Hoodia Diet Supplement

Hoodia Supplements

Hoodia diet supplement...weight loss breakthrough.

If you're looking to lose weight, you've probably already heard about hoodia supplements.

And if you haven't heard about them yet, you will soon.

Hoodia is a plant that grows deep in the Desert region of South Africa, and was covered by major media outlets such as CBS, the Today Show, the BBC, and much more.

In the mid 90's a South African organization called the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) was studying indigenous plants that made up part of the diet of the Sans Bushmen tribe.

The Sans Bushmen are a tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers who have been living in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa for over 100,000 years. They were the first to discover hoodia gordonii and use it for its therapeutic purposes.

Hoodia Diet Supplement

One reason you're even hearing about hoodia supplements now is because the Sans Bushmen discovered thousands of years ago that when they ate the plant it greatly suppressed their appetite and thirst for a prolonged period of time.

The reason they did this was not to lose weight, but because they would often be without food for long periods of time while hunting and the hunger pains could be a major discomfort and distraction.

They used hoodia gordonii to quell these hunger and thirst pangs.

The CSIR discovered when studying hoodia that when it was fed to animals it significantly reduced the amount that they would eat.

They isolated the active compound -- called it P57 -- and then eventually licensed the rights to Phytopharm, a British based pharmaceutical company.

Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company caught wind of this and struck a deal with Phytopharm to see if they could jointly develop a prescription based drug synthesizing the active ingredient.

After much research, it seems Pfizer could not successfully synthesize the drug in a cost effective manner and returned the rights fully back to Phytopharm.

Phytopharm's double-blind, placebo-controlled study using P57 was an amazing success, and was responsible for generating a lot of the excitement for many of the hoodia supplements on the market even though these supplements are not from Phytopharm but a variety of other companies.

In the Phytopharm study, they took two groups of morbidly obese participants and divided them in two.

Half were given P57 and half were given a placebo. The group using P57 ended up consuming on average 1,000 less calories per day than the placebo group, which is an extremely high number.

The P57 group also experienced a significant reduction in body fat.

Because a natural compound -- such as a whole plant -- cannot be patented, many other companies started to sell their version of the hoodia diet supplement.

Here's where you need to be cautious if you want to try hoodia supplements made from this amazing plant. You need to arm yourself with some facts about hoodia.

• First, there are many types of hoodia plant, but only the hoodia gordonii species harbors the appetite suppressing active ingredient. Because hoodia gordonii is so rare and takes so long to mature (6 years), supplies are a lot less than the high demand.

  Because it is hard to obtain and expensive, many hoodia sellers are putting other kinds of hoodia in their products other than hoodia gordonii, which means you won't get any benefit.

  In short, look for "hoodia gordonii" when you buy a hoodia diet supplement, not just labels that say "100% hoodia" or "pure hoodia" or you might get ripped off.

• Hoodia gordonii is a protected species and regulated by International trade laws. It requires something called a CITES certificate to legally export it out of South Africa.

  CITES certificates are hard to obtain, so you make sure you buy a hoodia diet supplement from only a website that displays their CITES certificate so you know you are getting real South African hoodia gordonii.

• Beware of any supplement that says "made from whole hoodia plant."

  This is because 40% of the hoodia gordonii plant is therapeutically useless.

  The flowers, skin, fibrous material, and leaves do not have any active ingredient, and these make up almost 40% of the plant.

  Therefore, if such sellers grind up the whole hoodia plant into powder and sell it to you in capsules, you are paying for 40% useless material with no active ingredient, which makes it a lot cheaper for them -- but you get ripped off.

• The best products, in our view, come from what are are hoodia concentrations.

  These are made by taking the hoodia gordonii plant and placing it into an alcohol solution.

  When the alcohol is removed, it takes away a lot of the useless fillers with it. This leaves a lot more of the material from the core of the plant, which can be used to make hoodia supplements.

  If you see "10:1" on the bottle this means that 10 grams of the whole hoodia plant was used to make just 1 gram of hoodia powder which is then used in the hoodia diet supplement.

  This is why sometimes a 400mg product can be a better buy than a 1000mg product.

• Because hoodia is so hot now, spam emailings selling hoodia are on the rise tremendously. Never buy hoodia supplements from spam. Such products are almost sure to be fake.

If you keep these points in mind, you will greatly maximize your chances of buying a quality hoodia supplement.

Hoodia Diet Supplement

It's rather interesting, in fact.

When we eat food, we get something called glucose, which our body uses for energy and we undergo higher blood sugar levels from the food.

In the mid-brain region, we have nerve cells that sense this glucose for food and "tell" us when we are full when we've eaten enough.

Hoodia Gordonii's active ingredient works by imitating glucose, thus tricking these nerve cells in our mid-brain into thinking we are full even if we haven't eaten!

Although hoodia gordonii is not a stimulant -- it does not rev up the body's metabolism or increase heart rate like other weight loss stimulants -- long term safety has not been established.

All we know at this point is that the Sans Bushmen have been using it for thousands of years without any known negative side effects....and that in the short term study conducted by Phytopharm, the participants using P57 did not experience any negative side effects.

However, more studies need to be conducted concerning its safety.

Keep in mind, however, that just because hoodia gordonii is not a stimulant, it is often combined with stimulants in weight loss supplements for added effectiveness.

You should avoid the hoodia products that contain stimulants if you don't react well to stimulants like caffeine.

Featured Hoodia Diet Supplement

Their website instills confidence with both 1800 telephone ordering and email form contacts, as well as displaying the CITES certificate to authenticate only genuine South African hoodia gordonii is used to make their product.

Click the following link to learn more about

Hoodia Gordonii Plus.