How to distinguish true and false monk fruit?

Monk fruit is a plant of the Cucurbitaceae family. Its fruit is often used as a medicine in traditional Chinese medicine. Monk fruit is sweet but cold in nature. It is generally used to clear away heat and relieve cough. It can also effectively treat constipation. Because of its sweet taste and low calories, it is often a sugar substitute for diabetic patients. Monk fruit is easy to identify in appearance, but friends often report that they have bought fake monk fruit. So how should we distinguish between real and fake monk fruit? Let’s find out together below.

(1) The powder of this product is brown. The stone cells in the pericarp are mostly in groups, yellow, square or oval, 7 to 38 μm in diameter, with thick walls and obvious pores. The stone cells of the seed coat are rectangular or irregular in shape, with thin walls and pits. The fibers are long and fusiform, with a diameter of 16 to 42 μm, a large cell cavity, and obvious wall pores. Visible ladder pattern and threaded conduit. The thin-walled cells are irregular in shape and have pits.

(2) Take 2 g of the powder of this product, add 20 ml of dilute ethanol, heat and reflux for 30 minutes, filter, evaporate the filtrate to about 5 ml, extract twice with n-butanol (10 ml, 5 ml), combine the n-butanol solutions, evaporate to dryness, add 0.5 ml of methanol to dissolve the residue, and use it as the test solution. Take another 2 g of Momordica grosvenori as a reference medicinal material and prepare a reference medicinal material solution in the same manner. According to the thin layer chromatography method (Appendix Ⅵ B), 10 μl of each of the above two solutions were taken and spotted on the same silica gel G thin layer plate with sodium carboxymethyl cellulose as the adhesive, and chloroform-methanol-water (60:10:1) was used as the developing agent. After development, the plate was taken out, dried, sprayed with 10% ethanolic sulfuric acid solution, and heated until the spots were clearly colored. In the chromatogram of the test sample, spots of the same color appear at the corresponding positions in the chromatogram of the control medicinal material.

The above is how to distinguish real and fake monk fruit. I hope that after learning the relevant content, you will be able to correctly identify it when purchasing. Here I would like to introduce to you the simplest way to use monk fruit. You can slice the monk fruit and boil it in water before drinking it. It is very effective for hoarseness. You can also make tea with the finished monk fruit, which can moisten the lungs and relieve throat.