Boost Your Immunity with Gourmet Mushrooms

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Even in healthy people, reishi boosts antioxidant capacity, as demonstrated in a recent study published in the International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition. This study showed that patients receiving either 10-day supplementation with encapsulated reishi (0.72 grams daily, equivalent to about 6.6 grams of fresh mushroom) or a single dose of 1.1 grams had an acute spike in plasma antioxidant capacity, without apparent toxic effects.

As an aid to healthy aging and longevity, reishi also helps detoxify the liver, prevent arteriosclerosis and manage Alzheimer’s disease (for which a Japanese reishi product has been patented). Other studies demonstrate anti-allergic, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial actions—and the research continues. With all these dividends, reishi may be one bitter pill you will want to swallow.

Getting the Best

These special mushrooms are available fresh, dried, canned, powdered or in extracted forms from supermarkets, health-food stores and mail-order sources. As a general health supplement, try a daily serving of about 5 grams of dried reishi or maitake (about 1 medium mushroom) or 5 to 15 grams dried shiitake (1 to 3 mushrooms).

For best results, remember these tips when buying and using medicinal mushrooms:

Before using dried mushrooms, soak them in lightly salted or sugared hot water or stock for about an hour. Powders and extracts should be used according to package instructions and the advice of your health-care provider. (Warning: Mushrooms can interact with some over-the-counter and prescription drugs; check with your health-care provider.)

Store fresh mushrooms in paper bags in the coldest part of your refrigerator, and eat them within seven days of purchase. Canned mushrooms last about a year, while dried ones sealed in plastic and stored in the freezer can last indefinitely.

If possible, choose mushrooms grown on natural wood logs rather than sawdust. You will pay more for log-cultured mushrooms, but they tend to taste better, last longer and shrink less during cooking. Their medicinal quality should be better, too.

Tough Living Makes Mighty Medicine

Why are medicinal mushrooms so gifted? Their strength comes from doing one of the most arduous jobs in nature—digesting dead or dying hardwood trees like oaks, elms and plums. Shiitake, maitake and reishi are wood composters that infiltrate tough tree trunks and roots using threadlike fingers, called mycelium, to digest and recycle nutrients back to the forest floor for the next generation of plants. Mushrooms are the fruit bodies that sprout when growing conditions are sufficiently cool and moist.

To do their job, these fungi must outcompete other fungi and microbes while dismantling the vast chemical complex of the tree. They must be aggressive yet defensive, a feat accomplished through biochemical combat. Harvested mushrooms possess potent bioactive chemicals, as well as nutrients gleaned from the tree. The button mushrooms commonly sold in supermarkets are far less competitive in nature and less active medicinally.

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