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Hoodia Gordonii is a flowering plant that belongs to the family Apocynaceae. It is a plant that reaches up to 1 meter in height. It has large purple or tan color flowers with strong smell. It is also called locally xhooba, Ghaap and khoba. It is also known as ‘Queen of the Namib’ and ‘Bushman’s Hat’. Hoodia is found naturally in Southern Africa in the semi-deserts of the countries of Namibia, South Africa, Botswana and Angloa. It is particular to the Namib Desert.

Hoodia is traditionally eaten by the San Bushmen who live in the Kalahari desert. These nomadic people eat the Hoodia stem to suppress their hunger when they are out on long hunting trips. The plant was also used by them for hemorrhoids, severe abdominal cramps, indigestion, tuberculosis, diabetes and hypertension. There are some twenty varieties of Hoodia. Of them, it is only the Hoodia Gordonii variety that suppresses natural appetite. Hoodia plants flowers in about five years after which it can be harvested.

As early as 1937, a Dutch anthropologist had noted that the San Bushmen consumed Hoodia to suppress appetite. But it was only in 1963 that this was studied were carried out at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the national laboratory of South Africa. The scientists, along with Phytopharm, a British company, isolated a steroidal glycoside, the active ingredient in Hoodia. They named it as p57. Very soon Hoodia began to be sold in liquid and capsule form and marketed extensively through health food stores. It has become popular as Hoodia 57. It is promoted as an effective supplement to lose weight and control obesity. What Hoodia does is to send signals to the brain which makes you feel full and lose appetite. This in turn makes you avoid over eating.

Hoodia became instantly popular world wide. The market for the Hoodia products boomed. The result was rapid lose of Hoodia from its natural habitat. This led Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to include Hoodia in Appendix II which meant that Hoodia will have to be declared as an endangered species if its extraction from nature was not immediately restricted. In fact, in 2008 the Botanic Gardens Conservation International listed also declared that the plant faced extinction due to indiscriminate exploitation. The government soon took to farming in government controlled farms in the Kalahari Desert. This regulation also subsequently led to the San Bushmen, the originators and holders of the knowledge, to receive a share in the royalty from the sales.

Nature gives us almost everything that we need. That is why, nature should be used up badly.

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