The medicinal mushrooms are superherbs but they are in a class of their own. They are best known for building the immune system. They’re a great source of the fascinating beta-glucan polysaccharides, which are extremely powerful weapons for the immune system. They act with a highly intelligent nature, doing just what the body needs. They educate the immune system. They’re both brains and brawn. Rather than taking medicinal mushrooms only when you’re sick, it’s best to take them regularly to prevent getting sick in the first place.
You can buy capsules and tinctures of medicinal mushrooms in stores and online. Or you can buy the whole herb and drink it in a tea or eat it, depending on which one it is. They sell both wild and domesticated mushrooms. Wild is best. You can find them if you go hiking in the woods. Look for them growing out of trees.
Another option is to grow them yourself. Not all of them can be cultivated though. Shiitake can be grown on different substrates. It can be grown on sawdust but logs are better. Reishi and many others can be cultivated but chaga cannot. Wild cordyceps is very expensive. Luckily someone has figured out how to cultivate it at a small fraction of the cost.
Tip: Make your own tinctures with herbs because you can make them stronger for far less money.
When you use a bunch of different medicinal mushrooms together you get a synergistic effect. An effect the famous mycologist Paul Stammets calls “host defense.” Here are some of the top ones you incorporate into your health regimen:
Best Medicinal Mushrooms
- Reishi – “mushroom of immortality.” Wisdom and good fortune. Very well studied and well known for being an herb of the highest order. You can find reishi growing wild in a surprising amount of places. You'll be shocked to find it growing once you start looking for it. It doesn't taste great when made into a tea, so I prefer to only put a little reishi in my tea and then take lots of reishi capsules.
- Chaga – #1 anti-cancer herb! Particularly useful against melanoma. Highest natural source of antioxidants, betulin, and melanin. One of the highest sources of super-antioxidant super oxide dismutase (SOD). Chaga's taste isn't offensive so I drink a lot of chaga tea with wild chaga. You can also buy it in capsules. I have an entire web page dedicated to chaga.
- Shiitake – Lentinan is exclusive to shiitake and is attributed for much of its health benefits. Highest amount of L-ergothioneine, a unique antioxidant the body cannot make. The most widely eaten medicinal mushroom. You can buy it in the stores but a lot of what is sold has been grown on sawdust, which is inferior to log-grown shiitake. Or you can buy shiitake extract.
- Agaricus Blazei – Only grows naturally in a small mountainous town in Brazil, where Western diseases like cancer are rare. Best-selling supplement in Japan, where it’s approved to treat cancer. Not here though in the land of the free. It's illegal to treat cancer with it here in the US. But if you take it yourself you get the same benefits! Paul Stammets sells his own unique strain of agaricus blazei extract.
- Cordyceps – jing herb, great for the adrenals and lungs. Wild cordyceps is quite bazaar and very rare, so it carries a hefty price tag. It grows on caterpillers but only at very high altitudes in the mountains during short time periods in a small portion of the world. Luckily you can buy cordyceps.
- Maitake – “hen of the woods.” Most commonly found in northeastern U.S. It's commonly eaten. But you can buy it in maitake capsules.