A couple months ago I made a post about a helpful diabetic herb that goes by many names- the Asian Pumpkin, the Shark Fin Melon, chilacayote, and its proper name- Cucurbita Ficifolia. It was actually misrepresented in the press as simply a pumpkin, which was somewhat astounding. I still wonder if Diabetics are eating regular orange pumpkins thinking that they are recieving health benefits. The original study is linked to in my first post about this Shark Fin Melon.

Someone came along and commented on my post with a couple of excellent sources for this hard to find vegetable in America. First off, you can find the seeds on J Hudson’s Website. It is under the name “Chilacayote”. The short description calls it by its normal name and you can actually order the seeds and attempt to grow them yourself. PLEASE EMAIL me if you decide to do this, I would love to do a writeup on how to grow them and how the entire process went.

A little more digging helped me find D-chiro-Inositol (DCI). DCI is related to Cucurbita Ficifolia in this study, by the same authors as the first: D-chiro-Inositol found in Cucurbita ficifolia (Cucurbitaceae) fruit extracts plays the hypoglycaemic role in streptozocin-diabetic rats. It appears that the D-chiro-Inositol might be the main ingredient of the Shark Fin Melon. If that is so, then what we would really want to suppliment is with the DCI.

Someone gave me a source for it! Here it is- Chiral Balance.

Please note that I have not yet tried this supplement and I have absolutely no idea if it is helpful or not. I would love someone’s input if they tried it. The company appears to promote the product for different uses.

In an interesting study completed recently in China, it was found that Cucurbita ficifolia is useful in lowering blood sugar in rats with induced diabetes. Cucurbita ficifolia also is known as the Shark Finn Melon or an Asian Pumpkin.

I found it amazing that this article was reported by some mainstream news as simply a pumpkin. It wasn’t until I found the actual abstract of the research that contained the exact name of this so called pumpkin that I realized it was basically misreported. That is too bad, because this melon looks like it has some great qualities. If you read the entire abstract you can see that they believe the higher plasma insulin levels was produced by actually more B-Cell mass, meaning that this shark fin melon demonstrated regenerative properties on the mice.

Hypoglycaemic role of Cucurbita ficifolia (Cucurbitaceae) fruit extract in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats

I have found no source for ordering this type of melon, but I read about it and it is similar to spaghetti squash in its texture and how you cook it. If anyone knows where to order it, please let me know in a comment to this post.