"Good medicine tastes bitter" is a well-known saying, so some people add sugar when drinking traditional Chinese medicine. However, each prescription consists of different medicinal ingredients with varying tastes such as sour, bitter, sweet, spicy, and salty, and they also have different properties such as cold, hot, warm, and cool. Therefore, adding sugar to Chinese medicine can reduce its efficacy in mild cases and even cause side effects in severe cases.
Consuming excessive sugar can exacerbate heat conditions. If a patient has symptoms such as abdominal distension, dampness and heat stagnation, and thick greasy tongue coating, it is generally prohibited to add sugar to avoid adverse reactions.
White sugar has a cooling property, while brown sugar has a warming property. Adding white sugar to warm prescriptions or brown sugar to cool prescriptions can weaken the medicinal properties, hinder the complete absorption of the medicinal effects, and affect the therapeutic efficacy.
The chemical composition of Chinese medicine is complex. Sugars, especially brown sugar, contain a relatively high amount of iron, calcium, and other elements. Protein and tannin components in Chinese medicine can react with sugars, causing coagulation and denaturation of some active ingredients in the medicinal solution, resulting in turbidity and precipitation. This not only affects the efficacy of the medicine but also poses a health risk.
Some medicines stimulate the secretion of digestive glands by utilizing their bitter taste, thereby enhancing their therapeutic effects. For example, Huanglian (Coptis chinensis) stimulates the taste buds, which in turn increases the excitation of the appetite center and reflexively causes an increase in gastric juice secretion, thus exerting a stomach-tonifying effect. Adding sugar would negate this effect and therefore fail to achieve the desired treatment outcome.
