Shiitake mushrooms (Lentinus edodes) have been used in Japan and China for thousands of years. It is known both as a food and as a medicinal fungus. Shiitake mushrooms have long been believed to boost energy, treat colds and get rid of intestinal parasites. Shiitake mushrooms contain fat, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals. However, its key ingredient is a polysaccharide called lentinan. Mushroom polysaccharide is extracted from the crushed mycelium of shiitake mushroom, which is rich in polysaccharide and lignin. Shiitake mushroom products made after crushing may reduce hepatitis B infectivity by utilizing the mycelium that emerges before growth of the cap and stem of the shiitake mushroom. Mushrooms can also stimulate white blood cells to produce interferon. In laboratory studies it has been shown to help boost immunity. There are more than 10 kinds of amino acids in shiitake mushrooms, including 7 kinds of essential amino acids such as isoleucine, lysine, phenylalanine, methionine, threonine, valine, and vitamins B1, B2, PP and mineral salts and crude fiber.

1. Mushrooms are very high in unsaturated fatty acids. 4. Mushrooms also contain butyrate oxidase, which has the effect of lowering blood pressure. 5. Serum cholesterol-lowering components (C6H11O4N5, C9H11O3N) were also isolated from shiitake mushrooms. 1. Lentinan has immunoregulatory and anti-tumor effects: Lentinan has a promoting effect on T cells that regulate human immune function, stimulates the formation of antibodies and activates macrophages, and reduces the ability of methylcholanthracene to induce tumors. Lentinan is known as the peripheral therapy (Scheme efferent) in immunology and is used in the clinical anti-tumor. In the human body, lentinan can increase the synthesis of DNA and the production of immune protein in peripheral monocytes. 2. Liver-protecting and detoxifying effect of lentinan: lentinan can significantly reduce the ALT elevation caused by CC l4, thioacetamide and prednisolone, and can antagonize CCl4 liver injury and reduce the content of liver glycogen, which has the effect of protecting liver and detoxifying . 3. Shiitake mushrooms also contain double-stranded ribonucleic acid, which can induce the production of interferon and have antiviral ability. Shiitake mushroom extract has anti-platelet aggregation effect.

Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner, biochemist, author and mushroom expert Martin Powell discusses all things mushrooms, from how extracts are produced, to the secondary metabolites of various species, to how mushrooms produce vitamin D and why you should always cook your mushrooms. Do different parts of the mushroom have different components? What secondary metabolites do we need to be interested in? Andrew: This is FX Medicine. I'm Andrew Whitfield-Cook. Joining us on the line today, all the way from the UK, is Martin Powell. He's a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, a biochemist, and the author of Medicinal Mushrooms: The Essential Guide and Medicinal Mushrooms: A Clinical Guide. He was a lecturer at the University of Westminster for 13 years, during which time he helped set up the Master of Science programme in Chinese Herbal Medicine. And has also taught in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Today, as well as helping patients, writing, and lecturing, he works as a consultant to leading companies in the natural products industry, with growers and manufacturers, to improve the quality of raw materials in the supply chain, and with leading integrative health clinics on improved treatments for cancer and other chronic health conditions.

I warmly welcome you to FX Medicine. How are you, Martin? Martin: Hi there, Andrew. Yes, I'm good, thank you. Yeah, all well. A little bit cold over here, but we're coping. Andrew: Yeah. Now, you've got a Bachelor of Science with honours in biochem. So it's a bit of a jump from biochemistry to mycology. Tell us a little bit about your history, and what first got you interested in mycology and medicinal mushrooms? Martin: Well, mushrooms have been something which has really sought me out, if you like, in my life. I suddenly wake up one morning and decided that this is what I wanted to specialise in or focus in. In case you liked this information as well as you desire to be given more info with regards to Supplier of shiitake mushroom extract powder for food Ingredients kindly check out our page. Almost quite the opposite, but like a lot of people growing up in the UK and in other English-speaking countries, we tend to have an innate mycophobia. We have an innate wariness of mushrooms. Martin: Yeah. Because we didn't nearly think about them as something which could be beneficial.

We were much more aware and conscious of the potential toxic nature of some of the species. So growing up, I think myself and a lot of people here have an innate wariness, if you like, of mushrooms. So it was actually quite a surprise and revelation for me when I started studying Chinese medicine. And of course, in Chinese medicine, mushrooms have been a major component of the materia medica for as long as it's been developing, well over 2,000 years. And if you look at the earliest extant materia medica, Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, that already lists a number of mushroom species and lists most of them in the superior category of herbs. So rather than being toxic, it's those herbs which can safely be consumed for long periods of time and of which it is said that long-term will lighten the body and confer longevity. So it's a radically different approach, a radically different attitude, if you like, to that which I grew up with.