September 14, 2018

Mushroom Supplements with Jeff Chilton

52 minutes

In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Jeff Chilton explains how to buy mushroom supplements, along with the benefits of medicinal mushrooms.

Jeff Chilton studied ethno-mycology at the University of Washington in the late sixties. A founding member of the World Society for Mushroom Biology and Mushroom Products and a Member of the International Society for Mushroom Science, Mr. Chilton’s company was the first to offer a complete line of Certified Organic mushroom extracts to the US nutritional supplement industry. Nammex extracts are used by many supplement companies and are noted for their high quality based on scientific analysis of the active compounds.

Main Questions Asked about Mushroom Supplements:

Mushrooms are not like typical plants. What makes them different?

Can you talk about the nutritional value of mushrooms?

Can you talk about the benefits from taking mushrooms – mushrooms we get at our grocery store versus medicinal mushrooms?

How can we learn more about which mushrooms to take for a particular condition?

Can you tell us about the white paper you published about medicinal mushrooms?

What should I be looking for on the label when buying medicinal mushrooms?

Key Points made by Jeff about Mushroom Supplements:

Without mushrooms, we would be deep in all of the leaves and branches and all the rest of that organic litter that’s out there. So they’re decomposing and helping us out.

Mushrooms are a fantastic food. They’ve got a good amount of protein for a vegetable, it could be anywhere from 20% to 40% protein. They’ve got a high level of very quality carbohydrates and they’re also really high in fiber. Mushrooms feed our microbiome.

They taste wonderful and I encourage all your listeners, try mushrooms if you haven’t eaten them already. They’re a delicious and wonderful food that also will act as a medicine.

Beta-glucan is found in the cell walls of mushrooms – all mushrooms have a certain amount of those beta-glucans. But what happens is that the beta-glucan has very distinctive architecture and each mushroom will have a little bit different architecture.

When we consume them, they are going to sit in the background. They’re what’s called a host defense potentiator. So they’re something that if we need some help immunologically, they will activate. If we don’t, they’ll still kind of sit there, but they’re there and they can help us and since they’re what are considered to be an adaptogen.

When I think about health, I think about it in terms of balance. What has become out of balance? What is it that is harming us in that sense?

If someone has liver difficulties, you’d want to be taking reishi because it helps with purifying the blood.

Lion’s mane has been used traditionally for dementia.

Some scientists are just looking for some compound that ultimately they can refine into a drug and that’s a world away from what we’re talking here which is consuming mushrooms as a food and/or taking a mushroom extract as a nutritional supplement. You have to be very careful when you’re looking at the research.

There’s a world of difference between this mycelium and the actual mushroom. Mushrooms produce a lot of compounds that the mycelium does not produce. The mycelium’s purpose out there is to amass nutrients and then put up this mushroom.

There is an iodine test that can be done at home to tell if your mushroom supplement is good or not.

When you hear some company talking about full spectrum, that’s another sign that this is a product that they want to claim has mushroom in it, but it really doesn’t. There weren’t any mushrooms because it was just this myceliated grain and that’s what they were showing right there, even though they make claims about full spectrum and call their products mushrooms and it’s just a bait and switch is all it is. It’s just a true bait and switch.

Resources Mentioned for Mushroom Supplements:

Jeff’s website

Purchase medicinal mushrooms

Book – Reclaim Your Energy and Feel Normal Again

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