Most Mushroom Supplements are not Actual Mushrooms

To say it’s a daunting task for a guy like me to challenge each discipline within the supplement industry is the understatement of the decade. The only way we’ll be able to do so is by surrounding ourselves with experts within each category of supplements. Someone who knows the manufacturing and quality assurance processes intimately. In case you beloved this post in addition to you want to acquire more information with regards to web page kindly stop by our web-site. Someone who is as committed as we are to wellness with integrity. I’ve been searching and I think I’ve found my mushroom guru. I recently interviewed Real Mushrooms founder Skye Chilton for The Big Mouth Pharmacist Podcast . It’s hard to know before the interview if someone’s going to live up to their own marketing hype. With Skye and Real Mushrooms, I feel like they actually sell themselves short a bit! This article is a first in a series around mushroom quality, augmented greatly by the expertise of Skye and Real Mushrooms. There are a lot of terms kicking around that you may or may not be familiar with as it pertains to mushrooms therapy.

You know what they say about pictures… ‘Pictures are purtier than readin’,” or something like that… Spores start out by growing pretty deep and wide with and stringy but at times cotton-candy like root system called mycelium. After a while, a mushroom (or fruiting body) will grow above ground. There are names for the other parts of a mushroom- like the cap/gills/etc, but we’ll save that for another day. Ready for the easiest concept of the day? The mycelium and the mushroom are not the same. They don’t have the same makeup. Not like eye shadow and lipstick, but the chemical makeup of the different parts of the whole mushroom complex will vary in nutritional and biological components. Generally, the mycelium will simply be tubes with smaller concentrations of healthful compounds, as they are transporting most up to the mushroom itself, which will then create lots of unique goodies that, you know, do stuff in humans. All mushrooms aren’t good.

In fact, most aren’t. There’s only a handful of mushrooms that won’t kill us, and some are just plain fun. The kind of fun where you trade your shoes for a grilled cheese sandwich at a Phish concert. In the mushrooms that are good medicinally, we see interesting health benefits. Mushrooms have been used to support immune health, stress, energy levels, memory and more. They’re relatively safe, and it doesn’t take much to find good data to support their use for various health concerns. Even in patients dealing with cancer diagnoses! It makes sense, then, that people get excited and want to try out mushrooms. I’m with you, and I recommend them whenever I can. Unfortunately, the natural products industry is great at letting us down, and they do so because it is not only more financially feasible, it’s highly profitable. Let’s talk about the biggest lie in the mushroom industry right now… Mushrooms are cultivated by placing a growth medium into plastic bags, sterilizing it, inoculating it with spores, and then growing at the proper temperature, light, and humidity.

Mushrooms grow, then the bags are open and mushrooms are harvested. The best growth medium is wood. It’s not like the stack a bunch of logs in a corner, but instead, they use nutrient-enriched sawdust of sorts. Alternatively, you could use grains like rice. In fact, many do, but the results are not the same. The rice-as-growth-medium method is used by mushroom growers to get lots of seeds. The mycelium, or roots, grows on the grain and creates what Skye calls an “inseparable mass.” The mycelium and grain are harvested together (because you can’t separate them) and then dried and powdered. Ready for me to shoe-horn a joke in here? When you grow mycelium on grain, there isn’t… MUSH-ROOM for anything else! Just like we pointed out in our Garden of Lies article, many “whole food” vitamin manufacturers are using a very loose definition of food, and often feed synthetic vitamins to yeast and refer to this as a “food.” The same goes here for mushrooms; many manufacturers sell the dried powder mycelium-grain mix as mushrooms.

As we stated clearly before, mushrooms and mycelium are different. Myceliated grain, as the mix is called, is mostly grain. Over 70% in some official studies and documentation. That means a mushroom product that is using myceliated grain instead of mushrooms is mostly filler. This is similar to Pet Nutrition, where some brands will use “chicken” as their main ingredient. Most of chicken is water. We want chicken meal, the properly dehydrated chicken. Skye points out that some people are trying to avoid grains for dietary reasons, then are gobbling down a grain-rich supplement without knowing any better. Imagine you’re paying for all of the wonder-chemicals that are found in healthy mushrooms like shiitake, reishi, or lion’s mane and all your getting is rice-root powder… That’s practically all your getting, as mycelium doesn’t have most of those compounds we’d benefit from, and if they do, they’re in very little concentrations. “Just Eat It! It’s Good For You!