Health Benefits of Medicinal Mushrooms
Julia Valiente Why so much interest in mushrooms?
How is it possible that mushrooms have taken so long to be studied by science when our ancestors have known about their properties for thousands of years? There is a certain logic in the fact that there are mushrooms that can heal, others that kill, and still others that take you on a mystical journey. When the effects of a family of botanicals are so powerful and varied, it is logical that they command a certain respect and their study is put on the back burner. Fortunately for all of us, that is changing.
The increasing interest is due not only to the deep cultural history of their use, but also to modern methods of mycelium tissue culture and new methods for testing the effect of individual components and their synergies. Thanks to these studies, we now know that mushrooms create new and exclusive substances with high medicinal value. Even our ancestors knew that mushrooms can be a deep reservoir of effective medicines, and now science confirms this popular wisdom.
We know that Ganoderma lucidum (Reishi) has at least 16,000 genes encoding more than 200,000 compounds, 400 of which are “active components.”
Mushrooms are tiny pharmaceutical laboratories that produce a huge variety of unique compounds that offer enormous potential to be explored. It's clear that mushrooms evolved their unique properties not to become medicines for humans, but to defend themselves against their own predators. However, the chemicals they produce also benefit humans, which is probably no coincidence. Over the course of human evolution, those who learned to use mushrooms and plants as medicine were more likely to survive disease and reproduce, so they needed to not only recognize which mushrooms were useful and safe and which were not, but also be able to respond appropriately to their ingredients. Over time, we evolved pattern recognition receptors specific to other non-human molecules. For example, mushroom beta-glucans activate our immune system, and the variety of responses to other compounds is astonishing and greater than that to plants. That's because humans are more closely related to mushrooms than to plants. It is therefore possible that our bodies respond better to the substances produced by mushrooms, which explains why their medicinal effects on humans are so strong and varied.
Furthermore, fungi are an important part of ecosystems, and understanding their role in nature is key to understanding their therapeutic effects. We are currently experiencing a scientific revolution regarding medicinal mushrooms, something our ancestors would surely celebrate.
Photo by: Andrew Ridley