What we found when we studied the latak
By Florita S. Maslog, PhD
Scientific Advisor Emeritus, Philippine Morinda Citrifolia, Inc.
Adapted for general readers by the PhilNONI editorial team from Dra. Maslog’s research, and reviewed and approved by the author.
“I was curious to know what phytochemicals I can isolate from noni.”
Not a company directive. Not a question from a customer. Just my own curiosity, and a question I could not quite let go of.
Years earlier, before I ever isolated a single compound in a PMCI laboratory, I had written my own literature review of noni’s pharmacology — the paper, as it happens, that first brought me into the company. Putting that review together planted a question that never quite left me: were these compounds, reported so often in other researchers’ papers — glucosides, anthraquinones, tannins, alkaloids, flavonoids — actually present in the noni our own company was selling? In 2012, a research team in India led by Nagalingam and colleagues ran a set of standard laboratory tests on Morinda citrifolia fruit and confirmed many of these compounds in their own variety. Reading their work, I had a simple thought: I can do the same on ours.
So I did — working with limited instruments and real difficulty sourcing the chemicals a study like this needs here in the Philippines. I did it anyway.
Why the powder, and not the fruit alone
The compounds I was looking for have been reported not just in noni fruit, but in its leaves as well. I wanted to know something specific: what value do the leaves actually add, beyond what the fruit alone provides?
To answer that, I needed to test the same material PMCI actually uses to make its capsules — not fresh fruit, not an isolated leaf extract, but the powder itself.
That powder has a story of its own. When PhilNONI juice ferments, the liquid separates naturally — a clearer layer rises to the top, and a thicker sediment settles at the bottom of the drum. In the Philippines this sediment is called latak. Only the upper, clearer portion is bottled as juice; we have bottled it this way from the beginning. Other noni brands on the market are often visibly cloudy with sediment, and that was never the standard our founder wanted for the bottle.
The latak does not go to waste. Dried and combined with dried, crushed leaves from the same Morinda citrifolia tree — roughly 70% latak to 30% leaf — it becomes the powder used in PhilNONI capsules. We tried a more modern method first, spray drying, but abandoned it: the sugars in noni juice caused the dried powder to cake and clump, and the process was expensive. The method we actually use today is simpler — the mixture is dried in an oven at 80°C for three days, turned every four hours, then pulverized. It was developed by our founder, Dr. Tito Contado, and has been carried out for years by Joe Villanueva, one of the company’s longest-serving staff.
This is the exact powder I studied — not a stand-in for it, not something similar to it, but the same material that goes into every capsule.
I had one more reason for choosing it. The drying process runs hot, and runs for days. I wondered whether that heat might have damaged or destroyed some of the compounds I was hoping to find. Testing the actual capsule powder was the only way to know for certain — and it happened to be, at the same time, a chance to confirm that the formula we had relied on for years was sound.
What I tested for, and how
Following the same general approach as the 2012 Indian study that had inspired me, I extracted the powder separately in three solvents — ethanol, methanol, and distilled water — and ran each extract through a battery of standard qualitative tests: the Lieberman-Burchard test for steroids, the Keller-Kiliani test for glycosides, a ferric chloride test for phenols, a separate test for tannins, the Salkowski test for terpenoids, the Dragendorff test for alkaloids, Molisch’s test for carbohydrates, a reducing sugar test, an ammonium hydroxide test for anthraquinones, three separate confirmatory tests for flavonoids, a ninhydrin test for protein, a test for the amino acid asparagine, filter paper staining for lipids and fats, a bicarbonate test for acidic compounds, and a froth test for saponins.
Every test was performed in duplicate, and I only counted a result once both trials showed the same endpoint.
What I found
Most of what I was looking for turned up in all three solvents: steroids, glycosides, terpenoids, alkaloids, carbohydrates, reducing sugars, anthraquinones, saponins, and flavonoids by two of the three confirmatory tests. Lipids and fats were the one class that came back negative everywhere — confirmed absent in the ethanol, methanol, and water extracts alike.
But not everything behaved the same way in every solvent, and I think that unevenness is worth sitting with rather than smoothing over. Phenol showed up in the ethanol and methanol extracts but not in water. Tannin did the opposite — absent in ethanol and methanol, present only in water. The same reagent, ferric chloride, produces both readings: a blue-to-green color for phenol, a black precipitate for tannin. All three solvents were run side by side, at the same time, in the same water bath.
The Shinoda test for flavonoids followed that same water-only pattern. Protein was absent in the ethanol extract but present in both methanol and water. And one amino acid, asparagine, appeared only in the ethanol extract and nowhere else.
I do not think this unevenness is a flaw in the study. Different solvents pull different things out of a powder — that is simply chemistry, and a result where everything appeared identically in all three extracts would have made me more suspicious, not less. What it does mean is that no single solvent tells the whole story on its own. Between the three of them, though, every compound class I tested for except lipids was confirmed present in at least one extract.
I had read about these compounds for years, in other researchers’ papers, about other noni varieties, grown elsewhere. Seeing them confirmed, one test at a time, in our own noni variant was a source of real happiness — the literature had said these compounds should be there, and here, finally, was the proof that they actually were.
And the heat did not appear to have destroyed them. Despite three days in an 80°C oven, the compounds I was looking for were still strongly present in the finished powder.
What this study does not show
Every test in this study was qualitative, not quantitative — meaning it tells us a compound is present, not how much of it is there. The equipment and reference standards needed to measure exact quantities are expensive, and were not available to me. I can say, with confidence, that these compounds are present in the powder used in every capsule. I cannot say how much of each one, and I do not attempt to.
It also cannot say what these compounds do once a capsule is taken. Finding a compound present in a powder, in a laboratory test, is a different question entirely from what happens inside a human body — the same distinction that matters for any laboratory finding of this kind. This study answers the first question. It does not answer the second, and I do not claim that it does.
What this means for the capsule
Dehydrated into powder, noni loses the smell and taste some people find off-putting in the liquid juice — the capsule delivers the same underlying material in an odorless, tasteless form. It also travels well; unlike a glass bottle, there is nothing to spill or break in a bag.
And because the powder is made from both the concentrated latak and the leaves, it draws on two different parts of the plant rather than one — consistent with the wider scientific literature, which has reported these compounds appearing in noni fruit and leaves alike.
To Dr. Tito and me, calling that bottom layer “concentrated juice” was never a guess — it really is concentrated. When juice ferments and settles, the clear liquid rises and the solids sink; what collects at the bottom is naturally denser with everything that did not stay dissolved in the liquid above it. That much is simply how settling works, not something either of us needed to measure to know. What neither study measured is how much more of these specific bioactive compounds ended up in the sediment compared to the clear juice — that side-by-side comparison was never directly tested, so I can tell you the sediment is concentrated, but not by how much, or in exactly which compounds.
Why this study matters to me
Beyond the chemistry, this study answered a question I had carried for a while: whether the process our company had used for years — a formula devised by our founder, carried out faithfully by one employee for even longer — was actually doing what we had always assumed. It was. The compounds survived the heat, the drying, the days in the oven. The formula held up.
Read the full study and Dra. Maslog’s other research →
References
- Maslog, F. (2023). Isolation of phytochemical components in Philippine Morinda citrifolia variety (PhilNONI). Silliman Journal, 64(2), 9–24. Silliman University, Dumaguete City, Philippines.
- Nagalingam, S., Sasikumar, C. S., & Cherian, K. M. (2012). Extraction and preliminary phytochemical screening of active compounds in M. citrifolia fruit. Academic Sciences, 5, 4–6.
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