They’re poor. They’re uneducated. They have problems with alcohol and drugs. They certainly don’t work in research labs. Yet the San Bushmen of the African Kalahari Desert may have set scientists on the track of finding an effective weapon in the battle against obesity. If you remember the surprise 1980 hit movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, you’ll be familiar with the Bushmen. If not, rent the video! These natives of the Kalahari are among the earliest known hunter-gatherer civilizations, but had no contact with Westerners until the 1920s. The film tells the story of a tribe living a peaceful life until a pilot carelessly drops a Coca-Cola bottle out of his airplane. The natives have never seen anything like this, and get into all sorts of conflicts about what to do with this magical gift. Finally one of the Bushmen decides that the bottle has caused so much discord that it should be returned to where it must have come from, the Gods. And so, as he embarks on his quest, a slew of zany misadventures begins.
Well, it seems that real life may have imitated art. The gift from the Gods, though, is not a bottle, but a plant. The San hunters have been using a type of cactus, Hoodia gordonii, for thousands of years to curb the appetite while on long forays in search of game. There wasn’t much food to be had on these hunting trips, and the Bushmen discovered that snacking on the Hoodia cactus would make hunger pangs go away. Sometime in the early 1960s, rumors about the existence of this appetite-suppressing plant filtered down to scientists at the South African Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (csir). Could there be something here to help deal with the rapidly expanding waistlines of Westerners who had become far too adept at hunting and gathering in the aisles of supermarkets?
It didn’t take long to discover that rats given Hoodia extracts stopped eating. So maybe there really was something to those stories about Hoodia dispelling hunger pains! csir scientists began the task of isolating and identifying the “active” ingredient in Hoodia, finding the proper dosage, and determining its safety profile. It took some thirty years, but finally a compound, code-named P57AS3, was found to have appetite-suppressant properties. csir promptly patented it as a weight-loss substance, but did not have the means to produce significant amounts or to explore commercialization.
Enter Phytopharm, a British company with expertise in developing drugs from natural products. csir worked out a deal that granted Phytopharm a license to commercialize Hoodia. In turn, Phytopharm, realizing that it may not have all the resources needed to bring a project with such great promise to fruition, entered into an agreement with Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company. The stage was now set to see if Hoodia could really perform. As usual, rats were the first guinea pigs. Given Hoodia extract, they lost weight even on a highly palatable diet. Excitement mounted further with the first human trial. Twenty overweight subjects were confined to a metabolic ward for two weeks and given either powdered Hoodia P57 extract or a placebo. They were allowed to eat as much as they wanted as they sat around, read, or watched TV, just like many Westerners do. The results were startling! Subjects treated with Hoodia reduced their caloric intake by some 1,000 calories a day and lost about 2 kilos over the two weeks. Granted, this was only one short-term study, but it was encouraging, nevertheless.
The plot thickened further when researchers at Brown University Medical School injected the purified Hoodia extract into the brains of rats and discovered chemical changes in their hypothalamus. This is the part of the brain that maintains the body’s “status quo” by controlling blood pressure, temperature, electrolyte balance, and weight. Injection of P57 resulted in an increase in the levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the body’s main energy storage molecule. The implication is that Hoodia tricks the brain into thinking that there has been an energy input from food, and a message is sent out to reduce intake. Surprisingly, in 2003, Pfizer decided to abandon the project, likely because the active ingredient, P57, turned out to be a complicated steroid derivative that was very difficult to synthesize on the scale needed to make standardized weight-loss pills.
The only viable approach now seemed to be incorporating Hoodia in its natural form into shakes, bars, or meal replacements. Phytopharm found a willing partner in Unilever, the multinational company that was already into the weight-loss game with its line of SlimFast products. Hoodia is now being grown on large, well-guarded plantations in South Africa to meet the expected demand, should further research bear out the early findings. The estimated market potential is over $3 billion a year! As is often the case, the hucksters have jumped on the bandwagon trying to cash in on Phytopharm’s research. Numerous Hoodia products already clamor for dieters’ attention on the web. Analyses have shown that they contain essentially no active ingredient. “Bio-pirates” are also active in Africa, and attempt to steal Hoodia plants to feed Americans’ appetite for anti-appetite substances.
And where does all this leave the San Bushmen? After all, it was their traditional knowledge that led to the discovery. For years they were shunted aside, but an agreement has now been reached that will allow the San to share in the profits, if indeed there are any. At this point, numerous stumbling blocks may still be encountered. But this hungry, poor, Third World tribe may have provided a partial solution to the problems of a developed world that is now eating itself sick. And that may not be all. Hoodia also has legendary aphrodisiac qualities. In the words of Petrus Vaalbooi, the bushman the San elected to look after their interests, “It’s very good for men’s problems. Once you’ve eaten this, you can really give your wife a good seeing-to.” Hey, maybe those Gods weren’t so crazy after all!