Are There Any Harmful Hoodia Side Effects?

The natural herb hoodia has been shown to suppress the appetite and can help people shed unwanted pounds more easily. However, are there any side effects to this herbal supplement? Can taking hoodia as part of a fitness program actually affect your health in a negative way? Some say yes. However, there aren't enough studies to prove whether or not hoodia causes these side effects. Many people take hoodia to help them loose weight and they don't complain of any side effects. As a matter of fact, many people market hoodia as the natural herbal supplement without side effects? So, who is right?

Rejected By Drug Companies

Pfizer, a pharmaceutical giant, bought the rights to hoodia and began trying to synthesize the drug back in 1996. In 2002, they released the rights to the drug stating that they experienced trouble synthesizing the drug. Some took this as a sign that hoodia side effects were the real reason for the release of the supplement's rights. This may be more fact than fiction. Jasjit Bindra PhD, a former researcher for hoodia at Pfizer, said that hoodia side effects include a disruption of the liver's natural functions, which could lead to complications with other medications the person is taking or worse.

Another hoodia side effect is seen in diabetics. Hoodia makes you feel full and it makes you feel as if your blood sugar is regulated. This can be dangerous for diabetics, whose blood sugar could unknowingly plummet while taking hoodia and nobody would ever know until it was too late.

And one more common hoodia side effect reported is dehydration. Hoodia, it turns out, not only makes you feel full but it also makes you feel as if you're not thirsty. If you are dehydrated, this could be very dangerous as thirst is your body's natural way of telling you that you need to drink something fast.

Used For Thousands Of Years

Still, despite reports of hoodia side effects, people have and will continue to use hoodia to assist them in their weight loss struggles. After all, they say, hoodia has been used for thousands of years by natives of South Africa and they've never reported any hoodia side effects. That may be true, hoodia opponents say, but those natives weren't exposed to the medications and other chemicals we now regularly put into our bodies and more studies need to be done to determine what the hoodia side effects are, if there are indeed any at all.