What is a Mogroside?

Most people have yet to hear much about mogrosides, but that has been changing in the last few years with the increased knowledge and usage of monk fruit as a sweetener.

A mogroside is a molecule of the family of triterpene glycosides. Some mogrosides are used in food as noncaloric nonsugar sweeteners. One of these, Mogroside V, is extracted from the monk fruit plant, Siraitia grosvenorii, (or luo han guo), and has 250 times the sweetening strength of sucrose.

We will definitely need to cover a lot of terminology and history to appropriately explain these interesting and delicious extracts.

What Exactly is a Mogroside?

Unless you have a degree or other advanced training in chemistry or biology, most of us have never before seen or heard of a mogroside.

A mogroside is a compound that belongs to the class of Cucurbitane.

Cucurbitane is a biochemical class of compounds with the same chemical backbone of 30 carbons and 54 hydrogens arranged in a specific ring form.

There are a whole array of cucurbitane based molecules. We will be focusing only on mogrosides at this time.

An interesting item on the name cucurbitane is that it is derived from cucurbit, which is the name for plants of the gourd family (Cucurbitaceae) (melon, pumpkins, cucumber, squash).

An interesting item on mogrosides is that glucose sugar molecules are attached to it. A mogroside is named by the number of molecules of glucose that are attached using Roman numbers. So, Mogroside V has 5 molecules of glucose attached.

Here is the structure of cucurbitane:

Here is the structure of Mogroside V:

Neat, right? You can see the cucurbitane backbone right in the center of Mogroside V:

Here is a ring structure of glucose:

Do you see that there are 5 of these glucose hexagon rings hanging off the cucurbitane backbone? 2 on the left and 3 on the right. It is very cool!

Got it? This is by far enough biochemistry for… really almost everyone. But it is important to get the essentials to see how this works.

For you deep chemistry types: I know what you are thinking, but we will not be diving into 3D stereochemistry, open-chain form vs cyclic forms of glucose, biosynthetic pathways, or squalene formation. (I had a lot of this in my master’s and doctoral programs). Not that those details are unimportant, but if you want to look up some information in this are, now you have the building blocks, concepts, and molecule names.

What happens to Mogrosides in the body?

There has been a significant amount of research into how mogrosides are absorbed; most of these are done in animal studies which parallel human metabolic chemical processes.

In the lower digestive tract, mogrosides are metabolized by the digestive enzymes and bacterial flora (Murata, et al). This removes the glucose units, and the biometabolite left is called mogrol.

The term for a molecule left after the glucose units (glycosyl groups) are removed and replaced by a hydrogen atom is called an “aglycone”. So, mogrol is the aglycone biometabolite of mogrosides.

Here is the structure of Mogrol:

Very little of the mogrosides in their original form are absorbed into the bloodstream from the large intestine and are excreted in the feces. Mogrol is absorbed to an extent into the bloodstream (Murata, et al).

What is a Monk Fruit?

Monk Fruit (=luo han guo, lo han kuo, and arhat fruit) is a fruit in the gourd family (cucurbitaceae). The genus and species is Siraitia grosvenorii. Other members of this family include pumpkins, squash, watermelon, loofah, and over 900 other species.

Monk fruit is native to and grown in southern China and Thailand. It has a history of being used is some traditional remedies. Monk Fruit grows on a vine, and produces a round green fruit. Growth of monk fruit is reported to be somewhat complex, so most monk fruit is cultivated rather than extracted from the wild (Dharmananda).

Raw monk fruit has additional flavors and other characteristics which are unpalatable, so various purification methodologies such as drying, mashing, and other procedures are used to remove the off-flavor components.

The different purification methods will result in varying concentration of mogroside V content.

Why are Mogrosides (Monk fruit extract) sweet?

Mogroside V is the major component of the commercial sweeteners derived from monk fruit (Itkin, et al). Mogroside V is approximately 250-350 times as sweet as table sugar (sucrose). This is likely secondary to the way the 5 glucose units of the molecule are perceived by the taste buds.

Why don’t Mogrosides cause blood sugar to rise?

Mogrosides are not reported to cause an increase in blood sugar levels. This is likely related to the fact that the glucose components are cleaved off from the mogroside molecule in the large intestine.

The glucose we ingest has already been absorbed earlier (higher up) in the digestive tract (small intestine), so any of these glucose molecules from the mogroside that are in the large intestine have to stay in the large intestine, and any use of this glucose would be by the bacteria that normally live in the large intestine.

MORE INFO

You may also enjoy our dedicated article on Monk Fruit. You can access it here:

What is Monk Fruit?

Aronia Guide has reviewed a product, Tohi, which uses Monk Fruit sweetener in their aronia beverage. You can access this product review and assessment here: Tohi

References

Murata, Y, Ogawa, T, Suzuki, YA, Yoshikawa, S, Inui, H, Sugiura, M, and Nakano, Y. Digestion and Absorption of Siraitia grosvenori Triterpenoids in the Rat. Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry, 74:3, 673-676. 2010. DOI: 10.1271/bbb.90832

Itkin, M, Davidovich-Rikanati, R, Cohen, S. et al. The biosynthetic pathway of the nonsugar, high-intensity sweetener mogroside V from Siraitia grosvenorii PNAS November 22, 2016 113 (47) E7619-E7628; first published November 7, 2016.

Dharmananda, Subhuti. Luo Han Guo: Sweet Fruit Used as Sugar Substitue and Medicinal Herb. January 2004. http://www.itmonline.org/arts/luohanguo.htm. Accessed 5/8/2020.