Does Hoodia Work for Weight Loss, or Just Empty Your Pockets?

May 13, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blog 

I bet you want to know… Does Hoodia really work to help you lose weight? After all, billions of dollars are being spent worldwide annually on this supposed “miracle” diet pill that, if you were to believe the hype spouted off by all of its manufacturers, you would think that hoodia is the miracle cure to obesity and excess weight that will save the world. Ahh, if it were only that easy to lose weight!

So… Does Hoodia actually work for lasting weight loss, or even have any effects whatsoever? Let’s dig a little deeper beyond all of the marketing hype and see if it actually has any merit.

The fact is that you can’t search the internet or listen to the radio without being bombarded by Hoodia advertisements promising all sorts of miraculous claims. The reason I wanted to bring up the subject and it’s validity is that I don’t want any of my readers to waste their money and fall for this scam.

Now let me preface this by saying that not all companies selling hoodia are crooked. Some are legitimate and honest and actually selling real Hoodia. However, with the lack of federal regulation on supplements, it is quite easy for shady smaller companies to get away with selling pills that don’t even have any in them. Also, we are not even saying anything regarding whether Hoodia (if it were the real stuff) actually does work or not for lasting weight loss.

Sure, the Hoodia ads sound great… no exercise necessary, just sit on your couch, pop a couple diet pills, and you’ll start melting fat off your bones like a furnace… Please, give me a frickin break! Let’s get this straight… Quick fixes NEVER work, and they NEVER will work in the future. Even if a miracle weight loss pill is developed in the future, there will always be an adverse side effect… it’s simply against the laws of nature, and homeostasis of the body.

I can’t even tell you how many people I get writing me and they’re totally sold on this Hoodia stuff by the slick advertising and hype. They buy it and they get no weight loss results whatsoever. Well, there was a good $50 or $100 down the drain! I can’t blame them for being suckered… I mean these scammers are pretty good marketers.

You’ll see in a minute that a large percentage of what is labeled and sold as hoodia may not even contain ANY Hoodia at all. A lot of it is completely counterfeit.

At first glance, it might appear that this supposed “magical herb” has some promise. All of the hype started a couple years ago when a popular night-time network TV show presented Hoodia as a new and potentially exciting weight-loss pill. Well, it didn’t take long for the internet and late night advertising scamsters to follow suit, fill some capsules with any old crap they could find, and start spamming bazillions of people around the world saying that their pills were the magical answer to the dream body they’ve been looking for their entire life.

Hoodia has been used by the Bushmen of Southern Africa for centuries as an appetite suppressant for their journeys. The fact is thatin its natural state might actually work as a decent appetite suppressant (although that doesn’t necessarily mean it will help with permanent weight loss). The problem lies in the fact that the supplement industry is not federally regulated in the US, and any scammer can put whatever they want in a capsule and sell it for huge profits.

The fact is that the quantity of Hoodia being sold throughout the world in supplement stores and online FAR EXCEEDS the amount that is actually produced. It is only grown in a small area of southern Africa and is a very slow growing plant, and there is a much larger quantity of “supposed hoodia” sold than is produced. Obviously, this means that a large amount of what is sold as hoodia is simply counterfeit.

Basically what they put in the pill doesn’t even have to be Hoodia, because ever since the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994, there is no regulation or testing to assure that what their label claims is actually in the bottle. Now even if they did put real Hoodia extract in the capsules, there is also no scientific proof at this point that these small doses that they are using will actually cause any type of weight loss at all in humans.

Even if it were to actually help curb appetite, that is not always a good thing, as it may simply deprive your body of the nutrition it needs to function properly and maintain lean muscle mass, all of which regulates your metabolic rate. If you did lose weight, this would not be a good weight loss, as you would lose muscle and end up with a slower metabolism, which would lead to excess fat gain in the future.

So you’re left with these major problems:

1. A certain percentage of the Hoodia being sold out there might not even be real. You simply could be buying any old junk powder that they fill the capsules with.

2. Even if certain brands are honest (which a lot of the bigger companies ARE honest), and actually put the amount of Hoodia that they claim in the bottle, there is no proof that those quantities are ample enough to curb the appetite (compared to the raw plant that the bushmen eat), nor is there any evidence that it will result in lasting weight loss.

So does Hoodia really work? The answer is that no one really knows for sure, however with all of the uncertainties that we’ve highlighted here, it is highly unlikely that Hoodia will create long lasting permanent weight loss for you, even if you do get lucky enough to get the “real stuff”.

As you’ve probably heard me say a thousand times before… the bottom line is that there are no “miracles in a bottle”. If you want to be truly healthy, lean, and strong for life, it takes some actual real exercise and a nutritious diet full of natural unprocessed healthy foods… a healthy diet that you can live with for life! There are no substitutes, but there are plenty of scams if you want to throw away your money.

THOMPSON STEPHEN
http://www.articlesbase.com/wellness-articles/does-hoodia-work-for-weight-loss-or-just-empty-your-pockets-692745.html

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