unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [78]
The BBC story also warns us that the stuff we’ve been seeing advertised may be just another weight-loss scam. The rights to develop a diet drug from Hoodia are owned by a British company named Phytopharm, and clinical trials still have several years to run. The reporter adds: “And beware Internet sites offering Hoodia ‘pills’ from the U.S., as we tested the leading brand and discovered it has no discernible Hoodia in it.” Oddly, several Hoodia hucksters actually post a link to this BBC story on their websites, probably figuring that few will actually read it and most will just assume it’s an endorsement.
To be fair to CBS, Stahl’s full report also warned against the claims of Internet marketers of Hoodia products. It mentioned that the wild cactus is so rare that Phytopharm has established a plantation in an attempt to grow it in the huge quantities that would be required to meet demand should tests prove that the product is safe and effective. But the Internet Hoodia merchants who link to the CBS report probably figure you won’t notice that part. They just post a link to the story, with introductions such as “Leslie [sic] Stahl…Hoodia works!!”
The BBC and CBS news stories—read in full—provide pretty strong warnings about the stuff being sold on the Web, but they are still secondhand sources. We can do better. On the Phytopharm website, we read, “The necessary clinical trials and other studies to ensure the safety of the [Hoodia] extract will take a few years before a product will be available.” The site says that the company is just starting those trials, in collaboration with its partner Unilever. That tells us that this diet drug is far from ready for market.
At Phytopharm’s site we also look for the “clinical study” conducted by the company in 2001 and mentioned in news reports and on many of the Hoodia websites. There is no report published in a medical journal—just a news release. It says the company ran a test of nineteen overweight men, giving half of them their patented “P57” Hoodia extract for fifteen days, while the other half got a placebo. The group getting P57 were said to have “a statistically significant decrease in daily calorie intake,” a reduction of as much as 1,000 calories per day. We also learn from reading the company’s press releases that before it hooked up with Unilever it had a deal with Pfizer to develop a commercial product from P57, but Pfizer backed out of the deal in 2003. Why would a major company drop a miracle weight-loss drug if it really had promise?
We’ve scouted up all this information for free, in a few minutes. For a small fee, you could have read on the Consumer Reports website an article briefly summarizing some of what we’ve said here, stating that there’s “very scanty” evidence that Hoodia works, and concluding that “we do not recommend taking these supplements.” (For $26 a year, we consider a subscription to Consumer Reports magazine and the website to be a bargain.)
When we weigh this evidence, we find that there’s good reason to ignore the Hoodia hype, at least for now. Our TV correspondents, Stahl and Mangold, both gave us impressive anecdotal accounts of eating fresh cactus, but we won’t find any of that at the supermarket. A British company, reputable enough to have partnered first with Pfizer and currently with Unilever, says we won’t be able to buy their product for years. What’s being offered for sale in the United States is claimed to be the cactus in powdered form, but we have no reliable way of knowing whether it’s really Hoodia or just sawdust, or—more important—whether Hoodia powder works like fresh Hoodia. The testimonials we see on sellers’ websites should be disregarded: we don’t know who these people are, whether they really lost weight, or whether, if they did lose weight, the loss resulted from the pills. Furthermore, we have little idea of what harm these products might cause. Phytopharm’s test group included only nineteen males. What if women took it? What if one person in every thousand experiences a life-threatening reaction? What happens