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Mushrooms – they’re not just a pizza topping! From shiitake and reishi to turkey tail and cordyceps, fungi have a variety of benefits. Jeff Chilton of Nammex talks about the nutrient profile of his favorite mushrooms and how to choose the best mushroom supplements.
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Products mentioned in this episode: Daily Greens Plus, Pre-Workout Elite
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During this episode you’ll learn about:
Resources to topics mentioned in this episode:
Products mentioned in this episode: Daily Greens Plus, Pre-Workout Elite
Subscribe to More Content
Subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. You can also learn more about the topics in the episode by checking out the latest news, videos, and stories on Thorne’s Take 5 Daily blog.
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Dr. Robert Rountree (INTRO):
This is The Thorne Podcast, the show that navigates the complex world of wellness and explores the latest science behind diet, supplements, and lifestyle approaches to good health. I’m Dr. Robert Rountree, Chief Medical Advisor at Thorne and functional medicine doctor. As a reminder, the recommendations made in this podcast are the recommendations of the individuals who express them and not the recommendations of Thorne. Statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to The Thorne Podcast. Joining me this week is Jeff Chilton. He’s a master of mycology and the founder of Nammex, a company that supplies businesses like Thorne with high-quality mushroom extracts for use in dietary supplements. Jeff, welcome to the show. Why don’t you tell our listeners about yourself, and in particular, how do you get to be a master of mycology?
Jeff Chilton:
[Laughs] Well, probably one of the best ways is to live in an area that has lots of mushrooms growing in it. I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Mushrooms were around me my whole life. When I went to university, I was at the University of Washington, and there’s very few universities that actually have a mycology department. My field of study though was anthropology, but I did study mycology while I was there. I put the two together into ethnomycology, because I was really interested in the use of mushrooms by people worldwide for food, for medicine, and in shamanic purposes.
Look, Bob, the ’60s were full of a lot of shamanism, so you have to understand that that was part of our culture back then. So, mushrooms were a real part of my life then. Then when I left university, well, what do you do with a degree in anthropology? Well, not a whole lot of jobs for that. So, I decided, well, there’s a mushroom farm that’s 60 miles down the road in Olympia, Washington, the only one in the state. I was there for the next 10 years, literally living with mushrooms.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Wow. So, you lived and breed them?
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, let me tell you. I loved every minute of it. This was a very, very large mushroom farm. It was primarily an Agaricus farm. So, we were growing about 2 million pounds of Agaricus a year, but we had a Japanese scientist there. He was growing shiitake and enokitake and oyster mushroom. So, I was able to see these other mushrooms being grown. So, it was just a wonderful time for me to be there to learn as much as possible. Every week, we were generating 320 tons of compost to feed the crops that we were growing down there. So, it was a huge operation on a very large scale, but I was just reading as much as I could get to my hands on, read a lot more about functional or medicinal mushrooms. That ultimately was where my career… the path it took.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Cool. Well, that segues nicely into the topic for the week, which is mushrooms. I will say I just had my sauteed shiitake in my eggs this morning.
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, my favorite mushroom.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, I eat shiitake actually several times a week. So, that’s how people often think about mushrooms. They maybe see them in the woods, they see them in the grocery store, and then a smaller percentage in the West really think about using them medicinally. Medicinal fungi, I guess, is the appropriate scientific term for that. So, again, a lot of our listeners, when they think about mushrooms, they think about pizza, right? Or they think about spaghetti.
Jeff Chilton:
[Laughs] Well, what’s interesting is that when I was at the mushroom farm in the ’70s, classical nutritionists said, “Mushrooms have no nutritional value.” Why did they say that? Well, because mushrooms are very low in calories, but the fact is that mushrooms are fabulous foods. They have a reasonable amount of protein, 20 to 40 percent. They’re mostly carbohydrate, but that’s very slow-acting carbohydrate like mannitol, trehalose, so very slow digesting it. They do not have starch as their carbohydrate. That’s for plants. No, mushrooms have these other carbohydrates, and half of those carbohydrates are in the fiber. So, mushrooms are very, very high in fiber. As you know, besides the fact of what it does in terms of our digestion, it’s also feeding our microbiome.
So, I’m constantly telling people, put mushrooms into your diet. They’re a fantastic food. I call them actually the forgotten food and the missing dietary link. I mean, this is something where in Asia and other parts of the world, they have appreciated mushroom for thousands of years. We’ve really lost that appreciation in the West and now just are rediscovering it. So, put mushrooms into your diet. If there’s only one mushroom, make it shiitake. [Laughs] It is fabulous. It’s such a wonderful mushroom, and not only is it a wonderful edible, but it’s got amazing functional value to it.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
A number of years ago, I was in Beijing, and the hotel I was staying at had a restaurant that was a fungal restaurant. Every single thing on the menu had some kind of mushroom, and I’m not even sure I would call them mushroom. I mean, they were strange looking shapes, things that looked like ladders. I mean very odd-looking things. It just occurred to me they have such a different concept of mushrooms or fungi in Asia, in Japan, in China, in Korea, than we do here. I mean, what do you think that’s about?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, you know what? I think what it’s about to some degree is “food as medicine.” Those restaurants, I’ve been to a couple of those, because they are in different parts of the country there, and it is pretty amazing that they can create all these dishes. You look at, there are dozens of dishes that they’ve got with the different mushrooms in them, but I love that concept. I think as you know, I mean, our diet is the foundation of our health. So, you really have to have a good diet and what you put into your body, it gives you not just that nutrition, but it has this other functional value to it.
Well, that’s really what we want to be doing. We don’t want to be consuming things that are taking us in the wrong direction. We want something that’s going to enhance our health. I think mushrooms are a perfect example of that.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I guess I’d have to say that most people when they think of mushrooms, they think of… Is it Agaricus bisporus? The button mushrooms that you get in a standard grocery store and not the shiitake. Can you say something about the difference in medicinal potential of different mushrooms? It seems to me like the button mushrooms probably have the least medicinal potential of any mushroom out there. They’re the most popular in this country, but again, compared to shiitake, there’s a range, in other words.
Jeff Chilton:
Yeah, even when it comes to nutritional, I mean, every mushroom has got a different medicinal profile in terms of nutritional profile. Look, I lived with the button mushroom for 10 years. I actually still love eating it. I haven’t let go of that. It is a wonderful edible.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
It tastes great.
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, yeah. Believe it or not, they’ve had tests in it. It does have medicinal properties in it as well.
I mean, every mushroom in its cell wall has compounds we call beta-glucans. Beta-glucans are part of the fiber in mushrooms, but there’s been a lot of research on the beta-glucans. The beta-glucans are what provide us with what I call immunological potentiation. That’s really what mushrooms are giving us. That’s the primary thing. Every mushroom has these beta-glucans in their cell walls. The difference is that these beta-glucans have different structures. So, they’re all what we call 1,3/1,6 – that’s how they’re put together – the 1,6 is the branching. But some have a more effectiveness than others.
Those are the ones that we look at as let’s just say the top 10 mushrooms that we consider highly functional in their activity for us and where there’s a huge body of research. Whenever I’m talking about mushrooms to people, that to me is the primary thing that I talk about because mushrooms potentiate our immune system. They sit in the background. When we are challenged in some way, they come forward; they will activate different immune cells – whether it’s macrophages or T-cells, NK cells. That’s what their function is really. I tell people too, don’t think that when you take them today, whatever you’re taking them for, tomorrow, you’re going, “Oh, my God. I feel so much better.”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not caffeine.
Jeff Chilton:
[Laughs] No, it’s not caffeine. So, the point is you have to look at them like a vitamin. You have to look at them as something that you’re taking every single day. You’re incorporating it into your diet. It’s not something where, “OK, I can take that aspirin, I can take that ibuprofen, and my inflammation or pain an hour or so, it goes away.” No, they’re there. They’re sitting in the background, just like you would take vitamin D for example. No, that’s how you should look at eating or supplementing. The first thing I tell people, eat mushrooms first. Put them into your diet, and then if you want to supplement, fine, go ahead and supplement, but it’s really important to put them into your diet.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
To eat them. So, we keep using this word “mushroom.” I’m hoping you can offer us a scientific definition of “mushroom,” i.e., fruiting body. What’s the significance of talking about these things as mushrooms or mycelia? Why would anyone care? Why would the consumer care about mycelia or mushroom?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, yeah, and look, it’s interesting, because as a mushroom grower, it’s like mushrooms don’t have any seeds. OK, so how am I going to grow mushrooms? There’s no seeds. Well, mushrooms have spores. Those spores in nature, they’re out in the wind currents. They land on the soil. They land on wood. When conditions are right, those spores will germinate into a very fine filament called a hypha. When multiple filaments come together, they will form a network. That network is called mycelium. Mycelium is what we call the “vegetative body.” It is actually the phallus, or the body, of this organism. When conditions are right, that mycelium, which is out there, and it is consuming organic matter. Look, it’s very important for our ecology. It’s part of this repurposing of organic matter ultimately into humus.
So, as one of the players in that world, when conditions are right, it will produce a very fine little knot of mycelium, which develops slowly into a mature mushroom. When that mushroom matures, it will produce spores, and it will complete this lifecycle. Now, this fungal organism in this lifecycle as consumers and looking for supplements, we want to know what the part is. With plants, we’d say, “What’s the plant part? Is it a root? Is it a leaf?”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yup. Above ground, below ground, right?
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, yeah, yeah. So, the point is, OK, with this fungal organism, we have spores, which in China, believe it or not, they’ll collect the spores of reishi mushroom, and they will put them through a process they call cracking. They’ll crack these spores and sell them as a supplement. Look, I’ve looked at it, don’t bother. There’s a lot of hype around it, and people are making tons of money selling these things. One reishi mushroom, believe it or not, can produce as much as 400 grams of spores.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
There’s money to be made there.
Jeff Chilton:
There’s money to be made there. Yeah. So, you have the spore. You have the mycelium, which is the vegetative body. You have the mushroom, which is the fruiting body. So, those are our three “plant” parts: spore, mycelium, mushroom. This is so important because there are companies that will grow the mycelium on sterilized grain. They’ll grow it on there for 30 to 60 days. It coats the grain with this. For people who have never seen mycelium before, mycelium is… If you’ve ever seen a mold growing on your bread, it starts out as a white. Then next thing you know, it turns green or black, which is the sporulation of this mold. But a fuzzy white filament, that’s what mycelium looks like. It will coat this grain. Again, it’s all done in a laboratory. They will then take it out, grain it all, and they will put it into a dryer. They’ll dry it out, grind it to a powder, and then sell it to you as mushroom.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
It’s not mushroom.
Jeff Chilton:
Look, it is not a mushroom. In fact, what it is mostly is grain starch.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Starch.
Jeff Chilton:
We actually did an analysis. We put it on a chart, analysis of the grain it’s grown on, and a lot of them will grow on oats or rice. Then we took the nutritional analysis of the mushroom itself and charted it on there and charted these mycelium on grain products on there. Those products where they’re growing this mycelium on the grain charted nutritionally exactly like the grain it is grown on, nowhere close to the mushroom itself. Again, this is something people have to be really aware of. Look, there’s nothing wrong with mycelium. It’s not like mycelium vs. mushroom. There’s nothing wrong with mycelium if it’s a pure mycelium, which they grow a lot of in China in liquid culture, tons and tons and tons of it. But these products do not separate the mycelium from the grain. What that ultimately means is you’re buying a lot of starch, a lot of grain powder. Can you imagine on the front panel it says “reishi mushroom” with a picture of a reishi mushroom and you think you’re getting a mushroom product? If you’re lucky in the fine print on the other side will tell you, “OK, what’s in this?” It’s like, “Oh, myceliated grain,” but they’ll have mushroom somewhere else. The front panel says, “Mushroom.” You think you’ve got a mushroom product, but in fact you’ve got nothing but grain starch.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Or cellulose maybe. I don’t know.
Jeff Chilton:
You could have cellulose as well in there. So, it’s really unfortunate, because if you go into, whether it’s Whole Foods or some other marketplace, 50 percent, I’m not kidding, 50 percent of the products in there will be these myceliated grain products. It is really unfortunate, especially – and this is what galls me the most – you have naturopaths that don’t know any better actually telling people to get these products. It’s just shocking. We push back on that in a major way. We just filed a citizen petition with the FDA over labeling issues. You have to label your product properly, and they’re not doing it. Because of that, you have a lot of people taking what they think is a mushroom product when in fact, it’s not anywhere close to a mushroom product.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
So there’s no standardization requirements that say, “This product has got this amount of beta-glucan in it,” in other words.
Jeff Chilton:
No, there’s not. Look, we introduced the beta-glucan standard into the industry in 2015. In 2015, I published a white paper where I analyzed 40 of these different myceliated grain products. I also analyzed whole dried mushrooms and our mushroom extracts and demonstrated that those products were low in beta-glucan, about 5 percent, when in fact mushrooms are 25- to 60-percent beta-glucan. They had up to 30- to 60-percent alpha-glucan, which are the starches, where a normal mushroom with the testing was somewhere below 5 percent. What actually it’s measuring is glycogen. Isn’t that interesting? Mushrooms as their storage carbohydrate have the same storage carbohydrate we do. Of course, there’s talk out there about how we have these similarities with mushrooms. It’s very interesting because that organism is doing the same thing that we’re doing. It’s breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
So if you’re expecting to take one of these products with low beta-glucan as an immune support, you’re probably not getting much.
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, you’re not getting anything at all. It’s really unfortunate. It’s not just the beta-glucans. I mean, if you look at, for example, a reishi mushroom. A reishi mushroom is a bio factory. This mushroom is producing all of these triterpenoids, over 100 different triterpenoids, a few other compounds. The mycelium, even pure mycelium, has very, very low amounts of triterpenoids. So, you’re not even getting the secondary metabolites with these products. It’s so unfortunate. I mean, the bottom line is, again, it’s mostly grain starch, very few of the compounds that you’re looking for in an actual functional mushroom. Again, we do everything we can to educate people about this whole issue,
But look, it’s not killing anybody. So, FDA doesn’t really care, even though they actually have a compliance document that says you cannot call mycelium “mushroom.” You can’t insinuate that mycelium is mushroom. This is from 1976. So, look. A lot of people think, “Well, why isn’t the FDA getting involved?” It’s like the FDA is looking for things that are killing people out there or real issues. That’s where they step in. But otherwise, no, they’ve got so many other bigger fish to fry, so to speak. That’s unfortunate, because what it does is it makes people go, “Oh, yeah, there’s no regulation around supplements at all.” Supplements are so heavily regulated.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Heavily regulated. Yeah.
Jeff Chilton:
You have no idea at how regulated they are, but the fact is, no, they don’t make you test your products for compounds in there or anything like that. If you’re making wild claims about them, yeah, they will hunt you down. If you’re making cancer claims or some other claims, no, you can’t do that. They’ll step in. But otherwise, no, they can’t enforce anything like the actual quality or how genuine is this supplement product? No, that’s not what they’re about.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
OK, this is a little bit of a side question and I want to come back to this, but a couple of years ago, I was in Shanghai, and I went to a traditional Chinese medicine store. They had cordyceps behind the counter, and these were beautiful. I mean, they’re in a little display box and everything. These things are selling one piece of cordyceps for $1,000. $1,000 for one piece of cordyceps! Is there more medicinal value to these products, or is it like ginseng in that you have a beautiful ginseng root and it makes a nice art display. But is there actually any added medicinal value to these really expensive cordyceps products that you see? I’m not talking about capsules now. I’m talking about the actual fruiting body.
Jeff Chilton:
Yeah. Well, Bob, I’ve been to that store. [Laughs] There’s probably more than one of them in Shanghai. It is interesting. You see, they’ve made them into these beautiful displays. Sometimes they’ve got like 20 to 50 of them that are woven into a beautiful looking display, something you’d probably put on your wall. Look, nobody actually consumes those, what we call caterpillar fungus, regularly. They’re probably, and mostly my understanding is, purchased as gifts for somebody because nobody can afford them. Nobody can afford it. I mean, I was at Natural Foods Expo exhibiting in 1991. I was walking around and I was meeting different companies. I had cordyceps with me and I said, “Hey, cordyceps, it’s been used for a long...” At that time, it was $1,000 a kilo. It was like, “What do you think?” I told them a little bit about it. They just looked at it and they went, “Our customers are not going to eat caterpillars.” After all, they’re vegetarians now. Come on.
But look, here’s what’s happened, which is so wonderful, cordyceps, this caterpillar fungus, is wildcrafted up in the foothills of Tibet. People are on their hands and knees combing through pastures looking for these, because the caterpillar itself is underground and all you see is this little blade coming off of it. So, they call it “winter worm, summer grass.” They’ll actually dig this thing up very gently and pull that caterpillar out with that little grass blade-like cordyceps that’s growing off of it, clean it up, and then take it to market.
Well, guess what? We cultivate cordyceps, not that species, but we cultivate a species called Cordyceps militaris. And militaris is a beautiful orange species that they learned how to grow in Asia 10 years ago. So, that’s what we will sell. Look, when you think about $15,000 for a dried kilogram, our entry level product for cordyceps is a one-to-one extract of Cordyceps militaris. We sell that wholesale for $70. So, big, big difference there. They’ve been using Cordyceps militaris in traditional Chinese medicine interchangeably with Cordyceps sinensis. My God, today, nobody really, no practitioner is going to be using Cordyceps sinensis in their practice, unless they’re working with a billionaire or something like that, because nobody can really afford that cordyceps.
I’m not a proponent of wildcrafting at all. Wildcrafting, to me, it always ends up in tears. Whatever it is gets overharvested. In Europe in the 1890s, they were harvesting 200 tons of truffles. Today, they harvest 9 tons of truffles. A lot of the truffles that they harvest today are coming from tree plantations where they’ve planted them, and they have truffle mycelium on the roots and takes a long time, but ultimately, they start producing. So, you can imagine that’s what happens ultimately with wildcrafting. One of the things that we’ve done recently, we are selling a lot of turkey tail. Turkey tail has really come on as a very strong product, and people are really getting a lot more interested in turkey tail.
Well, I’m just like, “Wildcrafted turkey tail, OK, wonderful.” But when you look at them, they’ve harvested these things. They’re all different ages. They could be this year’s. They could be last year’s. There could be a lookalike in there. It’s just not really a very good way to procure this mushroom. So, I went, “OK, look, we’re going to grow these things.” It took us about four or five years to get anybody actually want to grow them, because the issue with mushroom growing is the harvest. Every mushroom you’ve ever eaten has been harvested by hand.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Hand.
Jeff Chilton:
Can you imagine that? They’re still harvesting them by hand. So, it’s like with these turkey tails, every one of these things probably weighs less than a gram. One Agaricus mushroom weighs 35 grams, one midsized agaricus mushroom. So, people are just like, “Oh, my God. No, we don’t want to grow those because we’d never be able to harvest them at all.” Well, we finally found somebody that’s growing them. Last year, we grew 10 dried tons of cordyceps, that cultivated cordyceps. We’re going to grow more this year. We’re going to get away completely from wildcrafted cordyceps. The beauty of it is you’ve got a consistent product. That’s why I love cultivation.
All of our mushrooms are cultivated, and they’re cultivated on the substrates that they would grow on naturally, which means they’re going to produce the compounds we’re after, because the precursors are there in that wood, for example. Interesting thing is that most functional mushrooms grow on wood. It really is really fascinating. Most of them are wood decomposers.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Doesn’t the term shiitake mean “grows on oak”?
Jeff Chilton:
Yes, it does. Absolutely. “Take” is Japanese for mushroom. So, “shii” actually denotes the genus. So, they call it “shiitake.” Then look at all the other mushrooms. It’s maitake…
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Maitake.
Jeff Chilton:
… enokitake. So, it’s cool. I really think it’s a great way to talk about the Japanese mushroom.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Well, I think it’s time for us to take a short break. So, what we’re going to do is step away for a second, and then we’re going to come back and answer some questions from our listeners.
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We’re back. So, now it’s time to answer some questions from the community. Our first question this week comes from a listener who asks, “What should I look for when selecting a mushroom-based supplement to ensure I’m getting a high-quality product?” We mentioned something about beta-glucan standardization, etc. Is that it? Or are there other ways?
Jeff Chilton:
That’s very important. Look for a product that gives you amount of beta-glucan. If it says polysaccharides, don’t.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
[Laughs] Look out.
Jeff Chilton:
Because polysaccharides are also starches. So, some of these companies can hide behind a polysaccharide, but look for somebody who’s giving you an… We give a percentage of polysaccharides on all of our retail and wholesale products. The other thing too is look closely in the other ingredients. Some of these companies will actually tell you that they’re selling myceliated oats or myceliated rice. So, look very closely at that, but certainly look for somebody that’s selling something that says, “OK, X amount of beta-glucans.”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Are there any particular mushrooms that are especially effective for boosting the immune system? So we talked about how beta-glucans do that in general, at least the 1,3/1,6 linkages do that, but is there one mushroom that really stands out or are they all good?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, what’s really interesting is because we test for beta-glucans, we’ve been able to see which mushrooms have how much beta-glucan in them. Interestingly enough, the two mushrooms that are highest in beta-glucans are the turkey tail and reishi mushroom. Yeah. Both of those have around 50-percent beta-glucan. It’s amazing that those two super-important mushrooms in fact have the largest amounts of beta-glucan. So, definitely, those two would be your number ones.
Look, just really quickly on this in terms of sometimes you’ll see companies selling, oh, our product has seven different species. Then some other company will say, “Oh, but we’ve got 10, so we’re better than you.” Then another one says, “Well, we’ve got 17.” It’s just like this thing of what I call a kitchen sink product. The more species they have in there, the less of the important ones that are in there. My line in the sand is about five species. We have one product that we sell. We call it immune complex. We have five different species. Any more than that, you’re just diluting the best ones. So, be aware of that.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
OK, so a mixture of about five is a really good one.
Jeff Chilton:
Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Look, you can also just focus on one of the other. You can focus on the turkey tail. You can focus on the reishi extract. But if you want to have something where you have multiple species, no more than five.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I got to say thousands of years ago in China, somebody figured out you can rip this rock-hard shell, a monkey’s bench, off a tree and boil it for hours on end, make a tea and give it to the emperor, and the emperor won’t die. I mean, that was a gutsy there. “You drink this.” “No, you drink this. How about you drink this? We’ll see if this helps.” So, I mean, it’s mind boggling to me that somebody ever figured out that reishi in particular would have any medicinal value to it. How would you know?
Jeff Chilton:
Yeah, I know. That’s almost like, how would anybody know that this caterpillar with this little fungus growing off of it? You must’ve been pretty hungry.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll try anything. So, that brings us to this next question, which is, well, how do you cultivate mushrooms? What’s the process, and is this a sustainable process? So you mentioned wildcrafting, which is depleting species, right? Where are all the truffles going? This is the future, is growing this stuff yourself. Do you grow it in a vat? Do you grow it in wood chips? How do you do it?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, you know what happens is, first of all, you look at what it’s growing in wild, as I told you earlier. I mean, most mushrooms in the functional space are wood decomposers. OK. So, we’re going to either feed them a wood log, like with reishi now, we’ll grow it on a small wood log that’s about 8 inches high and maybe 4-6 inches round. Just so people know, in China, there’s no such thing as a wild forest. Everything is planted, like in Europe. You go to Europe, and you see these forests. Oh, look at that forest. Then you realize, “Oh, the trees are all in rows.”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Right. They’re exactly the same distance apart.
Jeff Chilton:
So look, they have what we would call woodlots over there. So, they can harvest these trees. They use these small pieces of a round tree to grow reishi mushroom, and other particular species will be grown on sawdust. This is a very common substrate for growing shiitake, lion’s mane, maitake, turkey tail. It will be sawdust plus some nutrient like rice bran. Think about it for a minute: Sawdust, what do you do with sawdust anyway? It’s a waste product. OK, we can use it to grow mushrooms. How about rice bran? What do you do with all the rice bran in the world? We got more rice bran than we know what to do with it. Oh, look, we can put it into the mushroom substrate. Mushrooms traditionally are grown on agricultural waste products.
Agaricus, the button mushroom, what does it grow on? People think, “Oh, it’s grown on some manure.” No, it’s grown on straw, composted straw, all of the straw that’s being generated every year in the United States. A large portion of it is going into growing Agaricus mushroom. So, agricultural waste products are being recycled by mushrooms. So, here you have this, let’s just say sawdust log. You will pasteurize it or sterilize it. You will inoculate it with mycelium. Again, for a mushroom, they have no seeds. Our seed is live mycelium. We’ll inoculate it. The mycelium will grow out over this substrate over a period. It depends. It could be two months, it could be six months. Once it’s fully grown and the way they do it in China is certain mushrooms will grow well in certain temperatures.
So, for example, our shiitake mushrooms, when it comes time to actually force the mushrooms to produce, it’ll be November when the temperature is lower. When the mycelium grows out, they want a warmer temperature. So, you incubate it at a warmer temperature. In the fall, you take it out of the warm area and you put it on shelves, where now it’s got cool temperatures. The shiitakes or maitakes grow right out of that little wood log, which is about 18 inches long and it’s about maybe 4 inches in diameter. They standardize these things. So, they’re just turning out millions and millions of these little logs that are already spawned. The grower gets them, puts them into their house, grows the mushrooms.
Again, every one of those mushrooms is harvested by hand. The key here is that you are feeding each species with what it normally wants to consume in nature. Now you are going to give it a lot more nutrients, because what you want is you want a high yield. That’s the key thing if you’re a mushroom grower. You want lots of them. So, that’s generally speaking how it’s done in the United States or Europe. We will grow in huge warehouses. Everything is climate controlled. It will be your temperature, your airflow, your humidity. Mushrooms need a high humidity. That’s why in China where we grow them, it’s in the fall where the temperatures down, the humidity is up. Our houses in China have none of that equipment. They’re grown very, very naturally according to the temperatures and the season. What that means, Bob, is that every year, we have to give our growers, “OK, we want you to grow X number of tons this year for us.” So, we project how much we need every year because it’s one and out. So, we want to make sure that they’re going to grow enough for us and our customers.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Here’s just a random question for you, but do workers that help you with the harvesting and growing seem to be healthier than other people? Theoretically, you’re breathing in these spores and you’re around these mushrooms, not even just eating them, but just being around them. Is it your sense that those people are healthier? Do you feel like there’s a benefit from being a mushroom worker?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, the beauty of it, when I was working at the Agaricus farm back in the ‘70s, we had miners’ lights on, because when we went into these houses, Agaricus is one of the few mushrooms that doesn’t need light to grow. Most people think, “Oh, yeah, all mushrooms are growing in the dark or something.” No, they’re not. Mushrooms need light to grow properly. So, there we were with miners’ lamps going into these rooms that were dark. Whereas the way we cultivated, they’re cultivated in shade houses. So, it’s a greenhouse, and then they cover it with... It’s like a plastic greenhouse, and it’s covered with a shade cloth. It’s in an open environment. So, you’ve got air moving in through there. So, the harvesters are not going to get a lot of spores when they’re working there.
Look, if you’re in an enclosed space harvesting mushrooms and there’s a lot of spores, spores can cause allergic reactions. They actually have something out there called mushroom workers’ lung, and that was from actually mushrooms and workers who were in enclosed rooms. But remember one of the things about the button mushroom, which is grown in these indoor areas, they harvest it as a button, which means the gills have not shown and the mushroom hasn’t opened up. The gills aren’t there. They’re not producing any spores. The other beauty of it for the grower is that they have a longer shelf life. Now, you’ll see those very big portobellos. So, what happens is they’ll allow them to grow up to the exclusion of others.
So, you have a bed and it’s got 50 big, huge mushrooms. They’re getting all of the nutrient out of that bed. In a normal Agaricus bed, oh man, you’d have 1,000 mushrooms on that bed. In this case, you’ve got maybe 20 that they allow to get big. They harvest it. So, it’s producing spores, but again, it’s a big mushroom. That’s what your portobello is. Portobello, cremini, and just your standard Agaricus, they’re all the same.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Different sizes.
Jeff Chilton:
Yeah. Well, and different colors. The cremini, I think, is the brown mushroom. The standard Agaricus is white. So, they have a lot of varieties with different colors, but white to brown and in between.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
So today, we talked about shiitake, reishi, cordyceps, maitake, turkey tail. If somebody is unfamiliar with mushrooms – they’re not eating them, they’re not taking supplements – where would you recommend they begin? Would you recommend a combination product that’s got a nice mix? I mean, the first thing you said is eat shiitake. OK, you can’t go wrong with that. But let’s say the person wants extra immune support. Where do you usually recommend they start, with a mixture or individual or both?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, you know what? I think if you were going to eat just one or if you were going to consume just one as a supplement, I would recommend reishi. Reishi is different from all the others in that it not only has the highest level of beta-glucans, but it also has these compounds called triterpenoids. Triterpenoids are excellent compounds. They help with your liver, your circulatory system. They basically provide compounds that the other mushrooms really don’t.
Now, turkey tail has certain triterpenoids, but not the same level, and they’re different than the ones in reishi. They look at it in China and Asia as something very, very special. I think that’s the reason because beyond just the immunological component with its high beta-glucans, it has these triterpenoids. So, I would recommend reishi for sure.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Don’t they call that the emperor or something? It’s got some sacred name to it.
Jeff Chilton:
Well, yeah, and I also call it the “mushroom of immortality.”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Chilton:
The Japanese call it “10,000-year mushroom.” So, yeah.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
It’s revered.
Jeff Chilton:
Absolutely, in fact, you see it in their art. You see it in their architecture. You see all sorts of images of reishi mushroom all throughout China. For those who haven’t seen a reishi mushroom, it has got a beautiful ram’s horn shaped to it, and it is red. You can polish it up to where it’s very, very shiny and very, very beautiful. You look at it and you go, “Is this a carving? Is this a piece of wood? What is this?” No, it’s actually just a dried mushroom that we’ve buffed up a bit.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, clearly, we could talk for a few more days, not just a few hours, because there’s so much here. I am going to put in a plug for the book we talked about before the show called Entangled Life. If people want to learn more about the potential of medicinal fungi, they should definitely read that book, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. It’s just a beautiful book that will really open your eyes to the potential here. The tip of the iceberg is the fruiting body, and then there’s the world under our feet of all the hyphae that are reaching out and touching each other.
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, yeah. It is interesting because people will walk along a path every day and then one day they go, “Oh, my God. Look at that. There’s a mushroom. Where did that come from?”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
“Where did that come from?” Yeah.
Jeff Chilton:
I tell them, because they say, “Oh, it just popped up overnight.” I say, “No, actually, it finally reached the size where you noticed it.” Underneath, if you pull it out slowly, you can look down to where it was growing from, and you can see the white filaments of the mycelium there.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
All right, folks, that’s all the time we have this week. Jeff Chilton, thanks so much for being on this podcast, really fascinating discussion. If our listeners want to follow more of your work, where’s the best place for them to go and find out? In particular, you mentioned that you’ve written white papers on the importance of beta-glucans, etc. Where do they get that information?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, if they go to our website, it’s Nammex.com, N-A-M-M-E-X dot com. We actually have a menu there, education, got a ton of great information. We also have slideshows on how we grow our mushrooms, how we process them. A lot of information there. Come for all of that information and continue your education. We also have a website called RealMushrooms.com. There’s a ton of great information there as well. So, check it out, either one of those websites. Lot of good information.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Great. Well, thank you, everyone, for listening today. Until next time.
Jeff Chilton:
Thanks, Bob.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
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This is The Thorne Podcast, the show that navigates the complex world of wellness and explores the latest science behind diet, supplements, and lifestyle approaches to good health. I’m Dr. Robert Rountree, Chief Medical Advisor at Thorne and functional medicine doctor. As a reminder, the recommendations made in this podcast are the recommendations of the individuals who express them and not the recommendations of Thorne. Statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to The Thorne Podcast. Joining me this week is Jeff Chilton. He’s a master of mycology and the founder of Nammex, a company that supplies businesses like Thorne with high-quality mushroom extracts for use in dietary supplements. Jeff, welcome to the show. Why don’t you tell our listeners about yourself, and in particular, how do you get to be a master of mycology?
Jeff Chilton:
[Laughs] Well, probably one of the best ways is to live in an area that has lots of mushrooms growing in it. I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Mushrooms were around me my whole life. When I went to university, I was at the University of Washington, and there’s very few universities that actually have a mycology department. My field of study though was anthropology, but I did study mycology while I was there. I put the two together into ethnomycology, because I was really interested in the use of mushrooms by people worldwide for food, for medicine, and in shamanic purposes.
Look, Bob, the ’60s were full of a lot of shamanism, so you have to understand that that was part of our culture back then. So, mushrooms were a real part of my life then. Then when I left university, well, what do you do with a degree in anthropology? Well, not a whole lot of jobs for that. So, I decided, well, there’s a mushroom farm that’s 60 miles down the road in Olympia, Washington, the only one in the state. I was there for the next 10 years, literally living with mushrooms.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Wow. So, you lived and breed them?
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, let me tell you. I loved every minute of it. This was a very, very large mushroom farm. It was primarily an Agaricus farm. So, we were growing about 2 million pounds of Agaricus a year, but we had a Japanese scientist there. He was growing shiitake and enokitake and oyster mushroom. So, I was able to see these other mushrooms being grown. So, it was just a wonderful time for me to be there to learn as much as possible. Every week, we were generating 320 tons of compost to feed the crops that we were growing down there. So, it was a huge operation on a very large scale, but I was just reading as much as I could get to my hands on, read a lot more about functional or medicinal mushrooms. That ultimately was where my career… the path it took.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Cool. Well, that segues nicely into the topic for the week, which is mushrooms. I will say I just had my sauteed shiitake in my eggs this morning.
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, my favorite mushroom.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, I eat shiitake actually several times a week. So, that’s how people often think about mushrooms. They maybe see them in the woods, they see them in the grocery store, and then a smaller percentage in the West really think about using them medicinally. Medicinal fungi, I guess, is the appropriate scientific term for that. So, again, a lot of our listeners, when they think about mushrooms, they think about pizza, right? Or they think about spaghetti.
Jeff Chilton:
[Laughs] Well, what’s interesting is that when I was at the mushroom farm in the ’70s, classical nutritionists said, “Mushrooms have no nutritional value.” Why did they say that? Well, because mushrooms are very low in calories, but the fact is that mushrooms are fabulous foods. They have a reasonable amount of protein, 20 to 40 percent. They’re mostly carbohydrate, but that’s very slow-acting carbohydrate like mannitol, trehalose, so very slow digesting it. They do not have starch as their carbohydrate. That’s for plants. No, mushrooms have these other carbohydrates, and half of those carbohydrates are in the fiber. So, mushrooms are very, very high in fiber. As you know, besides the fact of what it does in terms of our digestion, it’s also feeding our microbiome.
So, I’m constantly telling people, put mushrooms into your diet. They’re a fantastic food. I call them actually the forgotten food and the missing dietary link. I mean, this is something where in Asia and other parts of the world, they have appreciated mushroom for thousands of years. We’ve really lost that appreciation in the West and now just are rediscovering it. So, put mushrooms into your diet. If there’s only one mushroom, make it shiitake. [Laughs] It is fabulous. It’s such a wonderful mushroom, and not only is it a wonderful edible, but it’s got amazing functional value to it.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
A number of years ago, I was in Beijing, and the hotel I was staying at had a restaurant that was a fungal restaurant. Every single thing on the menu had some kind of mushroom, and I’m not even sure I would call them mushroom. I mean, they were strange looking shapes, things that looked like ladders. I mean very odd-looking things. It just occurred to me they have such a different concept of mushrooms or fungi in Asia, in Japan, in China, in Korea, than we do here. I mean, what do you think that’s about?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, you know what? I think what it’s about to some degree is “food as medicine.” Those restaurants, I’ve been to a couple of those, because they are in different parts of the country there, and it is pretty amazing that they can create all these dishes. You look at, there are dozens of dishes that they’ve got with the different mushrooms in them, but I love that concept. I think as you know, I mean, our diet is the foundation of our health. So, you really have to have a good diet and what you put into your body, it gives you not just that nutrition, but it has this other functional value to it.
Well, that’s really what we want to be doing. We don’t want to be consuming things that are taking us in the wrong direction. We want something that’s going to enhance our health. I think mushrooms are a perfect example of that.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I guess I’d have to say that most people when they think of mushrooms, they think of… Is it Agaricus bisporus? The button mushrooms that you get in a standard grocery store and not the shiitake. Can you say something about the difference in medicinal potential of different mushrooms? It seems to me like the button mushrooms probably have the least medicinal potential of any mushroom out there. They’re the most popular in this country, but again, compared to shiitake, there’s a range, in other words.
Jeff Chilton:
Yeah, even when it comes to nutritional, I mean, every mushroom has got a different medicinal profile in terms of nutritional profile. Look, I lived with the button mushroom for 10 years. I actually still love eating it. I haven’t let go of that. It is a wonderful edible.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
It tastes great.
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, yeah. Believe it or not, they’ve had tests in it. It does have medicinal properties in it as well.
I mean, every mushroom in its cell wall has compounds we call beta-glucans. Beta-glucans are part of the fiber in mushrooms, but there’s been a lot of research on the beta-glucans. The beta-glucans are what provide us with what I call immunological potentiation. That’s really what mushrooms are giving us. That’s the primary thing. Every mushroom has these beta-glucans in their cell walls. The difference is that these beta-glucans have different structures. So, they’re all what we call 1,3/1,6 – that’s how they’re put together – the 1,6 is the branching. But some have a more effectiveness than others.
Those are the ones that we look at as let’s just say the top 10 mushrooms that we consider highly functional in their activity for us and where there’s a huge body of research. Whenever I’m talking about mushrooms to people, that to me is the primary thing that I talk about because mushrooms potentiate our immune system. They sit in the background. When we are challenged in some way, they come forward; they will activate different immune cells – whether it’s macrophages or T-cells, NK cells. That’s what their function is really. I tell people too, don’t think that when you take them today, whatever you’re taking them for, tomorrow, you’re going, “Oh, my God. I feel so much better.”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not caffeine.
Jeff Chilton:
[Laughs] No, it’s not caffeine. So, the point is you have to look at them like a vitamin. You have to look at them as something that you’re taking every single day. You’re incorporating it into your diet. It’s not something where, “OK, I can take that aspirin, I can take that ibuprofen, and my inflammation or pain an hour or so, it goes away.” No, they’re there. They’re sitting in the background, just like you would take vitamin D for example. No, that’s how you should look at eating or supplementing. The first thing I tell people, eat mushrooms first. Put them into your diet, and then if you want to supplement, fine, go ahead and supplement, but it’s really important to put them into your diet.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
To eat them. So, we keep using this word “mushroom.” I’m hoping you can offer us a scientific definition of “mushroom,” i.e., fruiting body. What’s the significance of talking about these things as mushrooms or mycelia? Why would anyone care? Why would the consumer care about mycelia or mushroom?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, yeah, and look, it’s interesting, because as a mushroom grower, it’s like mushrooms don’t have any seeds. OK, so how am I going to grow mushrooms? There’s no seeds. Well, mushrooms have spores. Those spores in nature, they’re out in the wind currents. They land on the soil. They land on wood. When conditions are right, those spores will germinate into a very fine filament called a hypha. When multiple filaments come together, they will form a network. That network is called mycelium. Mycelium is what we call the “vegetative body.” It is actually the phallus, or the body, of this organism. When conditions are right, that mycelium, which is out there, and it is consuming organic matter. Look, it’s very important for our ecology. It’s part of this repurposing of organic matter ultimately into humus.
So, as one of the players in that world, when conditions are right, it will produce a very fine little knot of mycelium, which develops slowly into a mature mushroom. When that mushroom matures, it will produce spores, and it will complete this lifecycle. Now, this fungal organism in this lifecycle as consumers and looking for supplements, we want to know what the part is. With plants, we’d say, “What’s the plant part? Is it a root? Is it a leaf?”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yup. Above ground, below ground, right?
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, yeah, yeah. So, the point is, OK, with this fungal organism, we have spores, which in China, believe it or not, they’ll collect the spores of reishi mushroom, and they will put them through a process they call cracking. They’ll crack these spores and sell them as a supplement. Look, I’ve looked at it, don’t bother. There’s a lot of hype around it, and people are making tons of money selling these things. One reishi mushroom, believe it or not, can produce as much as 400 grams of spores.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
There’s money to be made there.
Jeff Chilton:
There’s money to be made there. Yeah. So, you have the spore. You have the mycelium, which is the vegetative body. You have the mushroom, which is the fruiting body. So, those are our three “plant” parts: spore, mycelium, mushroom. This is so important because there are companies that will grow the mycelium on sterilized grain. They’ll grow it on there for 30 to 60 days. It coats the grain with this. For people who have never seen mycelium before, mycelium is… If you’ve ever seen a mold growing on your bread, it starts out as a white. Then next thing you know, it turns green or black, which is the sporulation of this mold. But a fuzzy white filament, that’s what mycelium looks like. It will coat this grain. Again, it’s all done in a laboratory. They will then take it out, grain it all, and they will put it into a dryer. They’ll dry it out, grind it to a powder, and then sell it to you as mushroom.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
It’s not mushroom.
Jeff Chilton:
Look, it is not a mushroom. In fact, what it is mostly is grain starch.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Starch.
Jeff Chilton:
We actually did an analysis. We put it on a chart, analysis of the grain it’s grown on, and a lot of them will grow on oats or rice. Then we took the nutritional analysis of the mushroom itself and charted it on there and charted these mycelium on grain products on there. Those products where they’re growing this mycelium on the grain charted nutritionally exactly like the grain it is grown on, nowhere close to the mushroom itself. Again, this is something people have to be really aware of. Look, there’s nothing wrong with mycelium. It’s not like mycelium vs. mushroom. There’s nothing wrong with mycelium if it’s a pure mycelium, which they grow a lot of in China in liquid culture, tons and tons and tons of it. But these products do not separate the mycelium from the grain. What that ultimately means is you’re buying a lot of starch, a lot of grain powder. Can you imagine on the front panel it says “reishi mushroom” with a picture of a reishi mushroom and you think you’re getting a mushroom product? If you’re lucky in the fine print on the other side will tell you, “OK, what’s in this?” It’s like, “Oh, myceliated grain,” but they’ll have mushroom somewhere else. The front panel says, “Mushroom.” You think you’ve got a mushroom product, but in fact you’ve got nothing but grain starch.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Or cellulose maybe. I don’t know.
Jeff Chilton:
You could have cellulose as well in there. So, it’s really unfortunate, because if you go into, whether it’s Whole Foods or some other marketplace, 50 percent, I’m not kidding, 50 percent of the products in there will be these myceliated grain products. It is really unfortunate, especially – and this is what galls me the most – you have naturopaths that don’t know any better actually telling people to get these products. It’s just shocking. We push back on that in a major way. We just filed a citizen petition with the FDA over labeling issues. You have to label your product properly, and they’re not doing it. Because of that, you have a lot of people taking what they think is a mushroom product when in fact, it’s not anywhere close to a mushroom product.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
So there’s no standardization requirements that say, “This product has got this amount of beta-glucan in it,” in other words.
Jeff Chilton:
No, there’s not. Look, we introduced the beta-glucan standard into the industry in 2015. In 2015, I published a white paper where I analyzed 40 of these different myceliated grain products. I also analyzed whole dried mushrooms and our mushroom extracts and demonstrated that those products were low in beta-glucan, about 5 percent, when in fact mushrooms are 25- to 60-percent beta-glucan. They had up to 30- to 60-percent alpha-glucan, which are the starches, where a normal mushroom with the testing was somewhere below 5 percent. What actually it’s measuring is glycogen. Isn’t that interesting? Mushrooms as their storage carbohydrate have the same storage carbohydrate we do. Of course, there’s talk out there about how we have these similarities with mushrooms. It’s very interesting because that organism is doing the same thing that we’re doing. It’s breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
So if you’re expecting to take one of these products with low beta-glucan as an immune support, you’re probably not getting much.
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, you’re not getting anything at all. It’s really unfortunate. It’s not just the beta-glucans. I mean, if you look at, for example, a reishi mushroom. A reishi mushroom is a bio factory. This mushroom is producing all of these triterpenoids, over 100 different triterpenoids, a few other compounds. The mycelium, even pure mycelium, has very, very low amounts of triterpenoids. So, you’re not even getting the secondary metabolites with these products. It’s so unfortunate. I mean, the bottom line is, again, it’s mostly grain starch, very few of the compounds that you’re looking for in an actual functional mushroom. Again, we do everything we can to educate people about this whole issue,
But look, it’s not killing anybody. So, FDA doesn’t really care, even though they actually have a compliance document that says you cannot call mycelium “mushroom.” You can’t insinuate that mycelium is mushroom. This is from 1976. So, look. A lot of people think, “Well, why isn’t the FDA getting involved?” It’s like the FDA is looking for things that are killing people out there or real issues. That’s where they step in. But otherwise, no, they’ve got so many other bigger fish to fry, so to speak. That’s unfortunate, because what it does is it makes people go, “Oh, yeah, there’s no regulation around supplements at all.” Supplements are so heavily regulated.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Heavily regulated. Yeah.
Jeff Chilton:
You have no idea at how regulated they are, but the fact is, no, they don’t make you test your products for compounds in there or anything like that. If you’re making wild claims about them, yeah, they will hunt you down. If you’re making cancer claims or some other claims, no, you can’t do that. They’ll step in. But otherwise, no, they can’t enforce anything like the actual quality or how genuine is this supplement product? No, that’s not what they’re about.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
OK, this is a little bit of a side question and I want to come back to this, but a couple of years ago, I was in Shanghai, and I went to a traditional Chinese medicine store. They had cordyceps behind the counter, and these were beautiful. I mean, they’re in a little display box and everything. These things are selling one piece of cordyceps for $1,000. $1,000 for one piece of cordyceps! Is there more medicinal value to these products, or is it like ginseng in that you have a beautiful ginseng root and it makes a nice art display. But is there actually any added medicinal value to these really expensive cordyceps products that you see? I’m not talking about capsules now. I’m talking about the actual fruiting body.
Jeff Chilton:
Yeah. Well, Bob, I’ve been to that store. [Laughs] There’s probably more than one of them in Shanghai. It is interesting. You see, they’ve made them into these beautiful displays. Sometimes they’ve got like 20 to 50 of them that are woven into a beautiful looking display, something you’d probably put on your wall. Look, nobody actually consumes those, what we call caterpillar fungus, regularly. They’re probably, and mostly my understanding is, purchased as gifts for somebody because nobody can afford them. Nobody can afford it. I mean, I was at Natural Foods Expo exhibiting in 1991. I was walking around and I was meeting different companies. I had cordyceps with me and I said, “Hey, cordyceps, it’s been used for a long...” At that time, it was $1,000 a kilo. It was like, “What do you think?” I told them a little bit about it. They just looked at it and they went, “Our customers are not going to eat caterpillars.” After all, they’re vegetarians now. Come on.
But look, here’s what’s happened, which is so wonderful, cordyceps, this caterpillar fungus, is wildcrafted up in the foothills of Tibet. People are on their hands and knees combing through pastures looking for these, because the caterpillar itself is underground and all you see is this little blade coming off of it. So, they call it “winter worm, summer grass.” They’ll actually dig this thing up very gently and pull that caterpillar out with that little grass blade-like cordyceps that’s growing off of it, clean it up, and then take it to market.
Well, guess what? We cultivate cordyceps, not that species, but we cultivate a species called Cordyceps militaris. And militaris is a beautiful orange species that they learned how to grow in Asia 10 years ago. So, that’s what we will sell. Look, when you think about $15,000 for a dried kilogram, our entry level product for cordyceps is a one-to-one extract of Cordyceps militaris. We sell that wholesale for $70. So, big, big difference there. They’ve been using Cordyceps militaris in traditional Chinese medicine interchangeably with Cordyceps sinensis. My God, today, nobody really, no practitioner is going to be using Cordyceps sinensis in their practice, unless they’re working with a billionaire or something like that, because nobody can really afford that cordyceps.
I’m not a proponent of wildcrafting at all. Wildcrafting, to me, it always ends up in tears. Whatever it is gets overharvested. In Europe in the 1890s, they were harvesting 200 tons of truffles. Today, they harvest 9 tons of truffles. A lot of the truffles that they harvest today are coming from tree plantations where they’ve planted them, and they have truffle mycelium on the roots and takes a long time, but ultimately, they start producing. So, you can imagine that’s what happens ultimately with wildcrafting. One of the things that we’ve done recently, we are selling a lot of turkey tail. Turkey tail has really come on as a very strong product, and people are really getting a lot more interested in turkey tail.
Well, I’m just like, “Wildcrafted turkey tail, OK, wonderful.” But when you look at them, they’ve harvested these things. They’re all different ages. They could be this year’s. They could be last year’s. There could be a lookalike in there. It’s just not really a very good way to procure this mushroom. So, I went, “OK, look, we’re going to grow these things.” It took us about four or five years to get anybody actually want to grow them, because the issue with mushroom growing is the harvest. Every mushroom you’ve ever eaten has been harvested by hand.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Hand.
Jeff Chilton:
Can you imagine that? They’re still harvesting them by hand. So, it’s like with these turkey tails, every one of these things probably weighs less than a gram. One Agaricus mushroom weighs 35 grams, one midsized agaricus mushroom. So, people are just like, “Oh, my God. No, we don’t want to grow those because we’d never be able to harvest them at all.” Well, we finally found somebody that’s growing them. Last year, we grew 10 dried tons of cordyceps, that cultivated cordyceps. We’re going to grow more this year. We’re going to get away completely from wildcrafted cordyceps. The beauty of it is you’ve got a consistent product. That’s why I love cultivation.
All of our mushrooms are cultivated, and they’re cultivated on the substrates that they would grow on naturally, which means they’re going to produce the compounds we’re after, because the precursors are there in that wood, for example. Interesting thing is that most functional mushrooms grow on wood. It really is really fascinating. Most of them are wood decomposers.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Doesn’t the term shiitake mean “grows on oak”?
Jeff Chilton:
Yes, it does. Absolutely. “Take” is Japanese for mushroom. So, “shii” actually denotes the genus. So, they call it “shiitake.” Then look at all the other mushrooms. It’s maitake…
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Maitake.
Jeff Chilton:
… enokitake. So, it’s cool. I really think it’s a great way to talk about the Japanese mushroom.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Well, I think it’s time for us to take a short break. So, what we’re going to do is step away for a second, and then we’re going to come back and answer some questions from our listeners.
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We’re back. So, now it’s time to answer some questions from the community. Our first question this week comes from a listener who asks, “What should I look for when selecting a mushroom-based supplement to ensure I’m getting a high-quality product?” We mentioned something about beta-glucan standardization, etc. Is that it? Or are there other ways?
Jeff Chilton:
That’s very important. Look for a product that gives you amount of beta-glucan. If it says polysaccharides, don’t.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
[Laughs] Look out.
Jeff Chilton:
Because polysaccharides are also starches. So, some of these companies can hide behind a polysaccharide, but look for somebody who’s giving you an… We give a percentage of polysaccharides on all of our retail and wholesale products. The other thing too is look closely in the other ingredients. Some of these companies will actually tell you that they’re selling myceliated oats or myceliated rice. So, look very closely at that, but certainly look for somebody that’s selling something that says, “OK, X amount of beta-glucans.”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Are there any particular mushrooms that are especially effective for boosting the immune system? So we talked about how beta-glucans do that in general, at least the 1,3/1,6 linkages do that, but is there one mushroom that really stands out or are they all good?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, what’s really interesting is because we test for beta-glucans, we’ve been able to see which mushrooms have how much beta-glucan in them. Interestingly enough, the two mushrooms that are highest in beta-glucans are the turkey tail and reishi mushroom. Yeah. Both of those have around 50-percent beta-glucan. It’s amazing that those two super-important mushrooms in fact have the largest amounts of beta-glucan. So, definitely, those two would be your number ones.
Look, just really quickly on this in terms of sometimes you’ll see companies selling, oh, our product has seven different species. Then some other company will say, “Oh, but we’ve got 10, so we’re better than you.” Then another one says, “Well, we’ve got 17.” It’s just like this thing of what I call a kitchen sink product. The more species they have in there, the less of the important ones that are in there. My line in the sand is about five species. We have one product that we sell. We call it immune complex. We have five different species. Any more than that, you’re just diluting the best ones. So, be aware of that.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
OK, so a mixture of about five is a really good one.
Jeff Chilton:
Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Look, you can also just focus on one of the other. You can focus on the turkey tail. You can focus on the reishi extract. But if you want to have something where you have multiple species, no more than five.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
I got to say thousands of years ago in China, somebody figured out you can rip this rock-hard shell, a monkey’s bench, off a tree and boil it for hours on end, make a tea and give it to the emperor, and the emperor won’t die. I mean, that was a gutsy there. “You drink this.” “No, you drink this. How about you drink this? We’ll see if this helps.” So, I mean, it’s mind boggling to me that somebody ever figured out that reishi in particular would have any medicinal value to it. How would you know?
Jeff Chilton:
Yeah, I know. That’s almost like, how would anybody know that this caterpillar with this little fungus growing off of it? You must’ve been pretty hungry.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll try anything. So, that brings us to this next question, which is, well, how do you cultivate mushrooms? What’s the process, and is this a sustainable process? So you mentioned wildcrafting, which is depleting species, right? Where are all the truffles going? This is the future, is growing this stuff yourself. Do you grow it in a vat? Do you grow it in wood chips? How do you do it?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, you know what happens is, first of all, you look at what it’s growing in wild, as I told you earlier. I mean, most mushrooms in the functional space are wood decomposers. OK. So, we’re going to either feed them a wood log, like with reishi now, we’ll grow it on a small wood log that’s about 8 inches high and maybe 4-6 inches round. Just so people know, in China, there’s no such thing as a wild forest. Everything is planted, like in Europe. You go to Europe, and you see these forests. Oh, look at that forest. Then you realize, “Oh, the trees are all in rows.”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Right. They’re exactly the same distance apart.
Jeff Chilton:
So look, they have what we would call woodlots over there. So, they can harvest these trees. They use these small pieces of a round tree to grow reishi mushroom, and other particular species will be grown on sawdust. This is a very common substrate for growing shiitake, lion’s mane, maitake, turkey tail. It will be sawdust plus some nutrient like rice bran. Think about it for a minute: Sawdust, what do you do with sawdust anyway? It’s a waste product. OK, we can use it to grow mushrooms. How about rice bran? What do you do with all the rice bran in the world? We got more rice bran than we know what to do with it. Oh, look, we can put it into the mushroom substrate. Mushrooms traditionally are grown on agricultural waste products.
Agaricus, the button mushroom, what does it grow on? People think, “Oh, it’s grown on some manure.” No, it’s grown on straw, composted straw, all of the straw that’s being generated every year in the United States. A large portion of it is going into growing Agaricus mushroom. So, agricultural waste products are being recycled by mushrooms. So, here you have this, let’s just say sawdust log. You will pasteurize it or sterilize it. You will inoculate it with mycelium. Again, for a mushroom, they have no seeds. Our seed is live mycelium. We’ll inoculate it. The mycelium will grow out over this substrate over a period. It depends. It could be two months, it could be six months. Once it’s fully grown and the way they do it in China is certain mushrooms will grow well in certain temperatures.
So, for example, our shiitake mushrooms, when it comes time to actually force the mushrooms to produce, it’ll be November when the temperature is lower. When the mycelium grows out, they want a warmer temperature. So, you incubate it at a warmer temperature. In the fall, you take it out of the warm area and you put it on shelves, where now it’s got cool temperatures. The shiitakes or maitakes grow right out of that little wood log, which is about 18 inches long and it’s about maybe 4 inches in diameter. They standardize these things. So, they’re just turning out millions and millions of these little logs that are already spawned. The grower gets them, puts them into their house, grows the mushrooms.
Again, every one of those mushrooms is harvested by hand. The key here is that you are feeding each species with what it normally wants to consume in nature. Now you are going to give it a lot more nutrients, because what you want is you want a high yield. That’s the key thing if you’re a mushroom grower. You want lots of them. So, that’s generally speaking how it’s done in the United States or Europe. We will grow in huge warehouses. Everything is climate controlled. It will be your temperature, your airflow, your humidity. Mushrooms need a high humidity. That’s why in China where we grow them, it’s in the fall where the temperatures down, the humidity is up. Our houses in China have none of that equipment. They’re grown very, very naturally according to the temperatures and the season. What that means, Bob, is that every year, we have to give our growers, “OK, we want you to grow X number of tons this year for us.” So, we project how much we need every year because it’s one and out. So, we want to make sure that they’re going to grow enough for us and our customers.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Here’s just a random question for you, but do workers that help you with the harvesting and growing seem to be healthier than other people? Theoretically, you’re breathing in these spores and you’re around these mushrooms, not even just eating them, but just being around them. Is it your sense that those people are healthier? Do you feel like there’s a benefit from being a mushroom worker?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, the beauty of it, when I was working at the Agaricus farm back in the ‘70s, we had miners’ lights on, because when we went into these houses, Agaricus is one of the few mushrooms that doesn’t need light to grow. Most people think, “Oh, yeah, all mushrooms are growing in the dark or something.” No, they’re not. Mushrooms need light to grow properly. So, there we were with miners’ lamps going into these rooms that were dark. Whereas the way we cultivated, they’re cultivated in shade houses. So, it’s a greenhouse, and then they cover it with... It’s like a plastic greenhouse, and it’s covered with a shade cloth. It’s in an open environment. So, you’ve got air moving in through there. So, the harvesters are not going to get a lot of spores when they’re working there.
Look, if you’re in an enclosed space harvesting mushrooms and there’s a lot of spores, spores can cause allergic reactions. They actually have something out there called mushroom workers’ lung, and that was from actually mushrooms and workers who were in enclosed rooms. But remember one of the things about the button mushroom, which is grown in these indoor areas, they harvest it as a button, which means the gills have not shown and the mushroom hasn’t opened up. The gills aren’t there. They’re not producing any spores. The other beauty of it for the grower is that they have a longer shelf life. Now, you’ll see those very big portobellos. So, what happens is they’ll allow them to grow up to the exclusion of others.
So, you have a bed and it’s got 50 big, huge mushrooms. They’re getting all of the nutrient out of that bed. In a normal Agaricus bed, oh man, you’d have 1,000 mushrooms on that bed. In this case, you’ve got maybe 20 that they allow to get big. They harvest it. So, it’s producing spores, but again, it’s a big mushroom. That’s what your portobello is. Portobello, cremini, and just your standard Agaricus, they’re all the same.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Different sizes.
Jeff Chilton:
Yeah. Well, and different colors. The cremini, I think, is the brown mushroom. The standard Agaricus is white. So, they have a lot of varieties with different colors, but white to brown and in between.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
So today, we talked about shiitake, reishi, cordyceps, maitake, turkey tail. If somebody is unfamiliar with mushrooms – they’re not eating them, they’re not taking supplements – where would you recommend they begin? Would you recommend a combination product that’s got a nice mix? I mean, the first thing you said is eat shiitake. OK, you can’t go wrong with that. But let’s say the person wants extra immune support. Where do you usually recommend they start, with a mixture or individual or both?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, you know what? I think if you were going to eat just one or if you were going to consume just one as a supplement, I would recommend reishi. Reishi is different from all the others in that it not only has the highest level of beta-glucans, but it also has these compounds called triterpenoids. Triterpenoids are excellent compounds. They help with your liver, your circulatory system. They basically provide compounds that the other mushrooms really don’t.
Now, turkey tail has certain triterpenoids, but not the same level, and they’re different than the ones in reishi. They look at it in China and Asia as something very, very special. I think that’s the reason because beyond just the immunological component with its high beta-glucans, it has these triterpenoids. So, I would recommend reishi for sure.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Don’t they call that the emperor or something? It’s got some sacred name to it.
Jeff Chilton:
Well, yeah, and I also call it the “mushroom of immortality.”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Chilton:
The Japanese call it “10,000-year mushroom.” So, yeah.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
It’s revered.
Jeff Chilton:
Absolutely, in fact, you see it in their art. You see it in their architecture. You see all sorts of images of reishi mushroom all throughout China. For those who haven’t seen a reishi mushroom, it has got a beautiful ram’s horn shaped to it, and it is red. You can polish it up to where it’s very, very shiny and very, very beautiful. You look at it and you go, “Is this a carving? Is this a piece of wood? What is this?” No, it’s actually just a dried mushroom that we’ve buffed up a bit.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, clearly, we could talk for a few more days, not just a few hours, because there’s so much here. I am going to put in a plug for the book we talked about before the show called Entangled Life. If people want to learn more about the potential of medicinal fungi, they should definitely read that book, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. It’s just a beautiful book that will really open your eyes to the potential here. The tip of the iceberg is the fruiting body, and then there’s the world under our feet of all the hyphae that are reaching out and touching each other.
Jeff Chilton:
Oh, yeah. It is interesting because people will walk along a path every day and then one day they go, “Oh, my God. Look at that. There’s a mushroom. Where did that come from?”
Dr. Robert Rountree:
“Where did that come from?” Yeah.
Jeff Chilton:
I tell them, because they say, “Oh, it just popped up overnight.” I say, “No, actually, it finally reached the size where you noticed it.” Underneath, if you pull it out slowly, you can look down to where it was growing from, and you can see the white filaments of the mycelium there.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
All right, folks, that’s all the time we have this week. Jeff Chilton, thanks so much for being on this podcast, really fascinating discussion. If our listeners want to follow more of your work, where’s the best place for them to go and find out? In particular, you mentioned that you’ve written white papers on the importance of beta-glucans, etc. Where do they get that information?
Jeff Chilton:
Well, if they go to our website, it’s Nammex.com, N-A-M-M-E-X dot com. We actually have a menu there, education, got a ton of great information. We also have slideshows on how we grow our mushrooms, how we process them. A lot of information there. Come for all of that information and continue your education. We also have a website called RealMushrooms.com. There’s a ton of great information there as well. So, check it out, either one of those websites. Lot of good information.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
Great. Well, thank you, everyone, for listening today. Until next time.
Jeff Chilton:
Thanks, Bob.
Dr. Robert Rountree:
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