Mushroom Lies: Why Most Medicinal Mushroom Supplements Are Chock Full Of Grain & Dangerous Compounds, And What You Can Do About It.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, for the first time ever in the last five years, that cordyceps now has been brought into cultivation. So we're now cultivating these cordyceps fruiting bodies in China. They're being cultivated organically. Certified triterpenoids primarily occur in reishi and chaga. So these two fungi definitely need the alcohol to secure all of those triterpenoids from them. That chaga actually draws that vegetable out and turns it into what's called betulinic acid.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And last year I had a friend, my friend's name is Sky Chilton, and he visited my house. And one night while he was over, he sat down at my kitchen table and he spread out this big array of colorful mushrooms that he happened to have with him because he travels with mushrooms, I guess. And one of those was cordyceps, which is actually a mushroom I've talked about before on the show. It's pretty well known for its athletic performance enhancing capabilities. I recently tweeted a study about how chronic loading with cordyceps on a daily basis can help with the activation of lung tissue and VO2 max. And anyways, he told me to taste it. So he handed me this standard commercial cordyceps extract. And it was tasteless and it was flavorless, and it kind of had this bland, brownish color, and I really didn't care for it. And then he took out this different cordyceps, and it was obviously a different blend. It was kind of rich, it had a reddish brown color. And when I tasted it had this kind of powerful, potent, almost medicinal taste. And I felt it almost immediately, like kind of a surge of energy right after I tasted it. So the difference between these two different mushroom extracts was pretty noticeable and palatable and quite significant. So it got me wondering about what makes one mushroom extract different from another, and whether medicinal mushrooms have different benefits depending on how they're grown, what stage they're harvested in, how they're sourced, how you actually use mushrooms. So it Turns out that Sky's dad, Jeff, has actually written an entire book on this. It's called the Mushroom Cultivator. And sky gave me this book as well. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home. And I read it, and it really is probably the most comprehensive guide on mushrooms, particularly medicinal mushrooms, that I've ever read. So Jeff, in the 1980s, actually operated a commercial mushroom spawn laboratory. And then in 1989, he started one of the first medicinal mushroom businesses in North America. And now he's got this company called namx, and they sell organic mushroom extracts to nutritional supplement businesses in the US And Canada and around the world. And Jeff is here on the call with me to talk about, of all things, you guessed it, mushrooms. So, Jeff, welcome to the show.

Hey, Ben. Great to be here. Thank you very much for having me on the show.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. And, you know, a few weeks ago, I had this guy who was a Chinese herbal formulator on the show. And one of the first things I asked him was kind of what he does, because I was. Was trying to wrap my head around what an herbal formulator does. I'm curious, in your case, being a guy who used to operate a mushroom spawn laboratory, which sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, and now creates these mushroom extracts, what is it that you're actually doing on a daily basis? I imagine it goes above and beyond, like walking around the forest with a mesh bag chopping mushrooms off trash.

And I have done a lot of that. Believe me, that's something that I started doing way back in the. But you know what? In 1973, I went to work on a commercial mushroom farm here in Washington State. It was actually the only mushroom farm here. I went to work there in 73. I was there for 10 years. And on this farm, we grew over 2 million pounds of mushrooms every year. And I just loved every bit of it. And I was just soaking up how to do this. And after a few years, I became the production manager of this farm. And the cool thing about growing mushrooms is that it's a crop that is inside in rooms. And so what we were doing there is we were putting in four crops every week. So now think about that for a second, because if you can see four crops a week times 50 weeks, you're seeing 200 crops of something a year. Think how many farmers, how many crops they see in a lifetime. I'm seeing 200 crops of mushrooms and every year. So over the course of the 10 years that I worked there, I saw thousands of mushroom crops.

What's a crop exactly? Is that like a different style of mushroom or just like a new.

Well, no, what I mean by a crop is actually, this is a. Let's say you plant your seed in the spring and you harvest it in the fall. So that's a crop of wheat or tomatoes or whatever. So essentially, let's just call it a batch of mushrooms. One crop that we're putting in, we're putting four of these in every week. So I have a very, very deep knowledge of how mushrooms grow, how to produce the spawn, which is the seed to grow these mushrooms. So that 10 years, my intimacy with mushrooms was like, hey, I lived with mushrooms. And then at the end of that 10 years, in 1983, was when I wrote the book the Mushroom Cultivator. And, you know, at that time, a lot of people were interested in wild mushrooms and going out there and finding them. But for the first time, there was a comprehensive book that actually taught people how to grow mushrooms at home in either small rooms or they could. We taught. We had in the book how to build a grow room, how to make spawn, how to get a mushroom culture. So that book was pretty seminal. And then during this period, I also realized that there's this other side of mushrooms. Besides being a good food, there's this other side of mushrooms. They've been used for thousands of years as a medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. And so with that knowledge, I realized that, okay, I could be a mushroom farmer, so to speak, but the problem with being any kind of a farmer is getting that crop to market before it goes over. Whereas with medicinal mushrooms, I could produce and manufacture medicinal mushrooms, and it would be a dry product that could sit on the shelf. And to me, that was very attractive. Plus, I was now involved in mushrooms not just as food, but as a medicine. And the tradition of that is very long and something that I embraced fully and just started to learn more and more about that.

Yeah, and that's what I want to actually talk a little bit about today. I mean, I'm as big a fan of, like, a nice portobello mushroom grilled, you know, and served like a burger, as the next guy. But I want to ask you about medicinal mushrooms, particularly, like. Well, first of all, let me ask you this just from, like, a practical standpoint when it comes to using mushrooms, because we've mentioned things like chaga on the show before, Reishi cordyceps, like I was talking about before. For you, on any given day, being a guy who's kind of like in the mushroom industry, what would a day look like for you in which you're using medicinal mushrooms to achieve whatever immunity or cognitive performance or whatever it is you're going after?

Well, you know, first of all, I enjoy mushrooms as food, so I'll eat mushrooms at least two or three times a week. And the mushroom that I really love and I highly recommend to all your listeners is shiitake. I mean, I like the agaricus and that was, which is the button mushroom that you see out there. And that was what primarily we were growing on the mushroom farm that I worked at. But shiitake's got just this amazing flavor. It is such a wonderful mushroom. And the cool thing about mushrooms is you can put them in anything. You can throw them into stir fries, you can put them in with your eggs, you can, you can use them in so many different ways and they're a really good food. So that's the first.

And shiitake is also. You find that not just as a food based mushroom, but also I see that marketed in a lot of these detoxification mushroom extracts. Is that one that would be considered like a liver detox? Is that how that's working?

Well, I wouldn't call shiitake a liver detox. That would be more something where I would say reishi is more along those lines. But shiitake is a medicinal mushroom. Absolutely. In fact, shiitake is a mushroom where they've actually developed a drug from one of the beta glucans in shiitake. So in Japan they have a registered drug that is manufactured from shiitake mushrooms. So we're talking about definitely, absolutely, a medicinal mushroom in shiitake as well. But the one that I use regularly medicinally is I use reishi and the way I use it and what I really like to do is I put reishi in my coffee in the morning.

Really? That's so funny, because I every single morning have been putting mushroom extracts into my coffees. And I vary.

Right.

So I put about a teaspoon. Sometimes I use cordyceps, sometimes I use reishi, sometimes I use shiitake. But which one did you say you're putting in your coffee in the morning?

I'm putting reishi. And let me tell you something about that too, because I see a lot of products out there that are what they call themselves reishi coffees. And. Okay, that's fine. But one of the things to remember about reishi is reishi is bitter. So if you have a reishi product, be sure and taste it and make sure that there's a strong, bitter flavor there. And for me, I just drink my coffee black. So bitter is not bitter that I dislike. I like the flavor of just.

I'm right there with you.

So, Ben, when you add a little bit of this bitter reishi in there, it gives it another bitter aspect that I find very pleasant. And so that's. That's the way I use it. And I put maybe a quarter to half a teaspoon in my coffee in the morning, my first cup, and it's just like, man, that's great. And to me, that's how I use it.

And can you damage the mushroom extract if the coffee is too hot? For example, if you were to boil coffee over the stovetop or reheat a cup of coffee and the mushroom extract was still in there, do you need to be careful with the heat to which these are exposed?

No, absolutely not. Because the compounds in there are very stable with heat. In fact, all of our extracts are actually made with heat. They're hot water extracted. In the case of reishi, it's hot water and alcohol that we use to extract them. So heat does not damage the polysaccharides. In fact, heat's very good because the way mushrooms are made is that these important compounds in there in the cell walls, and those cell walls have to be broken down to a certain degree. There's a compound in mushrooms called chitin, and it's a structural compound. It occurs in about 5 to 8% of it, but it helps that mushroom, so to speak, stand up. So it's structural part of the cell wall of the mushroom. So heat helps to break down that chitin and make that mushroom more bioavailable. So we can get at those beta glucans better by actually doing a hot water extraction or hot water alcohol extraction.

Okay, that's interesting. I was recently over in Finland, and I found a giant chunk of chaga, very big, like almost the size of a basketball, growing on the side of the tree. And I took out a pocket knife and cut off a big chunk of it and actually brought it back with me. And last week, I did a hot water extraction with it. And then I took all the leftover chunks of chaga that I had after the hot water extraction. I put those in alcohol. It's sitting in a little jar of vodka up in my pantry right now for the second part, the alcohol extraction. But I'm curious if you can get into why, from a chemical standpoint, if you're using medicinal mushrooms, you can and should Use the hot water and then also alcohol. What are the different compounds that you're getting by doing two different extractions?

Well, primarily with the water extraction, that's where you're getting the beta glucans. And the beta glucans are the absolute key compound in every single medicinal mushroom. That's what we're looking to get from. That's what makes these mushrooms medicinal. And during the last 50 years, there has been a tremendous body of scientific research that has established beta glucans as the active compounds in medicinal mushrooms. And the thing is that these are compounds in all mushrooms, but the beta glucan itself can be different so that different mushrooms are more medicinal than others. I mean, even though every mushroom would have beta glucans, only specific ones are highly medicinal. And that's due to the fact that there's a certain amount of branching on this beta glucan. It's a really interesting molecule and compound. But the branching of the beta glucan is what makes the difference between highly active shiitake and let's say some other, like a chanterelle that really doesn't have the same level of medicinal activity that the shiitake has.

Okay, so the hot water is basically extracting the beta glucans.

Absolutely, it's extracting the beta glucans. And you know, there's number of different compounds that occur in smaller amounts. But you know, the way I look at it is the beta glucan that occurs in amounts that can actually have an effect. The thing a lot of times is people will quote research saying, oh, there's this compound in there, that compound, and it does this and that in some kind of a in vitro or in vivo test. But there's not enough in there. When somebody's taking 500 to say 1,000 milligrams, there's not enough of some of these obscure compounds to really do any good. Although people love to quote the research and say, oh, it's active against this, it's active against that. Well, you know, I think it's more important to stick with the compounds that occur in significant amounts and that you can take enough of that particular mushroom to actually have that be beneficial to you.

Okay, got it. Now then, once you, once you get the beta glucans, you're getting a lot of like the immune supporting. And I know that there's some studies and you talk about these in your book, I believe, about the cancer fighting property properties of beta glucans. What do you get from the alcohol part of the extraction?

Well, here's the thing, there's certain mushrooms that have compounds in them that, although those compounds will come out with a hot water extraction, they won't come out completely. So then what happens is, if you just do a water extraction, you'll be leaving a lot of these important compounds behind. The majority of those compounds are what are called triterpenoids. And triterpenoids primarily occur in reishi and chaga. So these two fungi definitely need the alcohol to secure all of those triterpenoids from them. And so that's where the alcohol comes in. And one of the things is that if an extract is made right off the bat with simply alcohol, let's say, well, you lose a lot of the polysaccharides in that mushroom fiber. So a lot of extracts, if they need alcohol, they'll extract it first with water, and then they'll come back and extract it with the alcohol and then combine them. That's what's really important for reishi and for chaga. And those compounds are what make those two mushrooms so unique. And that's why, for me, if I were to take any one mushroom, I would certainly be taking the reishi. And the thing with the reishi, it's got thousands of years of history behind it. And it's so cool because when I'm traveling through China in all sorts of Chinese art, it's a longevity symbol in China, and they have some really cool longevity symbols over there, like, interestingly enough, a peach and a deer with its antlers. But reishi is one of their primary longevity symbols.

Interesting. So when you're actually using these different mushrooms, like whether it's cordyceps or reishi or whatever, do you harvest them at different stages of growth to get different benefits or different effects from them?

Well, you know, not per se, but let me just tell you a little bit about how it works with these organisms. Because when we talk about a mushroom, for example, the mushroom is just one stage of this organism, and the organism is actually considered a basidiomycete. And the basidiomycete organism, which is the mushroom sort of all these different mushrooms are basidiomycetes. It starts out as a spore. Mushrooms don't have seeds, they have spores. So it starts out as a spore, the spore germinates, and it germinates a very thin filament. And when multiple spores germinate, those filaments come together in a network. And that network of filaments from those spores is called mycelium. And mycelium is actually what you would call the vegetative body of this organism. And the mycelium is something, Ben, where we don't usually see it, because when we're out there walking around, this mycelium is actually in the ground. It's in a piece of wood. We don't notice it so much. What we notice is that how much.

When you say it's in the ground, I mean, are we talking about something like the movie Avatar, where it's just like, everywhere, growing, like a fiber network, or are you just. Or is it more like moss, where if you're walking in a forest, there's little patches here and there?

Well, you know, I would say, generally speaking, mycelium is kind of like almost everywhere, because fungi are everywhere. But when you're walking in a forest, think about it as, okay, we've got tree roots everywhere, too, right? So there are root systems of trees, There are bacterial colonies, there's mycelial colonies. And remember that in a forest, we'll have multiple species of mushroom in there, multiple species of this basidiomycete organism that will be growing. So there will be colonies of mycelium for a specific species, and those colonies are in different locations, depending on the food source, because different mushrooms will decompose different types of organic matters. And especially here in the Pacific Northwest, we have a lot of wood. We have forests, it's damp. We have a lot of mushrooms popping up everywhere. So we've got multiple species, and they're all out there growing. And what happens is, they will grow. This mycelium network will continue to grow until it runs out of food, until it goes, wow, this has been a great meal here on this chunk of wood. But now this wood has reached a point where I've sucked all the nutrients out. And at that point, somebody else jumps in and takes over. It could be another. Another fungus, or it could actually be bacteria. In fact, it's kind of a. This is a microbial network with all sorts of organisms that are in on this feast. Because what they're doing is they're breaking down all this organic matter for us, which then feeds continuation of all these plants, trees, what have you. So that mycelium network is important. And actually, in China, they will take that mycelium, and what we can do with that is we can actually take a mushroom or we can grab a piece of that mycelium, we can bring it into the lab, we can grow it out on a petri dish, and then from that mycelial culture that we make, we can then generate spawn, which we call. Which is kind of like the seed to grow mushrooms. And then we can grow mushrooms from that chunk of mycelium that we have grabbed out there, either from a tissue culture from the mushroom or from some mycelium that maybe we've gotten cleaned up a little bit from the forest.

Okay.

And the way to think about that mycelium, Ben, is really, that's the body of this fungal organism, and the mushroom is what we call the fruiting body. It's almost like you think of a plant that has roots, and then it puts up the actual plant, but the roots are down there. Puts up the plant, and the plant produces tomatoes or a vegetable or something like that.

Okay, so the root would be the mycelium.

Exactly.

And then the actual tree with, like, the leaves and the stalks and everything would be the. Would that be considered the spore?

No, that's what then comes up would be the mushroom, then the mushroom.

Okay. Okay. I was under the impression, like, the fruit would be the mushroom, but what about, like, the sticks and everything leading up to the fruit?

The fruit is. You could call the mushroom the fruit because we call that the fruiting body. And the function of that mushroom, other than to provide us with some nice, tasty food is to produce spores. So the mushroom comes up, it produces spores, the spores drop off, they go on the wind, and then the whole cycle starts over again.

Okay, so the spores are just basically like seeds.

That's exactly right. And. And, you know, the cool thing was, is that sky and I went to China last year, and I don't know if he showed you the slideshow that we put together, but we went to a number of Reishi farms over there, and one of the things they're doing now is they're collecting Reishi spores.

Really?

They're collecting Reishi spores, and a single mushroom will produce billions of spores.

How do you collect them?

Well, what they did is that when the mushroom got up and was mature, they. They put a paper shroud around it with a plastic bag underneath it, and the spores dropped straight down. Rather than being open and flying off into the. Into the air, the mushrooms dropped straight down into that bag. And I'm telling you, from one mushroom, they were collecting as much as a pound of spores.

So what do you do with the spore?

Well, in China, what's happened over the last 15 years is that they've done studies where they have demonstrated that there's some actual medicinal value to the spores. In fact, they have products over there called cracked spores and, you know, spores. Ben, Spores have this. This tough coating around them that when we eat a spore from a mushroom, it just goes right through us. It. We can't digest it. It. We can't break it down. It goes right through us. But so what they've done is they've cracked the shell of the spore, and they do it with some kind of sonic waves. They crack the shell, and then they. They claim that it's medicinal. And they've done a number of research studies that show it has triterpenes, that show it has beta glucans. Personally, I'm not sure whether I'm ready to accept that yet. But, you know, what happens sometimes is business gets involved and they put out these products.

Somebody wants to sell some spores.

Exactly. And, you know, the funny thing is, spores. Are those ganoderma spores? The regiospores are worth more than the mushroom.

So that kind of leads me to something I want to ask you about. Like when you're talking about whether or not something works, you know, like I mentioned the guy, this guy's name was Roger Drummer. I had him on, and we were talking about herbal extracts.

I know Roger.

Oh, you know Roger. Okay, cool. That's interesting. Small world. Well, Roger was talking about, like, muscle testing and kinesio testing and looking at, like, areas of heat patches on the body to see how a certain organ system was being affected by extracts. So he was looking at more of, like, the body effects with something like medicinal mushrooms. What is your preferred method of testing for or identifying the efficacy of the mushroom?

Well, you know, here's the thing is, as you know, there's so many different products out there. When somebody walks into a store and tries to figure it out, what, you know, you see like, 15 different reishi products or all these different mushroom products, and you're like, what brand? What is what? And for me, that's always been something that's been very important in terms of how do I identify the active compounds in the products that I'm selling to, where I can tell my customers that, like, look here, we've got the active compounds, and I can tell you how much of those compounds we've got in here. So what I do is I have tests that I can do, and I just recently published a white paper. And in this white paper, using three different tests, I was able to find for one, the content of beta glucans. What is the percentage of beta glucans in these products? Is there starch in these products? We've been testing triterpenes now for 20 years. So I've got 20 years worth of triterpene testing that we've done using high performance liquid chromatography. And then we have another test for ergosterol, which is the primary sterol in mushrooms. All mushrooms have it. It's just like we have cholesterol. Mushrooms have ergosterol. Ergosterol is really cool because ergosterol in mushrooms, when you expose mushrooms to UV light, that ergosterol turns into vitamin D.

I've heard about that. That you can basically take mushrooms and you can put them under the sun and get vitamin D in them and then eat the mushrooms and have vitamin D the same way as you would by eating liver or taking a vitamin D supplement or something like that.

That's absolutely right. But here's the thing that came out of the research that I just recently did. And the thing about this, you know, I can sit here and I can talk about all this different research out there that was done by other people. You know, the tests, whether they were in vivo, where they're using animals, you know, rats or in test tubes. You know, there's a ton of that kind of research out there. I read it all the time. You do, too. But what I'm talking about is we did the actual testing. We. I contracted with laboratories to test 95 different products for beta glucans. And we're talking about dried mushrooms as a kind of a control, talking about my mushroom extracts. And we're talking about products out there that we bought in the marketplace that are basically mycelium grown on grain. And this is a really interesting phenomena because there's lots of products out there right now that are this mycelium on grain. And the grain at the end of the process is not separated from the mycelium. So you end up with grain mycelium mixture. And what we found was that primarily these mycelium on grain products were mostly starch from the grain. So there's a lot of residual grain in there and very low in beta glucans. And this was the exact opposite of what a mushroom is. A mushroom is high in beta glucan and mushrooms have next to no starch in them. So it was very easy to look at these two products and go, well, there's something really wrong here with these mycelium on grain products because there's so much starch in them. And the starch ended up, it was coming from all the residual grain in the products. Then when we tested these products for ergosterol and ergosterol, again being the key Sterol and mushrooms. And interestingly enough, ergosterol testing is used by the grain industry to test for fungal contamination. And they've been doing that for 50 years. So when you're a big grain producer, you want to make sure there's not this fungus in there that. I mean, there are some fungi that produce aflatoxins. You don't want that in your grain. So they've been testing grain for 50 years for ergosterol just to see the amount of fungal contamination. Well, we did the same with our mushrooms, with the extracts, and with these mycelium on grain products. And what we found was these mycelium on grain products have very low ergosterol content. I mean, sometimes 100 of the amount that is in a mushroom.

And that's because they were. They're grown on grain.

Well, yes. And what it is instead of being grown on what? Well, the thing about it is, for example, in China, they will grow mycelium, but they will grow it in a tank of liquid. It's called fermentation technology. It's liquid culture. So at the end of that process, after they have grown the mycelium, they separate the mycelium out and they have pure mycelium. What's happening with these mycelium ongoing grain products is they grow the mycenium on the grain, but then they don't separate it from the grain. So the grain is still part of that product. And so think about it in terms of like, you're growing a plant and that plant sitting in the ground, and you harvest the plant, but you take all the dirt and everything with it and sell that as part of your product.

Interesting.

So the more of that grain that was in, what it showed us essentially, was that the grain was very dominant in that product, and there was much more of that grain in there than there was actual fungal matter. And here's the problem. The problem is that if you go into the marketplace, these products that are mycelium on grain are actually called mushrooms.

Interesting. And you're supposed to grow them on what if you're not growing them on grain?

Well, for example, this is an example that you can relate to right now. You went out there and you harvested that chaga off that tree, Right? Okay. Chaga. It grows naturally on a tree. Reishi grows naturally on wood. So a lot of these mushrooms grow naturally on wood. If I want to cultivate a reishi mushroom, I will inoculate a. A log, a cut log. And this is how they do it. They take a log and they cut it into pieces that are about a foot long and maybe 6 inches in diameter. They inoculate it. The mycelium runs out, colonizes that log. Then they put it in the ground, cover it with earth, and the next thing you know, this mushroom comes right up. It's growing off the wood like it would in its natural environment. And here's the thing. This is the most interesting part about it, Ben, because in order for that mushroom to produce these triterpenes, these secondary compounds, these secondary metabolites, it has to have precursors from the wood.

Really? Like what? Like from the actual bark.

Well, here's what's interesting, is in that birch tree, there are compounds called betulin. And that chaga actually draws that betulin out and turns it into what's called betulinic acid. And that's one of the compounds in there. That's one of the triterpenes. And then there's another one which is, in my opinion, more important, called initidiol. You can't have in a tadiol unless you've got the precursors. So when we test mycelium on grain, for example, this grain is an unnatural substrate. It doesn't have precursors. The wood has all the precursors. So when we test reishi, when we test chaga, there are no triterpenes in there. Reishi can have 4 to 12% triterpenes, but in the reishi mycelium on grain, there are no triterpenes. We get in our HPLC chromatograms, where you're supposed to have peaks there that demonstrate we've got these triterpenes, There are no peaks.

Interesting.

And so I guess what I'm saying is, what we've discovered and what we found, and I could probably tell you this without testing, is that this mycelium, sure, it will produce beta glucans, and you can get beta glucans from mycelium, but if the mycelium you're taking is got all of this grain substrate in there, you're not getting hardly any beta glucans. Most of the testing showed beta glucans on average of somewhere around 5%. When the mushroom from that mycelium, whatever the species was, would be anywhere from 30 to 50% beta glucan. But when this mycelium was just grown on grain, it was somewhere around 5% on average of beta glucan. In fact, some of these products, like some of the cordyceps products, were as low as 1% beta glucan and as high as 60%.

So in the supplement industry, there are things that you can read on the bottle label, like NSF certified for sport or certified Good Manufacturing Practices facility, like the CGMP label, you can see certain things that tell you that a supplement, like a capsule based supplement for example, is good or is bad or hasn't it? What claims to have in it for mushroom extracts? Like if I were to buy like a pouch or packet of mushroom extract and you know, they seem to be getting more popular, right? Like say from Whole Foods, Is there something I can look for that will tell me whether it was grown on grain versus whether it was grown on more like a natural thing, like a tree?

Well, this is a really interesting point because it's very, very difficult to know. But I'll give you one main indicator where it's a complete giveaway. If that mushroom product was manufactured. If they say made in the usa, you can be absolutely certain that that is mycelium on grain. And I'll tell you why. It's just simple economics. If I as a mushroom grower, if I grow shiitake mushrooms and I take it to the market, fresh shiitake in the US last year, the grower got $3.50 a pound for fresh shiitake. He's doing okay. He's selling it out there, he's selling it to the supermarket and then they're charging twice that or something. Okay, $3.50 a pound is what he's getting. If you dry that out, a mushroom is 90% water. So you dry it out $3.50 times 10. Now you've got to get $35 for that pound of dried mushrooms. And at that price, nobody is going to purchase that and sell it as a supplement because they can't make money doing it. And that's the basic problem. And that's why, for example, all of the mushrooms that I sell are grown in China. And the thing about it is, I realized that that's funny, that was one.

Of the same things Roger said when I interviewed him. Like most of the herbs that he sells are from China.

Well, yes, and here's the key. The key is you can bash China all you want, but there's some things you can't get anywhere else. And so what I did is I went there and I traveled there all through the 90s. In 1997, I organized the first mushroom certification workshop for organic production. I brought OCIA from the US over to conduct this workshop. We had 24 mushroom growers there and three or four years later we had organic mushrooms. Being Grown in China. And today the growers and the farms that I work with are all organically certified. And I'm not talking about Chinese certifiers, I'm talking about certifiers from Europe, European high quality, well known European certifiers. Fires are over there. So the point is, for me, it's like you can either work with them or you can go, okay, we can't get actual mushroom extracts now. We have to have this, you know, I mean, people producing this mycelium on grana, I tell you this, this is not a good, it's not mushroom. For one, all the research is primarily done on mushroom and, or on pure mycelium. Very little research on mycelium on grain. And if it's mostly grain in the final product, well, that's what you're getting. You're getting grain powder. So I chose to go over there and work with them to get a clean product. And this is something where every product that I bring in, I have to test for heavy metals, we have to test for pesticides. I can't sell it unless it's passed all of these tests. So you can either work with them. And here's what's interesting. China produces 85% of the world's mushrooms. Wow, 85%.

And you can get them in China not grown on grain like this.

Well, again, growing them on grain. They're not growing mushrooms on grain. They're just growing mycelium on grain.

Okay, so you buy the mycelium, then you get it and you grow it.

Well, basically over there, essentially people grow out the mycelium and that's called mushroom spawn. That's mushroom seed. That's what actually mycelium on grain is originally, and it was developed in the US in 1930s is mushroom spawn. It's essentially something that was developed to use a seed to grow mushrooms. But, but what they've done here, because they've realized, companies have realized they can't produce mushrooms inexpensively enough to sell the supplements. They've just taken that mushroom seed. And once it's completely colonized with this mycelium, they just harvest it, grind it to a powder and then sell it. And unfortunately, when they do that, they're still calling it mushroom. It's nothing of the sort.

Interesting. Okay, yeah. So when you are consuming a mushroom that has grain in it, does that also mean that it has things like gluten in it?

Well, you know what, most of these companies that are selling these mycelium on grain products are using gluten free Grains. Some of the companies use rice, some of them use oats, but they mostly use gluten free grains when they grow this in. And you know, my take on it is that this is not really a medicinal mushroom product. I don't really consider these products medicinal in any way because our testing has demonstrated that there's very little of the medicinal compounds in there. And one of the easy ways to do, to test that, Ben, which your listeners can do at home is grain is starch. Mushrooms have minimal amounts of starch in them. If you just go to the pharmacy and get a little bottle of iodine and then you bring it home and you take one of these mycelium on grain products and this is a way you can test to see whether what you've got is one of those products, even though it says mushrooms is take one of those capsules, take two capsules and empty it out into a bit of water and then put a few drops of iodine in there. If it is mycelium on grain, it will be very high in starch and that iodine reacts with starch and it.

Will turn black, really, Whereas normally would it just stay like a red color.

If you had an actual mushroom product that was from mushroom and you did the same thing, put it in the water, whatever color that particular product was, would like. I just did this last night and we had a reishi extract. I was showing it to friends and the reishi extract was kind of brown. And then you drop the iodine in there, it doesn't change color. You don't see any color change. If it's a light sort of powder, which some of them are, maybe it would turn a little bit the color of the iodine. But if there's starch in there, it turns black, black, black. And you know, it's interesting because last night we took actually a box of starch and we put that in some water. Then we took a product that I knew was absolutely. Even though it said mushroom complex on it, I knew it was mycelium on grain. We put that in there. The starch turned black immediately. We dropped the iodine into this mushroom complex. It turned black immediately. Then we did some of the reishi extract and it didn't change color at all. This is a great test. This demonstrates it.

Yeah, that's kind of cool. I didn't know about that.

Well, the other test that I encourage people to do is what I call the reishi challenge, which is reishi is bitter. So if you have a reishi product, just empty it out. And taste it. I've tasted these reishi products that they claim to be reishi, but they're actually mycelium on grain. They're sweet. They're absolutely sweet. And that's because of the grain reishi. You should be able to take it out of your capsule or out of whatever it is. Taste it, man. It's bitter. It's got a great bitter flavor to it. Reishi is bitter. Take the reishi challenge. I tell you, if you've got mushroom products that you're using out there, you think they're great. Do the starch test. Do the reishi challenge. If it's a reishi product, you'll learn something right away. Whether you've got a high quality product or you're looking at a lot of grain in that product.

Interesting. So are there some people that shouldn't eat mushrooms? Are there certain conditions or certain issues? The reason I ask this is, for example, I know that mushrooms as a food are very fermentable. They're up there with onions and garlic and stuff like that. So people who have small intestine bacterial overgrowth or sibo, who don't do well with eating a lot of fermented foods. Mushrooms are on the list of things to avoid. They're considered a fodmap type of food. Are there other things to think about when it comes to mushrooms? As far as some people just having mushrooms being contraindicated for some people to actually consume?

Well, you know what, that's interesting because as a wild mushroom hunter, what we've learned over the years, and any mushroom club, for example, will tell you this. There's a certain percentage of people that are just simply allergic to mushrooms. And like most of us have, there's some foods that don't. Don't react well with a lot of us. And so some people, they'll eat a particular mushroom that we find just fine, and they'll get a gastrointestinal upset or they'll have some type of allergic reaction to it. I know people that. I mean morels. I don't know if you've eaten morels. I love morels. They're just.

They're one of the few mushrooms I can. Can harvest for and find around here.

Exactly. On your side of the mountains there, there's lots of morels. And it's a. It's a fabulous mushroom. Really tasty. And man, you can, when you find it, sometimes it's. It's big and meaty and. But there are people that, you know, like sometimes within 5 to 10% of the population that will eat a morel and man, it'll just give them an allergic reaction or they'll have a stomach upset or something. So, yeah, there are people out there that, that need to be careful. And what I tell anybody with just about anything, and this goes for even new foods that people are eating. And especially if they're like, with a friend and they're out, a friend finds mushrooms and goes, man, let's go and try these mushrooms. And comes home and cooks up a huge pan full of mushrooms and they sit there and they consume this. Don't do it. If you're eating a mushroom for the first time, if you're taking a mushroom supplement for the first time, start out with just a little bit, see if it agrees with you, and then move into it a little more. Now, if you're taking a mushroom supplement, you're talking about 500 to 1,000 milligrams. That's a little bit different than eating like, let's just say 50 to 100 grams of fresh mushrooms or something like that. But still, I think people need to be careful, move into anything new slowly, because everybody has different reactions to foods and, or supplements. So I definitely counsel food to our people to go slowly. The funny thing about mushroom clubs, Ben, is that the, I mean, funny, it's at the end of every season, like the Vancouver Mycological Society has what they call a survivors banquet, and everybody brings a mushroom dish.

Yeah. Because they're so easy to harvest, you mean?

Well, and the survivors banquet meaning, okay, how many people made it through the season without getting sick or dying?

Yeah, it's just one of the people who are eating mushrooms. Interesting. So another question I have for you is in some circles that I've been hanging out in, people are very interested in self discovery and they're using things like ayahuasca, for example, or taking like THC and doing float tanks. And then some people are doing like psilocybin or hallucinogenic mushrooms. What's your take on that? And I'm also curious. Curious if you know anything about whether that's the terpenes or the beta glucans or the sterols or what it is that makes a psychedelic mushroom. Psychedelic?

Well, I mean, it's been known for a long time with psilocybine mushrooms that the active compound in there is psilocybin.

And is psilocybin, does it fall into one of those categories you talked about? Like, is it a terpene or is that just a molecule?

No, no, it's an alkaloid of some sort. It's a very special compound. And you know what? I think it's wonderful that it's coming back, because I'm a child of the 60s and 70s, and there was a lot of experimentation going on. In fact, one of the things that we did back then was we were out hunting for wild psilocybin mushrooms. They actually grow over here in the Seattle area. And in fact, some of them grew right on the University of Washington campus. And one of the things was, ultimately, when my book came out, people could actually learn to grow these things. And here's the thing that I want your listeners to know, and that is, you know, back then, a lot of times, people were taking tablets or capsules of something or other and really didn't know what it was that they were taking. They had no way of knowing. One of the wonderful things about. About psilocybin mushrooms is that now a lot of people are growing them. Just like people grow pot, a lot of people are growing them. So when you are taking mushrooms, you can look at it and you go, yeah, I can see that this is actually a mushroom. And to me, that's one of the most important things if a person wants to experiment with that. And I think, what do you mean.

You can tell it's a mushroom?

Well, I mean, you can look at it and you can see, okay, there's a cap there, there's a stem, because normally when they're sold, they're sold as an actual mushroom. So you can look at it. And it's not too hard to go out on the Internet and find out, okay, what they should look like. You know, you're getting the real thing. And at that point you can say, okay, I've got these things here. If you have a cheap little scale, you can weigh them out and say, okay, so you know what you've got, you know how much you can take. And so it's something where you have much more control over it, the worst thing possible. And what happened to a lot of people was they would take something that was way too powerful. And the next thing you know, they think they're just going to go out for a nice stroll and enjoy nature, whatever, and it overwhelms them, and the next thing you know, they're having a bad experience. Today, I think, you know, you're lucky, you're very lucky that today these things, whether it be ayahuasca, whether it be psilocybin mushrooms or whatever, there are groups, you know, what you're taking generally, although I will say this, I'm not a big fan of people going off to South America to do something like ayahuasca. I personally think that people are better off staying closer to home. We've got things here, we've got lots of mushrooms here people can use. Mushrooms are just as good. Again though, it's kind of like a matter of finding people to do it with. Being in the proper, what we would call set and setting, meaning you've got a nice comfortable room or area to consume these in. Somebody's taken care of. You don't want to be kicked back with that and have the phone ring or somebody at the door. You want it to be a very comfortable environment and then have a nice headspace when you start to do this. And I think it can be a very positive experience. And these days, psilocybe mushrooms and these types of plants are being used by psychiatrists. They're being used for addiction. They're being used in a lot of positive way. And I think there's a lot of positive that can come out of it. And the other side of it here, which is, I think really interesting and you and your listeners might be interested in, is there's also a theme, let's say, of people that are taking these things in small doses, like small microdoses of mushrooms. Like Maybe they're taking 250 milligrams, 500 milligrams a day, just as a micro dose and kind of just, you know, in a sense it enhances your senses. It might make things.

You mean these psilocybin based mushrooms? Yeah, very, very small doses. Interesting. I didn't know that.

Yeah, microdosing. There's kind of a movement out there, people that are experimenting with that. And I think that's very interesting. You know, there are people out there that have postulated that back in prehistory people were taking these things. And imagine if you're a hunter or something and you're eating these and your vision is more acute or your hearing is more acute, which happens, huh. When you're on.

Interesting. Is there, is there a place that people are buying these or like same as these medicinal mushrooms. Are there, are there places you can go to get them for. To get like clean versions that you can rely on?

You know what? I don't think we're at that point yet. You know, we're sort of like in a brave new world here in terms of the government allowing these things. I mean, I've lived most of my life where a lot of these things were absolutely illegal, and people go to jail for it. You know, it's not like today where all of a sudden pot is legal in Washington state and Colorado and nobody's going to jail anymore. I mean, I know people. I have friends that have been in jail for these kind of things. And I think right now, psilocybin mushrooms is still illegal. So I'm not advocating that anybody break the law. But they are out there, and if you know the right people, I'm sure you can get a hold of them. But again, this is something where it's a personal choice and people have to be ready to and in the right frame of mind to move in that direction.

That's interesting. Okay, I have one more question for you. If someone hadn't used mushrooms before and wanted to start putting them in their coffee or using a little bit in tea or a smoothie or whatever, is there one specific mushroom? I started with cordyceps because I was an athlete and wanted to use it for enhancing sports performance before I started to dig into reishi and shiitake and all these other ones that I kind of cycle through. What mushroom would you recommend? If somebody's never kind of used mushrooms before, what would you recommend as a good starting point or a good starting mushroom?

Personally, I think the best one out there is reishi. And the reason I say that is because not only do you have a high content of the beta glucans, but you also have these triterpenes. So you've got something that is really going to help balance you. You know, reishi is. And most of these mushrooms are considered adaptogens. There's something that will help harmonize. Roger Drummer might have talked about adaptogens, because that's something I'm sure he's well aware.

Yeah, he did quite a bit.

Yeah. And, you know, that's what these mushrooms are considered, adaptogens, and reishi is the protein premier one. Now, having said that, I also think that cordyceps is a fantastic. Let's just call it a mushroom. It's not a true mushroom, but call it a mushroom. And I think there's something there that can, in fact, enhance athletic performance. I mean, reishi and cordyceps, both, they have shown better oxygen utilization, and cordyceps traditionally has been used for. For endurance. And if you're fatigued, Cordyceps has been one of the primary herbs that they've used for people suffering from asthenia, where they're fatigued and tired from an illness or something like that. Cordyceps is a really excellent one. And here's the cool thing about Cordyceps, Ben, that you should know. And I think sky brought you some Cordyceps, which we're super excited about is Cordyceps is the traditional Cordyceps is the caterpillar with the cordyceps growing out of it. And that's right now the most expensive herb in China. $20,000 a kilogram. Can you imagine? Geez, $20,000 a kilogram. But there is another species of Cordyceps that has been used as long as this Cordyceps sinensis, which is the caterpillar with the cordyceps on it. And that is Cordyceps militaris. And that's what sky brought you. For the first time ever in the last five years, that cordyceps now has been brought into cultivation. So we're now cultivating these Cordyceps fruiting bodies in China. They're being cultivated. They're organically certified. No longer do people have to. Well, nobody's paying $20,000 or the price of getting a cordyceps or two. Most of this Cordyceps was, was produced either pure mycelium from China and called CS4, or people over here doing this whole mycelium on grain thing, which I've talked about. But now for the very first time, these Cordyceps fruiting bodies, those beautiful orange. Did you check out the color of those things? Did you see the.

Yeah, that's the difference is the color is crazy.

Isn't that so amazing, the color of those things? Well, that Cordyceps militaris, now we're selling it, I think it is going to be absolutely fantastic. It is going to be the next thing when it comes to cordyceps, because most cordyceps out there right now, fact is, most of it is not very good. And I don't recommend any of the Cordyceps products that are out there. Cordyceps militaris, fruiting body is. There's going to be a lot of companies putting that out soon, a lot of interest in it, and it's going to be absolutely incredible.

Yeah. And like I mentioned in the intro, there's a pretty cool recent study done on Cordyceps specifically, that you get the most benefit out of it with chronic Cordyceps loading, like using it every day. And in this, in this specific study, they looked at oxygen kinetics, peak power and time to exhaustion, and they use Cordyceps militaris. Exactly what you're just talking about in the study. I'll link to it in the show. Notes if people want to check it out. And what I'll link to also in the show notes, if you want to go to Jeff's website, if you want to look at Jeff's, his extracts are, you can get them on Amazon, for example. They're called real mushrooms. I'll link to this study, et cetera. You can get all this over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com realmushrooms. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Realmushrooms if you want to check out the show notes for this one, or if you have questions about mushrooms that you've discovered, questions about microdosing with psychedelics or anything else that you want to bring to the discussion, that's a good place to do it. So, Jeff, this has been fascinating. I love mushrooms, and you're obviously a wealth of knowledge on mushrooms. Oh, and the other thing is, if you're listening, get Jeff's book, the Mushroom Cultivator, if this stuff excites you and you want to find out more about beta glucans and triterpenoids and sterols and a lot of the other cool components in mushrooms, the research behind them, what they can do, et cetera. So, Jeff, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Hey, it has been a pleasure. I mean, it's been great. And, you know, I just want to say I love the fact that your generation, I mean, my son's about your age, is so into health and fitness. I just love that because it just shows the changing dynamics in this country and shows how there are people concerned about that and are are trying to be as healthy as possible in a society right now where, man, I tell you, you look out there and you got to shake your head. So my hat's off to you, Ben. Keep it up. I think it's just fantastic what you're doing.

Hey, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Well, all right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Jeff Chilton signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.