Mushrooms are really trendy right now, as they ought to be because they are packed with medicinal properties many of us may benefit from:
Hannah foraging Chicken of the Woods
anti-tumor
anti-parasite
ant-bacterial
heals psoriasis & skin disorders
anti-fungal
immune modulating
seasonal allergy support
anti-cancer
liver cleansing
blood cleansing
cholesterol lowering
anti-inflammatory
While edible mushrooms are certainly delicious and full of nutrients, I am writing about the medicinal kinds: chaga, reishi, turkey tail, lions mane, shiitake, and cordyceps.
There are so many new mushroom products on the market, how do you know which to choose?
5 suggestions when sourcing:
Medicinal Mushrooms usually have a tough cell wall known as chitin. Mushrooms require either heat and water or fat or alcohol to break down this wall to make the compounds available to our human digestive systems. Simply eating powdered chaga is not going to give you much of a benefit other than some tough fiber and maybe even a belly ache. Make sure the products you are trying, whether pills, powders, tinctures or teas have been DOUBLE EXTRACTED first. Otherwise, you're buying an expensive fiber supplement with very few of the medicinal benefits listed above. Double extraction means the mushrooms have been both cooked in water to pull out the water soluble compounds like & beta D- glucans AND then added to alcohol to pull out the alcohol soluble compounds. Never consume mushrooms raw.
Double Extracted Maitake Tincture
2. Some products are made from only the mycelium (non fruiting body) of the mushrooms, which can have different benefits. So, be sure you are buying a product with at least fruiting body in it. Mycelium is great, too, but a lot of companies only use it because it is faster to grow therefore less expensive to mass produce. The fruiting body is full of medicinal compounds.
3. Know your source and trust it. Call the company and ask how the product is made to ensure it is the highest quality. If you don't get a response or anyone on the phone...maybe bring your business elsewhere.
4. Ethical and Sustainable Harvesting: many mushrooms take a long time to grow and when harvested improperly can damage the host (tree) or disrupt the mushrooms reproduction. Ask the company about their harvesting or cultivating practices. For example, when I harvest reishi ganoderma, I wait until it has spored out or sent it reproductive function into the forest to make more reishi. Then, I harvest. I only take enough for my apothecary being conscious of not taking too much, leaving some for others foragers and forest critters.
5. Gluten free: some mushrooms are grown on substrate so you want to be sure if you are gluten intolerant, they are growing on gluten free substrate. Be sure this substrate it not acting as a filler in the products either.
At Sweet Birch Herbals, we sustainably wild harvest and source the mushrooms that go into our products such as Shroom Immune. We are a small company that cares about the forests first and foremost.
Maitake & a happy Tilly
If you prefer powders over tinctures, I suggest sourcing from Healing Spirits Herb Farm in Avoca, NY. They are fabulous herbalists who grow and forage mushrooms for their powders. I buy their six blend powder for daily use.
Let me know if you have any mushroom questions!
For more about wild foraging, check out this post on Chaga or watch my videos on Instagram.
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