The Death of Hoodia Gordonii and the Birth of Caralluma Fimbriata

TORONTO, June 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- That's a shocking headline considering hoodia gordonii has been the hottest product to hit the global weight loss market since 2003. The South African hoodia market has been beset by one problem after another and it's finally taking its toll on the entire industry.

Millennium Health Supplements (Canada) Inc., the largest exporter of hoodia gordonii in the world, reports that the harvesting of wild hoodia has come to an end and the only hoodia gordonii coming onto the market currently is cultivated, or farmed. While many felt that cultivated hoodia could take the place of wild harvested hoodia, testers are finding out now that cultivated hoodia gordonii has a much reduced level of active ingredient in it, leaving it pretty much inert or useless.

Active levels of steroidal glycosides are directly related to the age of the plant. Farmers in South Africa are harvesting cultivated hoodia crops in the first 2 - 3 years to fill the supply gap with the wild harvesting of hoodia now shut down. The problem is that the plants have little or no active levels in them and they won't have until they reach maturity at about 5 - 6 years minimum. Wild harvested hoodia gordonii has an active level of steroidal glycosides at 0.34 - 0.35%. Cultivated hoodia now coming onto the market has an active level of about 0.1% or less.

All of the import/export problems, rigid controls instituted by CITES and manipulated by the South African agencies and tonnes upon tonnes of adulterated or inferior cultivated crops coming onto the market have also hurt the industry.

Jen Cully, President of Millennium Health states that, "We believe that hoodia gordonii has hit it's apex in the industry until cultivated crops can be left in the ground long enough to mature and that is going to take a few more years before we start to see hoodia gordonii with any acceptable levels of active in it. In the meantime, other products are set to take over the industry leaving hoodia to find a lesser place in the market perhaps as an additive," Cully says.

"Millennium Health still has hoodia gordonii in stock that has high active levels of 0.35% and we will continue to supply until that stock is gone, which won't take long," says Cully. "We are now in the process of changing over to the newest all-natural appetite suppressing product, Caralluma Fimbriata, that is by far superior to hoodia gordonii," she claims.

"We started conducting in-house testing with Caralluma Fimbriata pure powder, 5:1 and 10:1 extract a few months ago. The results are shocking and we are ecstatic to find that Caralluma is not only a superior product in comparison, but that there have been efficacy and double blind studies conducted in the United States and India that prove Caralluma is undoubtedly more effective and safer than other appetite suppressing products. Hoodia gordonii has no research behind it and we are too many years away from seeing any."

Cully says, "Our results showed that Caralluma Fimbriata works faster and better than hoodia gordonii. We used 2 different groups in our testing, one group that hoodia worked well on and one group that hoodia only worked on marginally or not at all. With the participants that hoodia worked on, caralluma worked faster. On participants that hoodia never did work on, Caralluma worked on all of them with both groups reporting that they felt Caralluma was much stronger. Both of those groups are losing weight at the same pace as the entire group on average of 4 - 6 lbs per week."

"The benefits of using Caralluma over hoodia are many," says Cully, "and our customers are already in the process of changing over to Caralluma. Millennium has been bombarded with requests for samples, quotations and some orders over the last few weeks. There are no export issues as Caralluma Fimbriata has been around for a very long time and has been cultivated for many years so we don't have any supply issues either. The cost of Caralluma is well below that of hoodia, which is greatly inflated because of supply and quality issues. And of course the most important issue are the studies and research behind Caralluma Fimbriata that are none-existent with hoodia."