Hoodia Gordonii comes from Africa. The people of the Kalahari Desert discovered hoodia long before Europeans started to give Latin names to unkown plants and animals. These people knew the plant by different names, such as: ikhoba, xshoba, xhooba etc. They have discovered that hoodia is safe to eat and used it when they went hunting, because this plant works as an apetite suppressant and they knew that it would allay their thirst and hunger. A few slices of the plant were enough to abate starvation. They also used it to reduce indigestion and abdominal cramps, and they are using it till this day.

It was Francis Masson, who gave the plant its Latin name. He named it Stapelia gordonii. After a few years the name was changed to Hoodia, by the name of Van Hood, a succulent grower.

Hoodia looks like a cactus and it is usually marked as one even though botanically it is not.

The plant has been used to suppress appetite up to the present in case of esurience. Even so lots of children fell victims to hoodia after consuming it for three months as the main substance of their diet.

You have to keep in mind not to use hoodia as a long term surrogate in case you want to lose weight, because it will only decrease your appetite, it will not replace food.

Hoodia tastes like a bitter cucumber, which is why it’s sold in capsule form in European and North American countries. There is a liquid version as well, which has flavor added to it, so it has a better, more pleasant taste.

Not until the 1990’s had the plant’s qualities been discovered, when the South African Council started a research project on animals and confirmed that hoodia could subserve weight loss without causing any side effects.

After the project, Phytopharm (a drug company) was givven the authorization to study the plant and spent more than $20 million dollars on clinical trials.

Another giant company named Pfizer joined Phytopharm and invested a lot in the research, eventually abandoning it after realising that it was very expensive to make a pill out of the ingredient.

Temporarily it can be bought in weight loss formulations together with green tea extract, which speeds up metabolism.

Hoodia gordonii is a costly appetite suppressant, due to the fact that it is a very rare, protected plant that can exclusively be grown with a permit.