by Jill Nussinow
Press Democrat: Healthtime 2006
Imagine a food product that might be able to prevent cancer, boost your immune system, lessen the effects of diabetes, asthma and allergies, lower your cholesterol, and make you feel peppier. Surprise- it’s mushrooms. They are not yet included on the recently released International Food Information Council survey of Top Ten Functional Foods that people identify as having a health benefit beyond basic nutrition. Maybe it’s because, “We live in a land of ‘fungophobes’ (those scared of fungus, which includes mushrooms),” according to David Law of Gourmet Mushrooms, a Sebastopol mushroom production facility. If you fall into that category you may be amazed to learn about mushrooms and their potential benefit.
They are one of the newest, and oldest, products to shine in the nutrition spotlight. In Asia, various mushrooms and other fungi have been used as medicine for thousands of years. Yet here in the U.S., we’ve been conservative when it comes to mushroom consumption. It seems that people have finally gone beyond the white button mushroom (the common Agaricus) and will now eat the closely related crimini (brown, pronounced cri-me-knee), or their larger counterpart, the portabello. You can even find shiitake and oyster mushrooms in many grocery stores.
But there is literally a world of mushrooms beyond these; so many, in fact, that according to Charmoon Richardson of Wild About Mushrooms in Forestville, “It’s a big frontier at this point.” Some fungi are culinary delights and others are too tough, woody or bad tasting to eat on their own-they need to be consumed as tablets, capsules, powder, extracts and tinctures. No matter how you get your mushrooms, biologist Law suggests that a daily dose may keep you healthy.
If this sounds too good to be true, you’ll want to explore this as I did. After a conversation with a colleague about this article, I drove directly to a natural food store for a copy of a pamphlet that she’d picked up there. The Nutrition News issue “Mushrooms: Magic, Myth and Medicine” starts off with a quote by Andrew Weil, M.D., a well-known alternative medicine doctor, “The most fascinating aspect of medicinal mushrooms is enhancing the function and activity of the body’s immune system.”
So now I know why one might want to include medicinal mushrooms in the diet. Figuring out which are the medicinal ones may be more of a challenge. Gourmet Mushroom’s Law and co-owner Malcolm Clark have been studying medicinal mushrooms for 25 years. Law explains why the field of medicinal mushrooms isn’t better known. The number of mushrooms and other fungi that exist is staggering. Mycologists (those who study mushrooms) estimate the number of species at 1.7 million or more. Of those, only about 70,000 have been identified with about 270 known to be medicinal. So if just five percent of the yet unidentified fungi have medicinal value, there may possibly be thousands of medicinal mushrooms at our disposal. Thus, the fungi world looms large in our future. I have eaten mushrooms since I was a teenager, as I love their earthy flavor; I’ve even gone out hunting for fungi with Richardson for culinary purposes, though not yet as a source of medicine. But in the winter at the first sign of a scratchy throat or sniffle, I grab a bunch of kale, some garlic, ginger and shiitake mushrooms and either prepare a stir-fry or a soup, into which I add some miso, and it usually makes me feel better. In this way mushrooms are immunomodulators. Gerry Camarata, M.D., a Santa Rosa Integrative Family Medicine practitioner says, “Mushrooms keep your immune system in balance.” While Law recommends eating mushrooms for their immune enhancing effects, he is more likely to suggest that people pop a daily dose of tablets or capsules for more therapeutic use. “Capsules that contain a combination of medicinal mushrooms taken daily may help boost the immune system and protect your body from invasion by viruses and environmental microbes,” says Law.
Don Lareau, of Occidental Mushrooms, agrees with Law about getting mushroom products often but thinks that eating them is preferable to pills except for the unpalatable mushrooms. For example, he suggests taking Reishi (ray-shi) or Turkey Tail as tea or tincture. Lareau therefore is in the first stages of making mushroom tinctures. Until those are ready, you’ll find Lareau at the Sebastopol Farmers’ Market on Sundays selling Maitake (my-tah-k), Lion’s Mane and Elm Oyster mushrooms, fresh and ready to cook. He also sells mushroom logs so that you can try your hand at growing your own.
Lareau got his start in the mushroom business when his mother was diagnosed with cancer and he wanted to find a way to help her. Once he investigated, he found that mushrooms could indeed be used therapeutically, although he suggests that their role is much better as prevention. Lareau learned what he could and decided that he wanted to be a local, organic mushroom farmer.
In his four years in business, trial and error has shown him the way to produce mushrooms. He also learns what he can from others. The interest in mushrooms has spawned so much enthusiasm that in 2001 the First International Conference on Medicinal Mushrooms was hosted in the Ukraine. Lareau and approximately 350 others, including mushroom growers, scientists, marketers and business people, from 38 countries listened to lectures and discussed the subject for three days. Lareau came away realizing that all over the world mushrooms are being studied for their role in health maintenance, disease prevention and as possible cures. Various mushrooms are known to be antiviral, antibacterial, and antioxidant and free radical scavengers.
It turns out that mushrooms, which are the fruiting bodies of fungi, are unique in that they are not animal, vegetable or mineral. They contain some compounds such as chitin (pronounced kitin), beta glucans, which is a complex sugar molecule (also found abundantly in oats and is responsible for their cholesterol lowering effect), and glycoproteins that are not readily available in other food products. These substances may account for some of the health-producing properties of mushrooms. They also account for the mushroom’s positive nutrition profile: low in calories, sufficient fiber, plenty of B vitamins and filling.
If this sounds too good to be true, you’ll want to explore this as I did. After a conversation with a colleague about this article, I drove directly to a natural food store for a copy of a pamphlet that she’d picked up there. The Nutrition News issue “Mushrooms: Magic, Myth and Medicine” starts off with a quote by Andrew Weil, M.D., a well-known alternative medicine doctor, “The most fascinating aspect of medicinal mushrooms is enhancing the function and activity of the body’s immune system.”
So now I know why one might want to include medicinal mushrooms in the diet. Figuring out which are the medicinal ones may be more of a challenge. Gourmet Mushroom’s Law and co-owner Malcolm Clark have been studying medicinal mushrooms for 25 years. Law explains why the field of medicinal mushrooms isn’t better known. The number of mushrooms and other fungi that exist is staggering. Mycologists (those who study mushrooms) estimate the number of species at 1.7 million or more. Of those, only about 70,000 have been identified with about 270 known to be medicinal. So if just five percent of the yet unidentified fungi have medicinal value, there may possibly be thousands of medicinal mushrooms at our disposal. Thus, the fungi world looms large in our future. I have eaten mushrooms since I was a teenager, as I love their earthy flavor; I’ve even gone out hunting for fungi with Richardson for culinary purposes, though not yet as a source of medicine. But in the winter at the first sign of a scratchy throat or sniffle, I grab a bunch of kale, some garlic, ginger and shiitake mushrooms and either prepare a stir-fry or a soup, into which I add some miso, and it usually makes me feel better. In this way mushrooms are immunomodulators. Gerry Camarata, M.D., a Santa Rosa Integrative Family Medicine practitioner says, “Mushrooms keep your immune system in balance.” While Law recommends eating mushrooms for their immune enhancing effects, he is more likely to suggest that people pop a daily dose of tablets or capsules for more therapeutic use. “Capsules that contain a combination of medicinal mushrooms taken daily may help boost the immune system and protect your body from invasion by viruses and environmental microbes,” says Law.
Imagine a food product that might be able to prevent cancer, boost your immune system, lessen the effects of diabetes, asthma and allergies, lower your cholesterol, and make you feel peppier. Surprise-it’s mushrooms. They are not yet included on the recently released International Food Information Council survey of Top Ten Functional Foods that people identify as having a health benefit beyond basic nutrition. Maybe it’s because, “We live in a land of ‘fungophobes’ (those scared of fungus, which includes mushrooms),” according to David Law of Gourmet Mushrooms, a Sebastopol mushroom production facility. If you fall into that category you may be amazed to learn about mushrooms and their potential benefit.
They are one of the newest, and oldest, products to shine in the nutrition spotlight. In Asia, various mushrooms and other fungi have been used as medicine for thousands of years. Yet here in the U.S., we’ve been conservative when it comes to mushroom consumption. It seems that people have finally gone beyond the white button mushroom (the common Agaricus) and will now eat the closely related crimini (brown, pronounced cri-me-knee), or their larger counterpart, the portabello. You can even find shiitake and oyster mushrooms in many grocery stores.
But there is literally a world of mushrooms beyond these; so many, in fact, that according to Charmoon Richardson of Wild About Mushrooms in Forestville, “It’s a big frontier at this point.” Some fungi are culinary delights and others are too tough, woody or bad tasting to eat on their own-they need to be consumed as tablets, capsules, powder, extracts and tinctures. No matter how you get your mushrooms, biologist Law suggests that a daily dose may keep you healthy.
Mushrooms are a great addition to soups, stews, stir-fries, side dishes and veggie burgers and loaves. They taste great, too. All the mushroom experts that I spoke with recommend fully cooking your mushrooms to help make them more digestible. Dr. Camarata suggests that mushrooms’ main components are water soluble and the nutrients are most available in soups, stews and dishes that use liquid and that you consume.
“I recommend that people eat shiitake, oyster or maitake mushrooms three times a week. They are an A+++ food and we’re just beginning to discover what they do,” says Dr. Camarata.
The reason that mushrooms can now be recommended for their medicinal benefits is that more than 20 species are currently being produced commercially so that they are available on a consistent basis. They are still expensive because the mushrooms are not always easy to grow. You can grow the part that doesn’t fruit in a much shorter time and use that part medicinally but some, including Lareau, prefer the actual mushroom. This means for his maitake mushrooms he must wait five months for the fruiting body versus three and a half weeks for the mycelium. And some mushrooms, like Cordyceps (caterpillar fungus), either needs to be gathered from 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas and found growing out of a caterpillar. (Yes, it sounds strange but it’s true.), or the spawn can be made into a tincture. According to Lareau, the main chemical component, cordycepin, is in the mycelium.
To stay healthy in the winter Lareau drinks reishi tea three or four times a week and finds that he rarely gets sick. In fact, some studies in Japan have shown that mushroom producers are healthier than the average worker. Perhaps just being around the fungi has a positive health effect.
One of my Santa Rosa Junior College students, Noriko Shoji, told me that in her native Japan people eat mushrooms as food and don’t really think of them as medicine. “We like shiitake, shimeji (a type of oyster mushroom) and enoki. We eat them because they taste good.” And maybe that’s reason enough for you to eat them, too.
Jill, The Veggie Queen says
Judi,
You are so welcome. Sharing and education are what I do best (sometimes). There is so much to learn, especially about fungi.
Judi says
As usual, so much valuable information! Thank you so much!
Jill, The Veggie Queen says
Thank you for your comment. I appreciate it.
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