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60 Minutes television wanted to put hoodia to the test; and therefore the crew journeyed to Africa, given the fact that 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 who was a local aboriginal San, to help find the succulent plant. His name was Toppies Kruiper.

Kruiper led the 60 Minutes crews out into a hoodia-growing area of the Kalahari. When Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia, Kruiper (through the interpreter) replied, "I really like to eat them when the new rains have come. Then they're really quite delicious."

When the crew and journalists located a plant, Kruiper sliced off a stalk looking like some kind of small cucumber. He took off the sharp spines. Leslie Stahl, the brave one, ate it. She described the taste as "a little cucumbery in texture, but not bad."

Stahl suffered no "side effects"; that is, no funny taste in her mouth, no queasy stomach, no heart palpitations, no nuthin'. And, she felt no hunger throughout the day, not even at the times of her usual eating hours. She also felt no need or desire to drink anything throughout the day in the desert. "I'd have to say it did work," said Stahl.

Hoodia might be new to modern Western civilization, but the San, indigenous to southern Africa, have been chewing the succulent stems and leaves for possibly more than 100,000 years. They know what's good and what's not in their region of the planet. Some of them still live in old traditional huts, and still cook "Bush food" gathered from the desert the old-fashioned way.

The first Western scientific investigation of the plant was conducted at South Africa's national laboratory. Because the San 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, the head of an English pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm that is now researching and developing weight-loss products based on hoodia. Hoodia's potential application as an appetite suppressant was not immediately obvious, however. "It took them a long time. In fact, the original research was done in the mid 1960s," says Dixey.

60 Minutes visited one of Phytopharm's hoodia plantations in South Africa, one of the many that the company will need if it's to meet the expected demand for its product. Plantation agronomist Simon MacWilliam is charged with growing a billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a couple of years. He acknowledges that beginning 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." However, "We're very confident of [growing enough to meet demand]," he says. "We have 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 due to the fact of civilization's obesity epidemic. Phytopharm's current objective is to get meal-replacement hoodia products on supermarket shelves by 2008.