Medicinal Mushroom Supplements. Customers Beware ! Medicinal mushrooms and their extracts are getting more popular every day. They support your immune system, neutralize the nasty side effects of medication and will also function as medication themselves. And all this without any side effects. Popular types are Agaricus blazei (ABM), Reishi, Chaga, Cordyseps sinensis, Shiitake, Maitake and many, many more. If you adored this informative article along with you would want to be given details regarding Supplier of shiitake mushroom extract powder for cosmetic Ingredients generously pay a visit to our site. Check the Wikipedia article on medicinal mushrooms for an overview. Supplements are offered for sale everywhere. But buy wisely! Many websites are pretending to sell you quality supplements, while in fact they are ripping you off. For a lot of money, in general. Here are some tips on what to look for when you want to buy extracts from medicinal mushrooms. The first, very important thing is this: humans cannot digest raw mushrooms. Well, most of it, that is. Mushrooms cells are made of chitin, which is 90% indigestible by humans. And the good stuff is contained in those cell walls.

So eating raw mushrooms is mostly useless. To benefit from the healing potential of medicinal mushrooms an extraction process is needed. Only hot water extraction can set the active ingredients free, maintain their structural integrity, and concentrate them to defined and therapeutically useful levels. Although hot water extraction is used in all of the thousands of independent scientific references, both herbal and medical, 99% of the mushroom supplements available in the U.S. Canada are ground up dried mushrooms (unextracted), mycelium cultivated on grain (unextracted), or tinctures. These supplements are at best 1/30th to 1/50th the strength of a hot water extract and are significantly less potent than the materials used in traditional herbalism or the clinical research. Nevertheless, the sellers will quote the outcomes of scientific research as if it were 100% applicable to their own products. Which is absolutely false and deceiving. Some will even point out that their (usually very pricey) product is 'wild, unprocessed' as if it were a good thing - it is the absolute opposite.

They either do not know what they are talking about or they are consciously ripping off their customers. I probably have a dark and paranoid mind, but I believe the latter to be true. 15 - 25 per kilo (35 oz) (wholesale price in China), whereas extracts with high levels of active ingredients are easily up to 10 times more expensive. The good news is that every mushroom-supplement label, be it through inclusion or omission, contains the information needed to determine potency and quality. The main active ingredient of all mushrooms are the so-called beta-glucans, a type of bioactive carbohydrate. Hot water extracts will list the beta-glucan levels, as a percentage, on the label. None of the un-extracted mushroom products or tinctures list beta-glucan levels on their labels. Because these are still locked inside the chitinous cell walls, their percentage cannot be determined properly. So, if this information is missing the supplement should probably be avoided.

Depending on the type of mushroom, percentages of 10% to 50% (Agaricus blazei) can be reached. High percentages are very rare, though: only JHS, Nammex and Oriveda seem to take their customers (and their business) serious. Another true fraud is the use of cultivated mushrooms in your supplements. Cultivated mushrooms usually have a very different composition when compared to the wild ones. Like, cultivated Chaga does not contain betulin because it is grown on grain instead of on a birch tree. The composition of the so-called phytosterols, important medicinal ingredients in every mushroom, will be completely different as well. Nevertheless, those sellers will still refer to the scientific research as if it were based on their own products. I call that fraud. Product labels use a wide variety of terms to describe the different types of mushroom supplements. The following list covers most of the descriptions one can encounter. Mycelium Biomass or Mushroom Mycelium - Mycelium grown on grain that is dried, powdered and encapsulated.