Paul Stamets: Miracle Mushrooms, Mycelium, and Your Health

So, well, you know, there is good evidence that lion's mane also compensates in many of these neurogenic benefits that's also having to follow the time. This is like a lion's mane elixir that I pour. Tell me if that shit's any good. Well, it comes from China. Is that bad? Every Chinese expert I've met, they said I wouldn't dare buy a mushroom from China. Jesus Christ. So, we have a spoonable lion's mane. You see what you got. And I put that in smoothies all the time and that's my go-to. And that's exactly the research. Can I put it in coffee? Yeah, I can put it in coffee. And Jamie, can you pull up that? How much do I put in here? The neurogenesis benefits of lion's mane. How much should I put in here? Ooh, it's open. It's not open yet, right? No, it's sealed. How much can I put in there? I put about a teaspoon. Teaspoon. And then stir it in. About that? But the neurogen—that's good. And the neurogen—this company in France that we did the neurogenic tests with found that the mycelium was far more active than the mushroom fruit bodies. And so the lion's mane stimulates a neuroite outgrowth and basically extends the nerves from growing compared to baseline. So in 7 to 12 days of substantial, up to 22% increase in neuroite outgrowth. What we found was actually there was one that was at 8%, one was at 12%, and then separately we stacked it with an analog of psilocybin. And rather than that being the arithmatic additive of cumulative, we found the synergy. So we think that lion's mane, the research has shown it increases myelin regeneration on the sheath of the nerves. And the psilocybin proliferates nerve tip growth. So it should conceivably help you learn? So this is an example. This is an unexpected result. This is lion's name mycelium that's showing a 14—basically a 14.8% over baseline. Then we have a psilocybin analog that didn't do all that great. Which analog is this again? I'm going to describe the analog for now for obvious reasons, but it's a legal analog. It creates a 7% outgrowth of neuroites. But then we stacked it with lion's mane and the psilocybin analog. There's a theoretical additive effect, 114 plus 107, 122. But we got 136. Statistically significant. The outlier actually is even higher. So the neuroscientists in France did this study, was extremely excited. And we found that the more we titrated it to greater dilution, the more active it becomes. What does that mean? Well, what— Titrate? What does that mean? Maybe we're diluting it. And these are human cells, pluripotent stem cells. And what we found was originally we were told it's called 3 micrograms per milligram, or 3 micrograms, a millionth of a gram. But when we went back to 0.03, 100 times less, the neurogenic benefits became greater. Now there's something called the PK conversion, the pharmacokinetics, when you ingest something, only a small portion of it may make it into your bloodstream. So the good news is that these things are so nontoxic and they're so potent. Now looking at the dosing regimen, it appears so far—we haven't done this clinically. This is human cells in vitro. But this laboratory is predictive of neurogenic compounds that these—the neurogenic benefits are so substantial that the PK conversion of ingesting them can be seen in the bloodstream as a fairly good conversion rate. So you—for instance, if you take vanillic acid, vanilla, about 2% will make it into your bloodstream. So if you take one whole gram of vanilla, only 2% actually gets into your bloodstream. So that's the PK conversion. So what we're seeing is right now is the potency of this is so strong at lower and lower dilutions, we're getting more and more potency. So I'm—this is—yeah. It's—I like to say dilution is a solution to profitability. The more that we dilute, the more potent it becomes. So this is why the neuroscientists in France are doing this study going, this stuff is so potent. Please dilute it. Dilute it. Dilute it. So— Wow. And so we see this as a tremendous horizon that lion's mane is legal. It's an edible-in-choice mushroom, a thousand-year history of use. We found that the mycelium is far more potent than the mushrooms for really good reasons. The—some of the compounds are called aeronasins, and these are actually discovered by Kawagishi in 1994 looking for an antibacterial agent. And so when they—when he was looking at the mycelium fighting bacteria, he found that the mycelium expressed this antibacterial, this is a cyan dorivative, and he gave the name aeronasin after Herysium aeronaceous, just like penicillin is named after penicillium. And so he stumbled on the fact that it has neurogenic properties and antibacterial properties. So the mycelium is navigating through the ground, through a hostile environment. It's only one cell wall thick. The mycelium has an immune system that's operational between like 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, you know, 35 degrees Celsius. That's the window it is growing in. So its immune system is operative in that window. When you do super hot water extracts, you're in the extreme zone. That's not part of the immunological lifespan of the mushroom. You're decocting it. You're taking out ingredients, but you're not harnessing within the immunological window of temperatures that the mycelium has evolved to fight off pathogens. And so what we have found is the mycelium is far more active than the fruit bodies. This is all new science, but then mushroomreferences.com is populated with dozens upon dozens of peer-reviewed articles showing the mycelium is far more active than the fruit bodies. And a whole genome sequencing of Reishi, for instance, founds 25% more genes coding for proteins are expressed at the mycelial state than at the mushroom state. Well, it makes sense because the mushrooms at the end of millions of cell divisions over months, years, even decades, finally produce a mushroom that rots in five days. The mushroom doesn't need a good immune system. It's attracting mycovores, animals, deer. You know, John just showed me some photographs of, he's going to show you if he was in a campground and found deer in the morning digging up mushrooms out of the ground. Well, animals engage mushrooms. Your one of your colleagues here, or maybe it's Jeff. I'm sorry. Jeff, one of the guys who works here? Oh, okay. So the idea, but mushrooms attract insects, people, animals because they're fragrant, they're protein, they're nutritionally dense, and they want to engage humans. The mycelium is navigating through a microbial and hostile environment. And a report came out in the literature of a thousand species of bacteria in a single gram. There's more than eight miles of mycelium in a several cubic inch. So the mycelium is navigating through a hostile microbial environment and setting up guilds and microbiomes and collections of cooperating bacteria that can help them defend against pathogens. Look at that. That's to make it up to eight miles of mycelium in a single inch of soil. And it's only one cell wall thick. That's such a weird looking image. So it's so hard to see what that is. That's a mushroom that's melted back into the ground. This mycelium, that's just now the mushrooms generate mycelium and it goes underneath the ground. So every time you're walking on the ground, you're walking upon miles upon miles of mycelium. And it knows that you're there. These are sensitive. These are not only externalized stomachs that are digesting nutrients and externalized lungs exhaling carbon dioxide, inhaling oxygen. But I believe these are extant neurological networks of nature. When you see that pervasiveness of those cells and the climate change scientists are coming around to this, 70% of the carbon biologically stored in mycelium in the ground, the way to find climate change is not only replanting trees, which is great. I love it. But it's the mycelial networks you're building in the humus that creates the soil that creates the biodiversity that then guarantees the health of the ecosystem. So it's the mycelial networks that govern because they're so pervasive. They set up because they're antibacterial properties. They're pro-bacterial properties. Another example of this is in the microbiome of soils and inside of human's stomachs. Turkey tail mushrooms and a placebo-controlled randomized clinical study with humans from a – scientists associated with Harvard found that turkey tail mycelium is a prebiotic for the microbiome that feeds bifidobacterium lactobacillus and suppresses clostridium, which is an inflammatory bacterium. It's really, really interesting that the mycelium is feeding nutrients to the beneficial bacteria within the microbiome that then gives us health. And so these are precursor nutrients that elevate the populations of the beneficial bacteria. So the two go hand in hand. But what about edible mushrooms, things like shiitake and those type of mushrooms? Is there any nutritional benefit to those things? There's enormous nutritional benefit. And there's been two also meta-studies that have come out this year showing that the ingestion of mushrooms with elderly people over the age of 60, there's a 50 percent decreased odds of Alzheimer's-like symptoms with a population of people consuming three mushroom meals per week. Now they didn't specify the mushrooms as a single pour, but the mushrooms they're commonly eating are oyster mushrooms, shiitake, and shimeji, and maybe some other mushrooms. But that's one meta-study that came out. There was a study out of Japan from Dr. Ikikawa at the National Cancer Center that found statistically significant reduction in cancers across the board. I think 162,000 people in this data set. And he was sent over the Nagano Perfecture to look for this. So these are edible and delicious mushrooms. Also they empower the immune system. Again, signal from the noise, statistically significant reduction in overall cancer rates associated with a food. The division now between foods and medicines is blurred. And yet it speaks to Hippocrates in Dioscoritis stating that let food be thy medicine, medicine be thy food. So it's interesting because physicians have been taught this sort of monomolecular approach to medicine and now we're realizing that these foods are essential nutrients for your immune system that downregulates inflammation. It's so interesting that we're learning all this during our lifetime too. You think that would all be established by now? Well, I'm glad you asked that. We have a paper coming out in the next two or three days, maybe in the next week. And it's on a turkey tail mycelium, the grown on rice. And we were able to find out something that no one had been reported in the literature. The traditional Chinese medicine approach is that these are immunomodulators. They help the immune system but they also are not inflammatory. When you have an immune response, oftentimes associated with an inflammatory response, blood rushes to the wound, you inflame, you have all these compounds that are being produced by the blood to suppress an infection. But you can overamp the immune system and have a pro-inflammatory response that can cause a lot of oxidative stress damage, clatterily. And so the article that's just coming out with BMC, Biomed Central, alternative in complementary medicine, peer reviewed, we have found that the mycelium, when it grows on rice, bioferments the rice to then produce a unique immunological response that upregulates what's called interleukin 1RA and interleukin 10. These are anti-inflammatory cytokines. And so the mycelium doesn't do that. The mushrooms don't do that. But the mycelium is biofermented. The rice, like tempeh, is transformed. Or like yogurt comes from milk because of lactobacillus or acidophilus. And that transformation then makes it a novel product. We found the same thing. The rice compared to the rice control has no anti-inflammatory properties. The mycelium, because of the extracellular metabolites, changes the rice into a unique immunological product that excites the expression of anti-inflammatory compounds while also exciting the pro-immune response. So it's a buffered response.