Can rock sugar be added to Chinese medicine?

Traditional Chinese medicine is quite bitter in taste, and people nowadays are afraid of bitter Chinese medicine. Especially for teenagers, using Chinese medicine after being sick is a good treatment for the body, but the bitter medicine is difficult for teenagers to accept. So everyone started thinking of ways to make Chinese medicine taste better. One way is to put rock sugar in traditional Chinese medicine to make the taste of the medicine more acceptable to everyone. But can rock sugar be added to Chinese medicine?

1. Ingredients of Chinese medicine

As long as rock sugar does not react chemically with the ingredients of the Chinese medicine or does not affect the efficacy of the medicine, it can be added, and rock sugar itself can be used as medicine. Among these Chinese medicines, honeysuckle and wild chrysanthemum can clear away heat and detoxify, reduce fire, platycodon can relieve cough and reduce phlegm, and oroxylum can relieve sore throat and moisten the lungs; soothe the liver and harmonize the stomach; heal sores and promote tissue regeneration; licorice can nourish the spleen and replenish qi, nourish cough and moisten the lungs, relieve urgency and detoxify, and harmonize all medicines.

2. The role of traditional Chinese medicine

Rock sugar is sweet and mild in nature, and enters the lung and spleen meridians. It has the effects of tonifying the middle and replenishing qi, harmonizing the stomach and moistening the lungs. It nourishes yin and produces body fluid, moistens the lungs and relieves cough. It has a good auxiliary therapeutic effect on dry cough, dry cough without sputum, and sputum with blood. Taking it together with the prescription you mentioned can play a synergistic therapeutic role, so not only does it have no harm, it also has the effect of auxiliary treatment, you can put it!

3. The proportion of Chinese medicine and rock sugar

Simply put, the amount of sugar added is related to the final seasoning effect. Adding too little or too much is not appropriate.

There is a theory that the distribution of sweet and bitter taste buds on the tongue is uneven, with sweetness in front and bitterness in the back. As a result, Chinese herbal medicine with added sugar will taste sweet first and bitter later because of the different order in which it contacts the parts of the tongue.

Another theory is that even though sugar is added, the bitter component does not disappear, but the stimulation signal of the taste center is disrupted. Humans have different sensitivities and sensing thresholds for sweetness and bitterness. After the sensors on the tongue receive both sweet and bitter signals at the same time, the signals ultimately transmitted to the taste center are also relatively uncertain. For sweetness and bitterness of the same intensity, it is very likely that the taste center will receive two nerve impulses and stimulations one after the other, ultimately forming the taste.

4. Theory of adding rock sugar to traditional Chinese medicine

There is also a theory that the bitterness of some Chinese herbs can be masked or interfered with by sweetness, while the bitterness of others cannot. For example, neotame (a sweetener with the chemical name N-[N-(3,3-dimethylbutyl)-L-α-aspartyl]-L-phenylalanine 1-methyl ester), which is 10,000 times sweeter than sucrose, can effectively mask the bitterness of Scutellaria baicalensis and Phellodendron amurense (about 70%), but its effect on masking the bitterness of Coptis chinensis and Gentiana scabra is less effective (about 50%), and even worse on masking the bitterness of Andrographis paniculata (about 30%). In other words, adding sugar to cover up the bitter taste of traditional Chinese medicine is not equally effective for everyone. It may work for some traditional Chinese medicines, but may not be satisfactory for others.