Mushrooms – The New Power Food

 
The French are obsessed with their mushrooms.

When it is ‘mushroom season’, there are undercover outings in the dark of the night, or at the crack of dawn to find the biggest and the best wild mushrooms.

Lingzhi or Reishi Mushroom

Once you find a spot, it is a super closely guarded secret that you don’t even share with family members. well, maybe on your death bed but even then…

The Chinese are also very keen on their mushrooms. For the longest time they have always known the health benefits of various types of mushrooms and the highest prized ones can go for thousands of dollars for a handful.

The Lingzhi or Reishi Cracked Spores comes to mind

For the Chinese and Japanese and many Far Eastern countries, cooking with mushrooms is an art. There is a mushroom to make every dish a special one, or to have specific meanings. They can also signify the arrival of certain seasons or an impending festival.

In America, 900 million pound of mushrooms are consumed each year, but only 5 % of those mushrooms are not button mushrooms (which is a shame really).

The Mushroom Expert

Steve Farrar has a master degree in Horticulture from Washington State University and he has been studying mushrooms for thirty years. The last ten years, he has been concentrating on the medicinal or health benefits of various mushrooms on our health:

“I’m continually humbled by my ignorance of what’s going on in this incredible complex world of fungi,” Farrar says. “It’s just mind boggling. Even with the well-studied species, nearly every week they’re finding a new bioactive component… Maybe it’s a polysaccharide, maybe it’s an enzyme, a protein, an antioxidant. They are continually finding new things that have profound effects when we consume them as a food or as a dietary supplement.”

Mushrooms have great antioxidant properties and is known to boost the immune system. Aside from the more common antioxidant properties like selenium and polyphenols, mushrooms has this ‘master antioxidant’ ergothioneine which has only recently been generating interest in the health industry even though it was discovered in 1909.

Ergothioneine – ‘Master Antioxidant’

According to Nature journal in 2009, ergothioneine has “an unusual sulfur-containing derivative of the amino acid, histidine,” and can very specifically target DNA oxidative damage.

Steve Farrar also believes that glyconutrients (complex sugars) contained in the fruit body and the mycelia also has many immune benefits:

“The vital information that can be contained in these sugars is astounding,” he says. “…The way they communicate is… through receptor sites on your cells. It’s described as a lock and a key. There are receptor sites depending on the physical structure of the polysaccharides, the side branches, and the substitutions on it, [and] they will lock on to certain components of your immune system and activate it much like they would be activated by coming into contact with the bacteria.

It’s very profound effects, and we don’t fully understand them… But it’s really these long chained polysaccharides (that are immense complex structures), a lot of times bound with proteins or amino acids or different side chains, that have the effect on your immune system.”

The trick is to eat a wide variety of mushrooms (make sure they are organic if possible) across board: oyster mushrooms, shiitake, maitake, brown beech and more. The larger the variety, the better it will be for your immune system.

Or you could take supplements in pill or powder form but make sure it of the highest quality.

Watch the interview here with Steve Farrar

Related articles for a new anti aging power food : mushrooms

• Mushroom and Health: Edible, Medicinal, and Psychedelic Types (webmd.com)
• Urban Forager | Reishi, the Leathery Healer (cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com)