As you probably know if you’re reading this article, monk fruit is a popular sweetener.
The story goes that during the Tang Dynasty of 618-907AD, there existed an elite group of monks called the Luo Han, or Arhats in Indian. They regularly pilgrimaged to the Guilin mountains of southern China to seek enlightenment. During their wanders, where they pondered things that no mortal man can comprehend, they stumbled across the small bitter monk fruit. Slowly, they converted it into healing tonics, and began agricultural cultivation around 1200AD, although others claim thousands of years ago.
There, the monks remained isolated, cut off from the rest of China, spending centuries exploring the riches of this secret fruit in their misty mountain temples. The other origin story is that the monk fruit gained its name due to resembling the round belly of Buddha himself.
The logbooks then end until 1938, when Western professors G.W. Groff and Hoh Hin Cheung wrote a report calling the juice incredibly sweet, and said that Chinese people commonly used monk fruit for colds and congestion, and various “hot” diseases according to traditional teachings. Studies started on its unusual sweetness in 1975, and by the 1980s, the Japanese had extracted the first Luohanguo sweetener. Unfortunately, it was very bitter, but Procter and Gamble patented a special process to emphasise the sweet compounds in 1995.
As fascinating as the monk backstory is, it has to be said that sweetener companies are exploiting this image to convey an atmosphere of mystique and wiseness. Monks are the most thoughtful and considered people on earth – logic follows that choosing monk fruit is the most thoughtful and considered decision on earth.
Even the name monk fruit sounds promising; let’s face it, it’s more enticing than “hexane-extracted sugar acid”.
But agave nectar also has a nice name, and a storied history of Aztec warriors marching around 1500AD South America to boot. Meanwhile, it has a disastrous 85:15 ratio of fructose to glucose, a sure-fire recipe for acne via a clogged liver. Could monk fruit be similarly deceptive?
The short answer is that I don’t recommend it for acne patients, or anyone.
The monk fruit fact file
It’s a small orange-sized fruit, with a brittle shell coated with tiny hairs. It’s a member of the same gourd family as cucumbers, melons and watermelon.
It’s commonly cultivated in small family orchards, but finding one in the wild is like the holy grail, just caught out of the corner of your eye, before turning to stare at it in disbelief.
As as sweetener, monk fruit is like stevia. It has a much coveted substance in nature: compounds which stimulate the sweet receptors on your tongue without actually being sugar. In stevia, it’s the steviosides (stevioside A and rebaudiosides), while in monk fruit, the 66 mogrosides deliver the sweetening goodness. Mogroside V is the most powerful, but mogroside IV and mogroside VI are also very sweet, while mogroside III and IIE have a bitter taste, but decrease as the fruit ripens. Mogrosides form about 1% of the fleshy part of the raw fruit.
The overall mogroside mixture tastes 250 times sweetener than sugar, while mogroside V and IV are nearly 400 times sweeter. The FDA granted it “generally recognised as safe” (GRAS) status in 2010, while the European Union is currently deliberating, but expected to approve it by early 2021. The mogroside V can vary from 7% to 95%, giving different brands subtly different tastes.
The glorious concept is that all your favourite sweet treats are back on the menu, and the punishing days of restriction are now a distant memory.
Sounds too good to be true? Well, it is, but there’s some better news at the end of this article.
Obviously, sugar is a globetrotting international acne villain; it spikes inflammatory chemicals by 100%, while increasing AGE free radicals. Worse, it’s a stealthy, slippery player, turning invisible by hiding in unexpected places like breaded fish and meat sauce. Switch all your sweet recipes to monk fruit and you will avoid these dangers – that’s one undeniable benefit.
The monk fruit benefits
An obscure, bitter fruit from an obscure misty, valley wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t have some astonishing health benefits (as dieting adverts everywhere tell us).
Monk fruit has some fantastic powers which normally, we’d get very excited about for acne.
Antioxidants – enough studies that the power is basically proven. Mogroside V and 11-oxo-mogroside V inhibited several different free radicals types, particularly the latter, which had a “remarkable inhibitory effect” (study). Feeding mogrosides to diabetic mice increased two self-manufactured antioxidants which are important for acne: glutathione and superoxide dismutase (study). This study compared diabetic mice with and without mogrosides. Free radicals rose, oxidative stress fell, and mogroside V, the sweetener in chief, “possessed strong oxygen free radical scavenging activities“.
Insulin – a very interesting gimmick. By definition, monk fruit is supposed to be superior to sugar for insulin and blood sugar, but mogrosides have a separate ability to increase AMKP, or adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase. This gene decreases two enzymes, called glucose phosphatase and phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase genes. The first splits glucose 6-phosphate into glucose and releases it into the bloodstream, while the second converts amino acids (proteins) into glucose. Inhibiting them leads to a mellower blood sugar spike. We’re always searching for unique glucose-controlling powers (like in sweet potatoes and cinnamon), and now we have another.
Inflammation – there’s nothing the monk fruit dislikes more than immune system chemicals giving innocent people acne, as in this study, mogrosides reduced the pro-inflammatory COX-2, prostaglandins, and interleukin-6 (IL-6). The subject was a swollen mice ear, a decent parallel to a red, swollen pimple. That study was only topical, but feeding mogrosides to diabetic mice improved “immune dysfunction”, and lowered the activity of pro-inflammatory cytokines (study). The only flaw was that the doses were unrealistically high.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Mogroside V, the main sweetening compound, breaks down into 65 different metabolites in the body, which was the most ever identified for a compound according to this study. 14 ended up in plasma, 34 in the heart, and 33 in the liver.
Back in China, the monk fruit is a popular longevity aid. The Guilin region where it grows supposedly has a freakishly high proportion of people living to age 100. It was added to the Chinese pharmacopeia back in 1977, strongly recommended for “moistening the lungs”, “restoring the voice”, “clearing heat” and “intestinal dryness”.
The monk fruit problem
Ultimately though, all those antioxidants and special bonuses don’t matter. Why? Because all zero calorie sweeteners are inherently unknown quantities.
There isn’t a single negative study on monk fruit. In 2014, there was a big fuss after a study detected toxic metabolites from artificial sweeteners like aspartame, after gut bacteria metabolised them. Sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame and acesulfame potassium-k behaved similarly. Mogrosides are also metabolised by the gut, but this time they’re beneficial; this study found that mogroside metabolites created by gut bacteria improved schizophrenia and the damage to neurons associated with it. Artificial and natural sugar mimickers are very different.
No, the real problem is identical to stevia: our bodies are programmed to believe that sweet tastes equal sugar.
In nature, zero calorie sweeteners are in very short supply, so we haven’t adapted to them. Honey, berries, bananas high in a tree – all naturally occurring sweet foods rely on sugar. There are no jars of Healthy Planet’s Pure Monk Fruit Powder waiting to be mined out of the Earth.
Therefore, thanks to evolution, our bodies expect all sweet tastes to be the prelude to a flood of bloodstream glucose. In preparation, it releases insulin, to convert that glucose into glycogen and store it away for future exercise, But with zero calorie sweeteners such as stevia, that glucose flood never arrives, so instead, insulin drops your blood sugar down to the hard floor of hypoglycaemia. You’ll probably get dizzy and have to lie down, but for acne, the problem is that cortisol then increases, in its natural duty of pulling extra glucose from energy stores. It has to restore the equilibrium at all costs.
Unfortunately, cortisol is also the main stress hormone. Its hobbies include delaying acne nutrient absorption (like zinc), with a spot of collagen destruction in the evening.
Stevia, the other natural sweetener to be approved by the FDA, is proven to increase cortisol. Monk fruit isn’t, as no studies exist, but the processes are identical, artificial or natural. It’s all about confusing your tongue’s sweet receptors.
Your official monk fruit strategy
That’s why I recommended against stevia usage in the article from 2015, and that’s why today, I don’t recommend monk fruit.
It’s exactly the same – occasional usage will be perfectly safe, but daily is just too risky. Insulin and blood sugar are just too vital for acne. You don’t want to poke this intricately balanced machine and trigger an unfortunate chain reaction.
Plus, monk fruit does have great benefits, but none are truly exceptional. They can all be found in beloved grocery store staples:
Antioxidants – pomegranate, berries, dark chocolate, coffee.
Lowering insulin and blood sugar – blocking AMKP is the one tempting power, the one rare power, but ginger enhances the GLUT-4 enzyme which removes glucose from the bloodstream. 1 gram of cinnamon can lower blood sugar by 20%. You have plenty of less risky options.
Anti-inflammation – blueberries, broccoli and ginger will take care of it.
Stevia also had another danger: that your taste buds start to disassociate the sweet taste from actual sugar, because it realises that none ever arrives.
Therefore, when you do eat sugar, even a healthy and nutritious apple, your insulin won’t increase any more, and your blood sugar will surge far higher. The next consequence? Your clogged pores will surge far higher, as dead skin cell turnover increases.
But this doesn’t seem to happen with monk fruit. When rats ate it for 13 weeks, their blood sugar spiked far less after each carbohydrate-heavy meal.
That’s 1/2 then, but the cortisol danger is enough to be cautious. Zero calorie sweeteners are new territory for humans; they’re not to be treated lightly.
The good news is that those long centuries of mystical research by the monks in their temples won’t necessarily go down the drain. The whole fruit will act very differently to hyperconcentrated mogrosides – the benefits might still be acquirable. If your plane ever crashes in the Guilin mountains while flying to India, à la Indiana Jones, don’t hesitate to try the fruits you stumble across.
Luckily, mogrosides have no normal dangers. They were found here to be less toxic than table salt or citric acid.
Normal amounts of sugar are safe anyway!
This is a fact that all acne patients need to know. When you hear sugar justifiably demonised in the media, it starts to feel like even having a jar in your cupboard is a cursed decision.
But eating 50 grams of sugar daily is harmless for acne, unless you’ve been eating 200 grams of sugar daily for years (probably without realising) and are following a 2 month correction course.
In studies, sugar’s acne dangers like increased inflammation and AGE free radical formation don’t kick in until a certain threshold is reached. Likewise for diabetes and heart disease (sugar is an underestimated clogged artery villain). Our bodies are well adapted to normal amounts of sugar. Prehistoric Europeans would have eaten apples and berries, while prehistoric Asians enjoyed the delights of orange and peach trees.
As an acne sufferer, you can enjoy yogurt, dark chocolate, slightly sweetened coffee, fruit, or even a bit of milk chocolate with no worries. The point is to always be in control of your sugar intake, because hidden sources are everywhere.
Sugar might be a national villain in the 21st century, but fundamentally, it’s one of our natural energy sources. The problem is newfangled forms like high fructose corn syrup and agave nectar, both with far too much fructose, and a soup of chemical solvents to boot.
Make no mistake – you almost certainly need to reduce sugar. We’re not letting it of the hook, but the big obsession with stevia, monk fruit and erythritol is partly based off paranoia about even a single granule.
Your product survival guide
If you do choose monk fruit, then there’s one hurdle to jump through – a huge amount of products contain other sweeteners as fillers.
The monk fruit only grows naturally on steep, forested mountain slopes in the Southern Chinese region of Guangxi. It requires a goldilocks zone of warm temperatures, yet thick swirling mists in the trees, to protect the fruit from sunlight. Most of the world’s farms remain in this magical place today. The Chinese regions of Guizhou and Hunan have a few small farms as well. The monk fruit deteriorates incredibly quickly, and that’s why you’ll never find whole ones sold like pomegranates or apples.
Consequently, monk fruit powder is very expensive compared to stevia, which has vastly more farms. To save money, many brands actually have erythritol as the primary ingredient, an artificial sweetener which is reasonably safe, but lacking in health benefits, and almost certainly prone to causing the exact same sugar decoupling and cortisol increase.
Witness the ingredients list of Nectresse, a heavily advertised “monk fruit” brand launched in 2012: erythritol, sugar, monk fruit extract, and molasses.
The green, fruity bottle design claimed to be “all natural”, until one day, they woke up in court being sued for false advertisement, being accused that the erythritol was chemically extracted from corn starch. Johnson and Johnson (the manufacturer) discontinued the product, citing disappointing sales, but the story didn’t end there: two popular brands on amazon right now read “erythritol, monk fruit” on the black and white ingredient label, while adorned with delicious looking pictures of monk fruits. In fact, you can barely visit a brand’s website without seeing a smiling Buddhist monk watching you from a temple.
The financial departments of food companies have calculated that a 40% purity is best for mogrosides – the best balance between sweetness and sky high cost. The other choice was 60%.
Therefore, always check the ingredients list! Many products marketed for health reasons have some deception involved in the weaker brands. The perfect example is agave nectar, where native Mexicans have supposedly harvested the sweet, healing sap for 5000 years. In reality, the sap is called miel de agave and squeezed from the stem, and the current fructose-filled monstrosity is extracted from the starchy bulbous root using volcanic-level heat.
If you’re going to use monk fruit, then buy a brand with only one ingredient: monk fruit.
Conclusion
We’ve said it all before, and we’ll say it all again – raw honey is the undisputed victor of natural sweeteners.
Forget stevia, forget monk fruit and their gimmicks. Honey sticks to the basics and sticks to them with aplomb, throwing in a soup of healthy enzymes and mysterious bee compounds.
It’s just as complicated a substance as monk fruit. Just stare into the golden richness of honey and you are staring into nutritional mysteries which we are centuries away from fully solving. That’s before you consider the countless varieties from different plant species.
Raw honey isn’t perfect either. Remember that it’s still sugar. Truthfully, there is no perfect sweetener, but raw honey is the best for acne. Chiefly, its benefits are spiking blood sugar much less, coming with bonus antioxidants, and having a decent fructose to glucose ratio.
Generally, you need to resist the pull of zero calorie sweeteners. They’re a serious object of temptation. It seems amazing when you first discover them, like you’ve uncovered an amazing secret, like a new pyramid hidden in the sand. It’s all the sugar flavour with none of the sugar consequences, but yes – it is too good to be true.
The final word: even if it is imbibed with the wisdom of 1000 Buddhist monks, I don’t recommend monk fruit as a sweetener.
Thanks for reading!