Hoodia: The Latest in a String of Diet Pill Scams

As Thomas Hardy observed, some things never change. When the dietary supplement ephedra was finally yanked from the market in 2003, public health specialists breathed a sigh of relief. The product had been associated with more deaths than all other dietary supplements combined.

But where some saw belated success, others saw an opportunity for profiteering. No sooner was the product vanishing from supermarket shelves than new “ephedra-free” supplements appeared. The target: The 33 percent of Americans estimated in national surveys to be obese. Suddenly bitter orange, green tea and blue-green algae, previously low on the ladder of best-selling dietary supplements, became all the rage. None has been proved effective.

If the colorfulness of the product doesn’t suffice to spur product sales, there’s always local color.  One brand of noni juice, another unproven nostrum for obesity, is marketed as “an exotic health discovery from French Polynesia.” Its label features a bare-chested local male with a mohawk haircut eating the fruit. 

The newest diet phenomenon, hoodia gordonii, follows the same well-worn path. This time, the bare-chested man brandishing the hoodia-containing Desert Burn products is “Sean – A South African Bushman and Our Friend.” (Memo to hoodia producers: The ethnographically correct term is San, not Bushman.) The Web site also depicts San traversing the desert in their loincloths, a scene reminiscent of the 1984 film “The Gods Must be Crazy” – the last time the San penetrated US popular consciousness. Actually, most San wear western-style clothing, in some cases only donning loincloths when tourists and journalists visit them in their impoverished villages.

Another approach to product promotion: The endorsement of the impressionable scribe. In a 2004 report, Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes testified that hoodia had suppressed her appetite, pronouncing the Southern African succulent “a little cucumbery in texture, but not bad.” The BBC’s Tom Mangold concurs: “We did not even think about food. Our brains really were telling us we were full. It was a magnificent deception.”

Magnificent deception, indeed. There is not a shred of evidence in the medical literature that this product works in humans. Sure, a study has identified some minimal impacts  on the brain in laboratory rats and 15 other lab rats given hoodia appear to have kept their weight stable while a control group of six not given the supplement piled on the milligrams, but that’s a long way from easing you into those low-rise hip-huggers.

But with today’s discerning consumer, simply hyping a tablet with an unproven dietary supplement is not enough to boost market share. Hence, from Desert Burn Industries alone, one can purchase Hoodia Juice (in a dropper), Hoodia Shake, Hoodia Java and the ever-popular Hoodia Fruit Bar. The latest entrant into this crowded marketplace is the Hoodia Patch, allowing absorption of the product through the skin. We doubt the San took it this way.

Speaking of the San, the group has retained a lawyer who is trying to secure for the group a fraction of the international sales of hoodia-containing products. This is a reaction against bio-piracy in which corporate interests exploit chemicals used indigenously for centuries. “The San will finally throw off thousands of years of oppression, poverty, social isolation and discrimination,” said the lawyer. “We will create trust funds with the hoodia royalties and the children will join South Africa’s middle classes in our lifetime.” Returns for the natives, Thomas Hardy might have suggested.

In addition to members of the legal profession, hoodia manufacturers have drawn the attention of regulators at the US Food and Drug Administration. Five hoodia manufacturers have received letters from the agency notifying them that their claims for the efficacy of their products have converted their products from dietary supplements into illegally marketed new drugs. Others have observed that the quantity of purportedly hoodia-containing product greatly exceeds that available in southern Africa; the plant is considered endangered. The imbalance between supply and demand seems to have exerted itself in a predictable way: There are reports of products shown to contain no hoodia at all.

Hoodia is another in the long string of dietary supplement frauds recently perpetrated on the American public. Ever since dietary supplements were deregulated by the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, the market has been rife with products touting unproven cures, exploiting the legitimate health concerns of people with obesity, in particular. As Paul Simon might have asked, “Just hoodia think you’re fooling?”