for the plant to reach maturity.
