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Low toxicity☠️ To avoid

🌵 Hoodia

Hoodia gordonii · Apocynaceae

🏜️ Desert
🧠 To remember it“Hoodia: the Kalahari legend flopped in the lab” – a good example of a survival myth not to be confused with a miracle solution.
Hoodia — Hoodia gordonii

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

A succulent plant resembling a cactus (though botanically unrelated), forming upright, spiny, fleshy stems with an angular cross-section, bearing curious wheel-shaped fleshy flowers that are often foul-smelling to attract pollinating flies.

  1. succulent spiny stems with angular ribs, resembling a cactus
  2. fleshy wheel-shaped flowers, often brownish and foul-smelling
  3. no visible leaves
Sizeup to 2 m for the largest species
Floweringsummer, depending on rainfall
Habitatarid regions of Southern Africa (Namibia, South Africa, southern Angola), Namib Desert and Orange River valley

🍽️ Eating it

Partsstem, traditional occasional use only
Seasonall year round
Tastebitter

Preparation : the San of the Kalahari Desert traditionally chewed a piece of stem to suppress hunger and thirst during long hunts; it is not a food but a traditional occasional appetite suppressant

💊 Healing with it

traditionally used by the San as an appetite and thirst suppressant during multi-day hunting trips in the Kalahari

Level of evidence : traditional use — Wikipedia - Hoodia; documented abandonment of the industrial project

⚠️ despite a global commercial craze in the 2000s (slimming supplements), no high-quality clinical studies have confirmed an appetite-suppressant effect in humans; a major food company invested nearly £20 million in its research before abandoning the project, deeming the product insufficiently safe and effective; protected species (CITES Appendix II), its wild harvesting is strictly regulated

Sources (1)

No entry replaces a certain identification in the field, or medical advice. When in doubt: don't eat it. If ingestion is suspected: poison control or 112/911.