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Quality Reishi - The Hard Facts on Cultivation and Extraction
There is a lot of confusion today in the field of Medicinal Mushrooms as to what form of mushroom product is the best to use. Is it the fruitbody, or the mycelium, or an extract standardized for some particular compound? This question is not as straightforward as it seems.
The answer to this question should be based on scientific facts, not on historical usage, or on someone's idea of what looks pretty or what feels or tastes good. There is a lot of amazingly complex bio-chemistry going on in the mushroom kingdom. Many new drugs are under testing from mushrooms for the treatment of many diseases like Cancer, AIDS, Diabetes and Hepatitis.
This subject deserves to be accurately addressed so that you can know which health supplements are the best for your use.
Definitions
Fruitbody: This is the mushroom that you see. It is the spore producing portion involved with reproduction. Basically, the fruitbody is equivalent to the flower of a plant. Fruitbodies ONLY form in response to some stress in the environment... heat, cold, fire, flood, running out of food, that sort of thing. The mushroom that you see is NOT the growth form of the mushroom organism. Strictly the reproductive portion.
Mycelium: This is the growth form of the organism, the stable state in which all of the life processes occur; growth, feeding, competing for survival and some forms of reproduction. In cultivated mushroom products, the mycelium can be grown either by fermentation (in a tank full of liquid) which is an unnatural growth condition, or it can be grown on a solid substrate of some material that it would normally grow on - the natural growth condition. For production of many mushroom derived drugs, the compounds are extracted not from the mycelium, but from the broth that the mycelium is grown in.
Extract: This is either the mushroom or the mycelium, extracted with some type of solvent with the intention of concentrating some desirable portion and eliminating or reducing some unimportant portion of the mushroom. There are a number of solvents which are used, depending on which compounds are desired. The two most common are Alcohol and Water. Extracts are more expensive and can be better or worse than the raw feedstock, depending on what you are attempting to achieve.
Scientific Basis of Quality in Medicinal Mushrooms
History
The cultivation of mushrooms specifically for the production of medicinal compounds is a fairly new science, dating only from the late 1970's. Since that time, there have been a number of bio-active compounds of interest identified from the mushroom fruitbody, from the mycelium and from the residual culture broth. In almost all cases, the compounds present in the different life stages are identical. But in a few instances there are differences, where substantially greater amounts of some target compound can be extracted from one growth state as compared to another.
The Process in Detail
Almost all of the research done recently has shown that the most bio-active compounds are in the extra-cellular compounds (metabolic exudates), as compared to either the mycelium or fruitbodies. These compounds would be in the liquid broth for products grown by fermentation. Knowing this, the question becomes "What is the most practical way to produce medicinal mushroom product of the greatest effectiveness, while keeping them affordable enough for the general public?" We felt that to address the problem by growing in liquid culture, as is commonly done in the Orient was not a good approach. Reason: The mycelium would have to be extracted as well as the residual culture broth in order to capture all the interesting compounds, while at the same time the few different compounds specific to the fruitbodies would be absent. Alternatively, to grow it on grain for a couple of weeks, as is the usual practice with other American growers was also not the answer. We believe that the production of medicinal mushroom nutraceuticals that don't work is counterproductive. The consumers will lose faith in medicinal mushroom products, and the potential benefits are lost.
So, what we did was look long and hard at the chemistry of the wild collected fruitbodies, the mycelium and the extra-cellular exudates. We then experimented with modifications of the growing substrate and culture parameters. By controlling each aspect of the growth cycle, such as the time of growth to harvest, the O2 to CO2 ratios, temperature, the light cycle and all the other parameters, we found we could produce a product with at least as much of the target compounds as is found in nature. In nearly all cases, we are able to exceed the concentration of any target medicinal compounds over what is found in the naturally grown mushrooms.
The real trick though, is to grow the mushroom organism in glass containers for a long enough period of time to completely consume all of the substrate, and then trigger the mushroom to go into its reproductive cycle of fruitbody production. At that point we have all of the different aspects of the mushroom present: The mycelium, the primordia, the fruitbody and the spores. But most importantly of all, we have the entire range of extra-cellular compounds that have been produced throughout the entire life cycle of the organism. All of the anti-microbial properties, the anti-viral properties, and all of the other potent bio-activities. This long growth period takes at least several months, and for some species can take up to two years. When a supplier says they can deliver a finished, custom grown product in 30 days, it is certain that the quality will be very low. In nature it takes months-to-years for a mushroom colony to become established. That is why you find them growing in the same place year after year. They are fruiting each season, true, but the organism itself exists from year to year in the soil below. To think that we can trick that organism into optimal growth in only 2 or 3 weeks is wishful thinking indeed.
The Process Summary
In a nut shell, the process which Reishi Essence has developed with its manufacturing partner is this:
- Select species-specific substrate for the mushroom in question.
- Select the growth parameters of temperature, light, O2, etc. for the results desired.
- Grow for lengthy periods of time (typically 20-45 weeks) in small glass containers, capturing all of the metabolic exudates. (This is the hard part; to grow the mycelium in their own metabolites without stunting the growth. Look at beer or wine production for example: the alcohol accumulation eventually stops the growth.)
- Fruit the mushrooms in the glass container at the end of the growth term.
- Harvest the whole thing. Mycelium, fruitbodies, primordia, and all of the extra-cellular compounds which have been produced over the entire life cycle.
- Dry, powder, package, sterilize and supply.
This is the best process for production of bioactive medicinal mushroom compounds. Even if further extraction or processing is desired, this is still the most complete and broad-spectrum raw feedstock for downstream processing. By growing the mushroom products this way, we gain the benefits of each phase of the life cycle.
The Best Reishi Product Available
Reishi Essence red reishi is quite simply the best product of its kind available in the world today. There is no residual grain as is the case with all of the other domestically produced, solid substrate grown mycelium. (less than 2% Residual substrate in ours, vs. typically 60-80% residual grain from some of the other American suppliers. Question: Are you looking to buy Medicinal Mushrooms or are you looking to buy rice flour?)
There is a complete profile of the extra-cellular metabolites found in our product, which is not found in liquid culture mycelium. And the life-force of the growing organism, the mycelium, is there in all its glory. The same holds true of the fruitbody-specific compounds. Present and accounted for. To compare products produced by the Full Spectrum process to the usual extracts found on the market, is like comparing apples and oranges. Nature is a very complex wonder. Think of the rose... Do you want the color, or the smell, or maybe just the prick of the thorns? Some of the extracts being sold today are no more than the pricks.
Extract Chemistry
The Mushroom biochemistry is much more complex than that of plants. Orders of magnitude more complex. And the chemistry involved is not nearly so well known. We use extracts for its most potent and most successful products. But these are very specific and targeted extracts. Extracts which are made for the specific purpose of concentrating out specific compounds. Just as in the production of penicillin, the fungus (a Penicillum species) is grown in liquid culture, then the active ingredient (Penicillin) is extracted from the residual culture broth. An example of a specific target compound, using a specific growth method and a specific extraction procedure. This works very well. And in the cases where we have identified a specific compound which we want, it is easy to find a way to extract it. For example, to extract polysaccharides from red reishi mushrooms is a pretty straight forward chemical process. But what about another compound present in red reishi, the one called triterpenes? This compound has anti-inflammatory, lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol properties, while polysaccharides are shown to be effective against cancer and have immune-modulating functions. If you extract red reishi by hot water, then use alcohol to precipitate out the polysaccharide fraction, the polysaccharide is concentrated and the resultant product is effective for cancer treatment or immune stimulation. However, with this process you loose the triterpenes, and the extract has no effect on its beneficial properties. So, even though a raw red reishi product shows great effectiveness in treating high blood pressure cases, the "Standardized Extract" as available today is useless for lowering them. So what is the more valuable product, the raw Full Spectrum red reishi, or the "standardized extract"? The answer is neither, or both. It really depends on what you are hoping to achieve with the supplement. For general health supplement usage, the best product is the one that has the greatest effectiveness over a broad range of conditions. In this example, it makes much more sense to use the Full Spectrum product.
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