Hoodia Balance is a Fast and Effective Health Supplement
Certified 100% Pure South African Hoodia
Hoodia Balance
On November 21, 2004 CBS correspondent, Lesley Stahl reported on 60 Minutes that a strange little plant, Hoodia Gordonii, "... is a natural substance that literally takes your appetite away." According to CBS, "Scientists say that it fools the brain by making you think you're full, even if you've eaten just a morsel."
Now, word of this amazing plant is spreading like wildfire across the country and taking the consumer market by storm. Many are calling the discovery of Hoodia Gordonii the breakthrough of the decade.
Hoodia Balance contains a massive 750MG of 100% pure certified South African Hoodia from the Kalahari Desert. With the media storm surrounding hoodia, the product is in extremely high demand. That coupled with the fact that there is a very limited quantity of real hoodia gordonii available from South Africa, the opportunity for counterfeit, fake and diluted hoodia products is running rampant. There are two certified documents required to prove the authenticity of pure South African Hoodia which we are proud to display. They are the C.I.T.E.S Certificate and the Analytical Report.
IF ONLY YOU WEREN'T SO DARNED HUNGRY ALL THE TIME...
It's true that you eat for a lot of different reasons, but feeling hungry can drive you to distraction. You know you should stick to your diet (what ever the current one is), and you know when you're eating more than you need. But, what can you do about always feeling hungry? It's just not fair.
Hoodia Balance might just be the answer you're looking for. Combined with a sensible food program, exercise routine, and drinking plenty of water, the ingredients in Hoodia Balance will help you to regain your slim body easier and faster.
If you weren't hungry all the time, you wouldn't be tempted to snack between meals. You could easily say "No," to second helpings. You would find it easy to push away from the table feeling satisfied.
A great deal of research is being conducted into the effects of satiety (the feeling of being full) on overeating. Hormones circulating through the body convey messages to the brain to indicate hunger of "fullness."
WHAT IS HOODIA GORDONII?
If you missed the 60 Minutes program, the program described Hoodia as a small, succulent plant that grows only in the remote region of the South African Kalahari Desert. There, the indigenous San Bushmen have eaten the plan for centuries, to stave off hunger during their long and arduous hunting trips.
This small plant looks like a dill pickle with spines on it. It grows slowly in its harsh environment, and takes four or five years, or more, before it is ready to harvest.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, joined forces with the South African San Council. They agreed to work together on the usage of indigenous plants for the benefit of both parties. They also committed themselves to the conservation of natural resources.
Because of tremendous worldwide demand for the Hoodia plant, it has become endangered by over-harvesting. Now, certification is required to prove that the product is authentic Hoodia Gordonii.
Real Hoodia Gordonii only grows in the semi-arid desert of South Africa - not in China, or Mexico, or the United States. With Hoodia Balance you can be assured of getting the real, organic Hoodia ingredient. That's because our Hoodia is approved by the Western Cape Conservation Authority of South Africa, and is certified to be 100% authentic.
YOU'LL BECOME PART OF OUR WEIGHT MANAGEMENT CLUB
When you order your first shipment of Hoodia Balance, you'll be automatically signed up to get Free lifetime membership access to our results-based online fitness program. This information is exclusively for Hoodia Balance members, and is not available to the general public.
As soon as you receive your first order, be sure to check out our Health Resource Center on line. The suggestions given there will help ensure your success. You'll find customized exercise programs, diet plans, fitness tracking systems, and much more.
Your Hoodia Balance Program gives you a fast and effective weight management system. Place your order now to start re-discovering the real you.
Ingredients
Hoodia Found deep in the Kalahari desert, Hoodia is a succulent plant that looks like a small cactus. This strangely-shaped little plant has many relatives throughout the desert, but only one variety, Hoodia is known to have an effect on appetite and weight loss. There are no known side-effects from Hoodia, which has been studied scientifically for over 30 years. Most recently, Phytopharm has invested millions in isolating Hoodia's active components.
For generations, the San Bushmen have eaten Hoodia to control both hunger and thirst as they roam the Kalahari desert. They would consume the raw plant over long desert journeys, allowing them to eat and drink almost nothing for hours and days at a time. And for generations, only the San people knew of Hoodia's remarkable properties.
We only use 100% pure South African Hoodia from the Kalahari Desert in Hoodia Gordonii Plus and are proud to display the certificates to prove it. Our Hoodia is licensed by the Western Cape Conservation Authority of South Africa and is certified to be 100% Authentic. There are two certified documents required to prove the authenticity of pure South African Hoodia. They are the C.I.T.E.S Certificate and the Analytical Report.
Certification
Certification for 100% Pure South African Hoodia Balance
Authentic hoodia is one of the rarest botanicals in the world. The surge of products declaring to have the most effective weight loss supplement in the last decade simply can not be! Real hoodia is Rare, Controlled and Expensive! It is literally impossible to have so much of the real hoodia product in the market place. Amazingly, we found that as much as fifty percent of the hoodia products being advertised were misleading and a substantial quantity had Little to No hoodia at all! Simply wasting consumer's time & money!
We only use 100% pure South African Hoodia from the Kalahari Desert in Hoodia Gordonii Plus and are proud to display the certificates to prove it. Our Hoodia is licensed by the Western Cape Conservation Authority of South Africa and is certified to be 100% Authentic. There are two certified documents required to prove the authenticity of pure South African Hoodia. They are the C.I.T.E.S Certificate and the Analytical Report.
60 Minutes
African Plant May Help Fight Fat
Lesley Stahl of CBS Reports On Newest Weapon In War On Obesity
Nov. 21, 2004
(CBS) Each year, people spend more than $40 billion on products designed to help them slim down. None of them seem to be working very well.
Now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon it'll be tripping off your tongue, because hoodia is a natural substance that literally takes your appetite away.
It's very different from diet stimulants like Ephedra and Phenfen that are now banned because of dangerous side effects. Hoodia doesn't stimulate at all. Scientists say it fools the brain by making you think you're full, even if you've eaten just a morsel. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
The hoodia plant in the Kalahari Desert could become the newest weapon in the war against obesity. (CBS)
Lesley Stahl tries just a few bites of the plant, which is already listed as an ingredient in several weight-loss products on the market now. (CBS)
The hoodia plant in the Kalahari Desert could become the newest weapon in the war against obesity. (CBS)
Quote
Hoodia, a plant that tricks the brain by making the stomach feel full, has been in the diet of South Africa's Bushmen for thousands of years.
Hoodia is a bitter-tasting cactus-like plant. 60 Minutes was told that if it wanted to try hoodia, it would have to go to Africa. Why? Because the only place in the world where hoodia grows wild is in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.
Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, hired an experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local aboriginal Bushman, to help find it. The Bushmen were featured in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy."
Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out into the desert. Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia. "I really like to eat them when the new rains have come," says Kruiper, speaking through the interpreter. "Then they're really quite delicious."
When we located the plant, Kruiper cut off a stalk that looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed the sharp spines. In the interest of science, Stahl ate it. She described the taste as "a little cucumbery in texture, but not bad."
So how did it work? Stahl says she had no after effects - no funny taste in her mouth, no queasy stomach, and no racing heart. She also wasn't hungry all day, even when she would normally have a pang around mealtime. And, she also had no desire to eat or drink the entire day. "I'd have to say it did work," says Stahl.
Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating it for a very long time. After all, they have been living off the land in southern Africa for more than 100,000 years.
Some of the Bushmen, like Anna Swartz, still live in old traditional huts, and cook so-called Bush food gathered from the desert the old-fashioned way.
The first scientific investigation of the plant was conducted at South Africa's national laboratory. Because Bushmen were known to eat hoodia, it was included in a study of indigenous foods.
"What they found was when they fed it to animals, the animals ate it and lost weight," says Dr. Richard Dixey, who heads an English pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm that is trying to develop weight-loss products based on hoodia.
Was hoodia's potential application as an appetite suppressant immediately obvious?
"No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original research was done in the mid 1960s," says Dixey.
It took the South African national laboratory 30 years to isolate and identify the specific appetite-suppressing ingredient in hoodia. When they found it, they applied for a patent and licensed it to Phytopharm.
Phytopharm has spent more than $20 million so far on research, including clinical trials with obese volunteers that have yielded promising results. Subjects given hoodia ended up eating about 1,000 calories a day less than those in the control group. To put that in perspective, the average American man consumes about 2,600 calories a day; a woman about 1,900.
"If you take this compound every day, your wish to eat goes down. And we've seen that very, very dramatically," says Dixey.
But why do you need a patent for a plant? "The patent is on the application of the plant as a weight-loss material. And, of course, the active compounds within the plant. It's not on the plant itself," says Dixey.
So no one else can use hoodia for weight loss? "As a weight-management product without infringing the patent, that's correct," says Dixey.
But what does that say about all these weight-loss products that claim to have hoodia in it? Trimspa says its X32 pills contain 75 mg of hoodia. The company is pushing its product with an ad campaign featuring Anna Nicole Smith, even though the FDA has notified Trimspa that it hasn't demonstrated that the product is safe.
Some companies have even used the results of Phytopharm's clinical tests to market their products.
"This is just straightforward theft. That's what it is. People are stealing data, which they haven't done, they've got no proper understanding of, and sticking on the bottle," says Dixey. "When we have assayed these materials, they contain between 0.1 and 0.01 percent of the active ingredient claimed. But they use the term hoodia on the bottle, of course, so they -- does nothing at all."
But Dixey isn't the only one who's felt ripped off. The Bushmen first heard the news about the patent when Phytopharm put out a press release. Roger Chennells, a lawyer in South Africa who represents the Bushmen, who are also called "the San," was appalled.
"The San did not even know about it," says Chennells. "They had given the information that led directly toward the patent."
The taking of traditional knowledge without compensation is called "bio-piracy."
"You have said, and I'm going to quote you, 'that the San felt as if someone had stolen the family silver,'" says Stahl to Chennells. "So what did you do?"
"I wouldn't want to go into some of the details as to what kind of letters were written or what kind of threats were made," says Chennells. "We engaged them. They had done something wrong, and we wanted them to acknowledge it."
Chennells was determined to help the Bushmen who, he says, have been exploited for centuries. First they were pushed aside by black tribes. Then, when white colonists arrived, they were nearly annihilated.
"About the turn of the century, there were still hunting parties in Namibia and in South Africa that allowed farmers to go and kill Bushmen," says Chennells. "It's well documented."
The Bushmen are still stigmatized in South Africa, and plagued with high unemployment, little education, and lots of alcoholism. And now, it seemed they were about to be cut out of a potential windfall from hoodia. So Chennells threatened to sue the national lab on their behalf.
"We knew that if it was successful, many, many millions of dollars would be coming towards the San," says Chennells. "Many, many millions. They've talked about the market being hundreds and hundreds of millions in America."
In the end, a settlement was reached. The Bushmen will get a percentage of the profits -- if there are profits. But that's a big if.
The future of hoodia is not yet a sure thing. The project hit a major snag last year. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had teamed up with Phytopharm, and funded much of the research, dropped out when making a pill out of the active ingredient seemed beyond reach.
Dixey says it can be made synthetically: "We've made milligrams of it. But it's very expensive. It's not possible to make it synthetically in what's called a scaleable process. So we couldn't make a metric ton of it or something that is the sort of quantity you'd need to actually start doing something about obesity in thousands of people."
Phytopharm decided to market hoodia in its natural form, in diet shakes and bars. That meant it needed the hoodia plant itself.
But given the obesity epidemic in the United States, it became obvious that what was needed was a lot of hoodia - much more than was growing in the wild in the Kalahari. And so they came here.
60 Minutes visited one of Phytopharm's hoodia plantations in South Africa. They'll need a lot of these plantations to meet the expected demand.
Agronomist Simon MacWilliam has a tall order: grow a billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a couple of years. He admitted that starting up the plantation has been quite a challenge.
"The problem is we're dealing with a novel crop. It's a plant we've taken out of the wild and we're starting to grow it,' says MacWilliam. "So we have no experience. So it's different— diseases and pests which we have to deal with."
How confident are they that they will be able to grow enough? "We're very confident of that," he says. "We've got an expansion program which is going to be 100s of acres. And we'll be able - ready to meet the demand.
This could be huge, given the obesity epidemic. Phytopharm says it's about to announce marketing plans that will have meal-replacement hoodia products on supermarket shelves by 2008.
MacWilliam says these products are a slightly different species from the hoodia Stahl tasted in the Kalahari Desert. "It's actually a lot more bitter than the plant that you tasted," says MacWilliam.
The advantage is this species of hoodia will grow a lot faster. But more bitter? How bad could it be? Stahl decided to find out. "Not good," she says.
Phytopharm says that when its product gets to market, it will be certified safe and effective. They also promise that it'll taste good.
BBC
Friday, 30 May, 2003, 09:56 GMT 10:56 UK
Sampling the Kalahari cactus diet
The San bushmen have eaten the plant for years
Correspondent's Tom Mangold travelled to Africa and sampled the appetite suppressing Hoodia, a plant which may make Kalahari bushmen millionaires.
By Tom Mangold
BBC Two's Correspondent
Imagine this: an organic pill that kills the appetite and attacks obesity.
It has no known side-effects, and contains a molecule that fools your brain into believing you are full.
Deep inside the African Kalahari desert, grows an ugly cactus called the Hoodia. It thrives in extremely high temperatures, and takes years to mature.
The San Bushmen of the Kalahari, one of the world's oldest and most primitive tribes, had been eating the Hoodia for thousands of years, to stave off hunger during long hunting trips.
When South African scientists were routinely testing it, they discovered the plant contained a previously unknown molecule, which has since been christened P 57.
The license was sold to a Cambridgeshire bio-pharmaceutical company, Phytopharm, who in turn sold the development and marketing rights to the giant Pfizer Corporation.
Fortune cactus
A molecule in the cactus makes you feel full
When I travelled to the Kalahari, I met families of the San bushmen.
It is a sad, impoverished and displaced tribe, still unaware they are sitting on top of a goldmine.
But if the Hoodia works, the 100,000 San strung along the edge of the Kalahari will become overnight millionaires on royalties negotiated by their South African lawyer Roger Chennells.
And they will need all the help they can to secure the money.
Currently, many bushmen smoke large quantities of marijuana, suffer from alcoholism, and have neither possessions nor any sense of the value of money.
The truth is no-one has fully grasped what the magic molecule means for their counterparts in the developed world.
Blood sugar
According to the British Heart Foundation 17% of men and 21% of women are obese, while 46% of men and 32% of women are overweight.
So the drug's marketing potential speaks for itself.
Phytopharm's Dr Richard Dixey explained how P.57 actually works:
"There is a part of your brain, the hypothalamus. Within that mid-brain there are nerve cells that sense glucose sugar.
"When you eat, blood sugar goes up because of the food, these cells start firing and now you are full.
"What the Hoodia seems to contain is a molecule that is about 10,000 times as active as glucose.
"It goes to the mid-brain and actually makes those nerve cells fire as if you were full. But you have not eaten. Nor do you want to."
Clinical trials
Dixey organised the first animal trials for Hoodia. Rats, a species that will eat literally anything, stopped eating completely.
When the first human clinical trial was conducted, a morbidly obese group of people were placed in a "phase 1 unit", a place as close to prison as it gets.
All the volunteers could do all day was read papers, watch television, and eat.
Half were given Hoodia, half placebo. Fifteen days later, the Hoodia group had reduced their calorie intake by 1000 a day.
It was a stunning success.
The cactus test
In order to see for ourselves, we drove into the desert, four hours north of Capetown in search of the cactus.
Once there, we found an unattractive plant which sprouts about 10 tentacles, and is the size of a long cucumber.
Each tentacle is covered in spikes which need to be carefully peeled.
The San will finally throw off thousands of years of oppression, poverty, social isolation and discrimination
Roger Chennells, lawyer
Inside is a slightly unpleasant-tasting, fleshy plant.
At about 1800hrs I ate about half a banana size - and later so did my cameraman.
Soon after, we began the four hour drive back to Capetown.
The plant is said to have a feel-good almost aphrodisiac quality, and I have to say, we felt good.
But more significantly, we did not even think about food. Our brains really were telling us we were full. It was a magnificent deception.
Dinner time came and went. We reached our hotel at about midnight and went to bed without food. And the next day, neither of us wanted nor ate breakfast.
I ate lunch but without appetite and very little pleasure. Partial then full appetite returned slowly after 24 hours.
The future
Mr Chennells is ecstatic:
"The San will finally throw off thousands of years of oppression, poverty, social isolation and discrimination.
"We will create trust funds with their Hoodia royalties and the children will join South Africa's middle classes in our lifetime.
"I envisage Hoodia cafes in London and New York, salads will be served and the Hoodia cut like cucumber on to the salad.
"It will need flavouring to counter its unpleasant taste, but if it has no side effects and no cumulative side-effects."
Unfortunately for the overweight, Hoodia will not be around for several years, the clinical trials still have several years to run.
Do not travel to the Kalahari to steal the cactus as it is hard to find and illegal to export.
And beware internet sites offering Hoodia "pills" from the US as we tested the leading brand and discovered it has no discernible Hoodia in it.
BBC Two's Correspondent was broadcast on Sunday, 1 June, 2003 at 1915 BST.
FAQ
Hoodia BalanceFrequently Asked Questions
Is the Hoodia Balance diet pill safe?
The hoodia gordonii plus pill contains natural ingredients and has no known
side effects and is safe to use.
How do I know this is the authentic Hoodia?
There are two certified documents required to prove the authenticity of pure
South African Hoodia. They are the C.I.T.E.S Certificate and the Analytical
Report.
What is the recommended dose?
As a dietary supplement, adults should take two capsules once a day with a
meal or as directed by your physician.
Is the packaging discreet?
Yes, all orders are shipped in a discreet package.
How can I order?
You may order by credit card or paypal. We accept payments online or through
our toll free call center.
What name will show up on my Credit Card statement?
Health Buy will appear on your billing statement.
How do you ship the Hoodia Balance?
We ship all USA orders via USPS first class mail with delivery confirmation.
We ship all international orders via fedex with tracking.
How it works
The Story of Hoodia Gordonii
Hoodia gordonii (pronounced HOO-dee-ah) is also called hoodia, xhooba, khoba,
Ghaap, hoodia cactus, and South African desert cactus. It's actually
not a true cactus at all, but rather is a succulent with sharp spines, that
resembles a cactus.
Hoodia is causing quite a stir for its ability to suppress appetite, thereby
promoting weight loss. The CBS television news program, 60 Minutes, and the
British network, BBC have already featured stories about Hoodia.
Hoodia Gordonii can only be found in the semi-arid deserts of South Africa,
Botswana, Namibia, and Angola. Hoodia grows in clumps of green upright stalks.
It takes about five years, or more, before Hoodia's pale purple flowers
appear. After that time the plant can be eaten. Although there are at least
40 known varieties of Hoodia, only the Gordonii species is believed to contain
the natural appetite suppressant.
Modern scientists only recently discovered Hoodia, however the San peoples,
or Bushmen, have been eating it for centuries. These indigenous people, who
live off the land, traditionally cut off part of the stem and eat it to stave
off hunger and thirst during their arduous hunting trips across the desert.
They also eat it for various medical issues, but, to date, no modern research
has been done on those uses.
In 1937, a Dutch anthropologist studying the San people noted that they used
Hoodia to suppress appetite. But it wasn't until 1963, when scientists
at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa's
national laboratory, began studying Hoodia. Initial results were promising
- lab animals lost weight after eating Hoodia Gordonii.
After 30 years of research, the South African scientists at CSIR isolated
the active ingredient in Hoodia, and obtained a patent on the molecule in
1995. It is a steroidal glycoside, which they named P57. The South African
government then licensed the patent to a British firm named Phytopharm.
Then, Phytopharm licensed the patent to American drug giant, Pfizer. The
intent was to use the molecule, P57, as a base, to mass-create an artificial
drug to meet the demands of millions of people. After three years of investigation,
Pfizer pulled out of the deal, saying it would be too expensive to ever bring
to market.
In December of 2004, Phytopharm licensed to Unilever, who has promised to
bring this man-made drug to market.
It remains to be seen if a weight loss drug utilizing P57 will ever be realized.
In the meantime, while you wait and wait for the artificial product, Hoodia
Gordonii Plus, a whole plant formula, is available right now. You can order
this very minute, and become friends again with your reflection in a full-length
mirror.
Today
Can a cactus plant be a magic bullet for dieters?
Prickly bush in the Kalahari Desert could be key to weight-loss success
Today show
Updated: 8:57 a.m. PT Oct 24, 2005
Janet Shamlian
Correspondent
Could a plant from South Africa be the weight-loss secret that could help millions of overweight Americans slim down? NBC News correspondent Janet Shamlian talks about the possible magic pill we've all been waiting for.
It's the look everyone wants — a body to diet for. They're on the beaches, in magazines and all over Hollywood. How far will we go to get one? How about thousands of miles and deep into a distant culture? South Africa’s Kalahari Desert is home to what could be the answer to an appetite.
It's a cactus called hoodia. “You strip off the skin, you strip off the spines, and then you consume it,” says weight loss expert Madelyn Fernstrom.
Eat it and you won't want to eat anything else — a secret bushmen have known for ages and a mystery to the West no more.
FREE VIDEO
• What's the newest weight loss potion?
Oct. 24, 2005: NBC's Janice Shamlian reports on hoodia — a cactus-like plant only found in South Africa that may hold a magic weight loss ingredient.
Today show
“Hoodia's actually one of our top selling diet products,” says Anthony Paulmeno of General Nutrition Center.
Nutrition stores are packed with products. But this isn't the fresh plant said to work wonders. It's the dried, powdered and — some say — less effective version.
One of the issues for dieters is that there are so many products with the label hoodia on them, it's hard to know the difference between them, or if they work at all.
“Today” show staffer Jayme Anker is giving it a shot and hoping it suppresses her appetite.
“I am obsessed with it,” says Anker.
Having endured weight loss camp as a child, at 26 she's still waging the war and hoping hoodia will be the weapon that works. “What’s the worst that's going to happen to me?” she says.
It’s an important question. Store brands are not inspected or regulated, and their exact contents are unknown.
Texan Walter Parks bought his bottle on the Internet. “I would say yes, that it is the magic bullet plant,” Parks say. But there are no human studies to prove that.
Fernstrom says, “It's important to say this does need more [research].”
But dieters are hopeful a hunger-busting plant will deliver one of those glorious, how-did-they-get-it bodies that are seemingly everywhere — except in the mirror.
Hoodia Balance
of real hoodia gordonii available from South Africa, the opportunity for counterfeit, fake and diluted hoodia products is running rampant. There are two certified documents required to prove the authenticity of pure South African Hoodia which we are proud to display. They are the C.I.T.E.S Certificate and the Analytical Report.
If you missed the 60 Minutes program, the program described Hoodia as a small, succulent plant that grows only in the remote region of the South African Kalahari Desert. There, the indigenous San Bushmen have eaten the plan for centuries, to stave off hunger during their long and arduous hunting trips. 
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The San will finally throw off thousands of years of oppression, poverty, social isolation and discrimination
