EP55: The Wild Power of Mushrooms
And welcome to another episode of the Eat Weeds podcast. I'm Robin Harford and for about a couple of years I've always wanted to interview a particular gentleman who set up bristolfungarium.com. His name's Tom Baxter and last year at the Power Plants Festival I had the great pleasure of meeting him and he's a bit of a character so it's really nice to have him on the show. Tom welcome. Thank you, Robin.
Speaker 2:I'll attempt to keep the character in check. So
Speaker 1:today we're going to talk medicinal mushrooms because that's what your speciality is. And I'm always curious about people's journey. To keep it short, what was I know your backstory with organic farming, vegetables, etc, but specifically in this context of mushrooms, what was the turning point? What made you go, I want to do that?
Speaker 2:I think I'd spent quite a few years foraging for mushrooms. I've been fortunate enough to look for mushrooms in the Siberian Steppes too and then I spent quite few years living in the sort of foothills of the Pyrenees and used to frequently tell my assorted children that the conditions were perfect for mushrooms and we were just going to go and spend five hours up the mountain looking And 95% of the time we found nothing, and by the end their excitement was just tinged with complete anticipation of disappointment because every time we'd go we'd never find anything. They'd then tell me that before we even left.
Speaker 3:This time and I think
Speaker 2:that is the is the foragers' conundrum isn't it? You can never lose faith but yet experience tells you that you should perhaps qualify your participation a little more. Fundamentally for me what happened was that I was at that stage an organic veg farmer and needing revenue in winter where no photosynthesis takes place and I had been like foraging mushrooms and selling them to various customers or in these shops in around Bristol. And I then spent the last bit of money I had on a couple of shipping containers and started growing oyster mushrooms on straw and then hired a man far more competent than me called Henry who was able to clone local mushroom strains, oyster mushroom strains, and so then we started looking at what was available around us that we could then clone and grow. I think fundamentally for me, at one point, I had a couple of forest schools.
Speaker 2:I grew up on the edge of Longweed Forest. I spent a lot of time in the woods as a child, and I've always wanted somehow to come up with a way of being able in my head to spend more time in the forest and yet earn money. And this was ironically enough, I've managed it, although I don't spend a huge amount time in the forest anymore. But we do look to the woods around us for the majority of the genetics of the mushrooms that we grow. So in a way, I have fulfilled my desire to use the forest as a basis for my existence.
Speaker 1:You took me around the sheds just now, and you're coming from very much a scientific background or base not I don't know about background, but basis. Think Trying to get strengths of certain compounds up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're quite fortunate now in that six years in, we're now the only company in The UK that funds pure research, so our PhD at the neuroscience department in Bristol. Wow. We also have recently hired Pai Anne, who's my Persian teddy bear, but he is a late 50s analytical chemist with thirty years experience. He's been at Glaxo and Pfizer.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:His whole life has been counting compounds to put on labels, and so we now have again, we're the only people, I think no. There's one company in Spain, actually. Apart from the single company in Spain, we're the only company in Europe that has a dedicated analytical chemistry laboratory, which is actually done in Peyton, your whole neck of the woods. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so we are able now to take mushrooms from the forest around us here in Somerset and quantify the compounds that we know are relevant from a human health perspective, and we can do that very quickly. So within a month of finding something, we can count the compounds that we're interested in.
Speaker 1:And then from that, if you find something that's appealing Yep. Say stands out from the crowd Yep. Will you then that's what you will then bring back here and
Speaker 2:Yeah. And grow. Yeah. Yeah. And so interesting, for example, with our lion's mane, is actually how we actually landed up where we are now on this farm.
Speaker 2:So about eight years ago, a friend of ours spotted a lion's mane 30 foot up a beech tree, and we went to look at it, and it was a lion's mane. I think we were the first people to find a lion's mane at that point in the Southwest for eight years because they are they were the last few years has been a bit of an explosion in people seeing lion's mane. I think post COVID where a lot of people spent a lot more time outside, they started to become a lot more engaged and obviously with the sort of increase in interest in fungi and mushrooms and mycology, A lot more people are cognizant of what they're looking at or interested in what they're looking at. And, Baylor, when we've when this one was identified eight years ago, there hadn't been one for a very long period of time in the Southwest, and they cut the tree down, the beech tree that it was growing on, and we managed to collect a lot of smashed lion's man off the floor and cloned it. But I also rang up.
Speaker 2:I got the number for the man that owned the land and then was like, had a pop at him about the fact he shouldn't have cut that tree down. And then I asked him if he had any land for sale. He said, I don't sell land. And then you can't make any money off land. What do want the land for?
Speaker 2:And I was like, I need to build a barn. Said, oh, millions of barns. And so he took me around, and he's got a couple of thousand acres just around here. So just around Baragurney, and they're in half the village. And there was we found a barn and which he's rebuilt for us.
Speaker 2:And then he said, don't you suppose you'd be interested in the the farmhouse? No one's been living it for two years. Commercially, we can't rent it out. It's absolutely fucked. But if you'd be interested So, yes, so now we live in the farmhouse, which is less screwed than it was when we turned it.
Speaker 2:When we turned up, had to go around with expanding foam everywhere just to keep the wind out and the rain. So, yes, ironically enough, that lion's vein that we found 800 meters from from where we're based now is the reason we're here. And that lion's vein, when we had it tested, had sort of 20% higher levels of two types of compounds, hericinones and beta glucans, than the five commercial strains, and I think it's indicative, and we know this anyway intuitively, that something that has taken, in this case, certainly probably centuries it's been here, maybe considerably longer, that it is adapted to this environment. Sure. And so the fact that we're growing that mushroom at scale now and it's of all the mushrooms, we sell far more lion's man than anything else and it had higher levels of the two compounds we're interested in.
Speaker 2:It speaks of there being, as we know, the plant kingdom, the fungi king was probably similar, some adaptive reality to the environment. And I think one of the reasons we grow so many mushrooms that are localized to here is, one, this was an ancient estate, and so there are still some ancient woodlands. And two, the fact that they've been growing here for such a pronounced period of time means that they are accustomed to the climate. And for whatever reason, that means that they are more adapted to the conditions, and that seems to be represented in the chemical profile. So when we test them, they have higher levels of some of the compounds that we're interested in as opposed to these other strains that we've tested that are brought in
Speaker 1:China or
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or or Europe quite often. And but, yeah, there's definitely a lot from Asia as well. But it's yeah. So not all the time is that the case, but certainly more often than not, that is the case.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it's largely thanks to a lion's vein. I'm able to be sat here in this barn with you now.
Speaker 1:Thank you, lion's mane.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you, lion's mane. A dominant master is the fungi.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what's what for people who are completely new to all this, they may have heard of medicinal mushrooms. They may have heard that lion's mane they can buy lion's mane coffee from all these I'm thinking more of the American brands. What is it about medicinal mushrooms that the regular folk on the street need to pay attention to and the sense of why they're important for their potential well-being? If they're important for their well-being, is it which are we talking purely neurological here?
Speaker 1:You mentioned the neuroscience institute or department. Is that where medicinal mushrooms have their excellence
Speaker 2:or is it? Okay, yeah, no, it's not that simple.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:I wish life was, but
Speaker 2:So now what is interesting with fungi in particular, if we look at the different sort of kingdoms, is from an evolutionary perspective, they were the first kingdom of life on Earth, and they were around for about, we're confident, 1,500,000,000 years ago. Although in August, there was a dig done in South Africa, and there are these remarkably these forms that look almost identical to what we now recognise as mycelium, and so potentially it might be back to 2,400,000,000 years. But initially, obviously, were water based. The Earth's been around for 3.5. If it does push it back to 2.4, we really are at the dawn of time.
Speaker 2:The Earth would have been a very radioactive place at that point. And what is actually what is interesting at Chernobyl, there are actually three different strains of fungi growing on the inside of the dome, the concrete dome, which
Speaker 1:are using radiation as their energy source. So Chernobyl, for those who are very young, was the nuclear power plant that went hot, basically, in Russia.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. There's a wonderful book called Chernobyl, which is strongly recommend anyone reading it. It just how the incompetence of humans Sure. Could really create catastrophic Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it really was the incompetence of humans. It was not like a system design failure. It was just one level of it. And also yeah. Anyway, we we go into the Chernobyl disaster.
Speaker 2:Read the book. Fascinating. So, yeah, fungi have had a inordinate length of time to develop compounds. Are fundamentally biochemical factories. The majority of a mushroom is not actually the fruiting body of the mushroom that we see, that's just the reproductive orgasm, a bit like an apple on a tree.
Speaker 2:So the tree is made up of the roots, mycorrhizal fungi, and the trunk and the branches, and the apple is just the fruit, the reproductive organ, and that's fundamentally what we see in terms of the mushroom. But the mycelium, which is like the tree and the roots combined, is one cell wall thick, so anything can pass into the body of the fungi. And from about, let's say, one point five billion years to sort of nine hundred million years, all that existed on Earth was fungi, bacteria, viruses and other fungi, and all of these could pass into the body of the mushrooms, and so the mushrooms had to launch a biochemical reaction against these viruses, bacteria, fungi. And that is the reason why fungi as opposed to plants have so many more compounds. So each of the fungi we grow probably has between two fifty and maybe over 300 compounds of interest.
Speaker 2:Even plants that are viewed as sort of powerhouses like curcumin or turmeric, we're looking at around 200, and the compounds are actually much, much more simple in terms of molecular structure. The reason why that's relevant for us as humans is that a lot of the compounds that these mushrooms have created in reaction to other viruses or bacteria getting into the into their body is that they are very similar from a molecular structure perspective to compounds that our body already makes. So a couple of an easy example to look at is in ration, gallauderic acids are very similar to pretty much all hormonal steroids that the body makes and also cholesterol. So they all have they're triterpenes that have 30 carbon atoms, and the only sort of difference is off the
Speaker 1:So explain the triterpene for people.
Speaker 2:So the triterpene is the type of compound which is, from a molecular structure perspective, has 30 carbon atoms, and off carbon atom number three, it either spikes into a hydroxyl or carbonyl, and depending on whether or not it's testosterone, oestrogen, cholesterol, they all have this same shape, and so the receptors in the human body recognise that shape. So when you have these compounds called gallidaric acids in Reishi that are the same shape, they attach on to the same hormone receptors in the body because the body recognises them. And so there are quite a few examples of this in with compounds that mushrooms make. So for example, all mushrooms make type of polysaccharide called a beta glucan, and that is a thirteen sixteen molecular structures of the third and sixth carbon atom that spikes. That is recognised by human immune receptor cells, so there are nine different pharmaceutical adjunct treatments for cancer.
Speaker 2:There are isolates of fungal beta glucans, and again, that's because of the shape of these beta glucans. And there are lots of lots of examples of compounds from mushrooms being used in in the sort of pharmaceutical space, and so the science is not new. We know that the body can make use of these compounds, and the reason why there are so many more of these compounds in fungi that the body recognizes as opposed to in plants is one because of where the animal kingdom comes after the fungal kingdom. And so a lot of the structures were in essence developed by fungi and then adopted later from the evolutionary perspective by animals. Whereas with plants, they don't sit above the animal kingdom.
Speaker 2:They sit to the side. And so that's fundamentally the reason why mushrooms are so relevant from a human health perspective and also from from a folkloric angels or medicine perspective. I remember reading Culpepper and talking about the plague and London tonic number two. They called it a think they called it a conch fungus and also whatever that. But, anyway, 30% of London tonic number two was made from some sort of conch fungus, which we think potentially may have been a garacon.
Speaker 2:But, anyway, certainly, the knowledge of fungi being relevant from a health perspective goes back a long time, both in Europe and obviously in Asia. In Europe, there's been, probably because of the birth of Christianity, a bit of a stop in the sort of river of knowledge. There was a big gap where fungi didn't seem to be used particularly much. We certainly know, obviously, in the fifteenth, sixteenth century it was, but there is the Druids obviously use them. We know about some of the through some of the writing.
Speaker 2:I think it was one of the Roman historians talking, obviously, about the druids and how the the the arrows wouldn't hit them, and they took various hallucinogenic mushrooms beforehand. And I think that was probably we were fundamentally forest runners to a degree back then, and so the knowledge of the forest would have been very prevalent. And I think probably post, we lost a lot of our forests, especially when we're cutting them down full of all the wooden boats, the Armada, that sort of stuff. Yeah. But I think the lack of ancient forest in The UK is probably that goes hand in hand with the lack of sort of decrease in knowledge of what was available from a medicine perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know when I was wandering Southeast Asia and Laos and Burma and places like or Myanmar as it's known now, that when I would be in go to villages or gather there'll be a gathering of a market really on the edge of the forest. There were always the healers, for want of a better word, on the ground, and half of the medicines were larger roots and twigs and leaves and things, but half of it was were just massive mushrooms.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So they're part of it. But then I think their tradition was influenced by Chinese medicine.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think there's a huge also in fungi love, humility, tropical jungle. There's a lot of fungi. Interestingly, we were fortunate enough to be invited over to Barbados in November to do the first fungal survey of Barbados since, I think, it was over 1940, really. And what was amazing being over there was that because fungi predate Pangaea, and so there were there was one landmass fundamentally about 350,000,000 years ago.
Speaker 2:Fungi have already been around by at least a billion years by this stage. So when Pangaea started to break away to form the sort of continents and the landmasses that we know now, fungi had been colonized, that land mass, and so there's enormous similarities between fungus all over the world. They look different, but they're all from the same family that's it's quite interesting. Everyone thinks that you'd find extraordinarily different fungi in Barbados. Mean, you do find morphologically fungi that look different, but they're all still identifiable when so we have we found some ones that people probably recognize are these sort of pink flamingo chanterelles growing off coral and a very small amount of soil, but obviously it formed some sort of mycorrhizal relationship with some of the some of the trees there.
Speaker 2:But again, actually, Barbados, like The UK to a certain degree, Barbados even worse have been completely clear felled. So although we're in this jungle with huge trees above us, actually going back a hundred and forty, hundred and fifty years, literally the entire island have been clear felled. Wow. So a lot of the there's no real ancient forest there anymore. And because uniquely in the Caribbean Islands, it's actually a coral Island.
Speaker 2:And so even when you're, like, at the highest points, you dig down two or three inches, there's little coral underneath your fingertips. And so, yeah, I think, you know, the history of the world is one of evolution or creation and destruction. And what's quite interesting is if you look through the fungal records at we're living through one of the great extinction events currently, but if you look at the extinction event, for example, between the Permian and the Triassic, immediately, a couple two or three million years after that, there is huge spore loads in the fungal in the Ross fossil record. There was an explosion of fungi with a dominant life force again or, like, a dominant kingdom of life on Earth. And so I think fungi are nature's great recyclers, and another example is the only reason we have the fossil fuels that we have now, those were the trees and plants that were not infested with fungi and recycled.
Speaker 2:If you wanna sleep easily at night, there will always be fungi. I remember reading about some Japanese ice cores that have been drilled in Antarctica. It went back to twenty million years ago, and they found some fungal spores, they fruited, basically. Wow. What's also interesting is that they can deal with the spores can deal with the radiation in space and so there is I'll probably get this wrong, but there's a theory called I think it's called trans spasmodia, which is this idea that because fungal spores can deal with the radiation in space, it's plausible that fungal spores came here on a meteorite Yeah.
Speaker 2:And gave birth to life on Earth. I think a huge number of evolutionary biologists believe it, but it is definitely plausible.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's quite interesting one that because I was while you were talking, I was just thinking, oh, would would because people are out there trying to find life in other planets. Would one of the key indicators of life other than water be fungi?
Speaker 2:I don't think anyone's looking for it because they're looking for the Bacteria. Yeah. They're looking for the sort of fundamental building rocks to a hydrogen car. But And also how you would yeah. I'm not sure how you would get a bit of equipment over on Mars that could do well, I'm sure you probably could that could do microscopic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I'm absolutely probably could. If you could find fungi, then you have found complicated life on Earth.
Speaker 3:Life anywhere.
Speaker 2:What is really interesting actually is recently some some I think there were Danish ecologists put on weather balloons up into the stratosphere. It was quite simple tech used for mycology, and they had these matchsticks or a sort of spinning thing that they put Vaseline on, and they chucked them up under weather balloons, like, high up in the stratosphere. And so the spores would stick on the the Vaseline and then blew the balloon up and it falls back down. And there are so many mushroom spores that high up and so loads of them were like potential. A lot of fungi can be potentially invasive to either crops or humours or whatever it may be and so this idea that fungi are already travelling all across the world.
Speaker 2:I know, like, it's quite often said, if you had a column, a foot wide column above your head going to the stratosphere, there's around about 6,000,000,000 fungal spores above your head. You're breathing in fungal spores every breath you take. They are we can't see them, but they are, I wouldn't say, the most important, but certainly the oldest aspect to intelligent life on Earth.
Speaker 1:So how much of the human body is fungi?
Speaker 2:Everyone wants to bring it back to the individual. Are, In your sort of gut biota, there will be millions of different types of fungi kicking off down there. Yeah. Certainly in terms of not millions, there'll be tens of thousands. We think that at the moment we've identified about 150,000 types of fungi, and current estimates are that there's between two to 3,000,000.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Our level of fungi and the role they play is infinitesimally small. Sure. Obviously, there have been some beautiful books written, obviously you've read Life of Trees where they do the radioisotopes down and then get transferred.
Speaker 1:And there's that Australian filmmaker with his wife that do that beautiful film on fungi, world of fungi, something
Speaker 2:like that. I don't Extraordinary photography. Oh, it's a macro photography. Yeah. So we're yeah.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I've met there was one on on Netflix done by a guy called Louis Schwartzberger called Fantastic Fungi. Oh yes. It had Paul Stammocks in it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Louis does a lot of that macro photography. Actually Louis hopefully is gonna start funding Richard who does a lot of our macro photography here to do some yeah, so we're lucky again that we've got friends who do a lot of that sort of stuff Yeah. Because of Bristol having the natural a lot of the natural history stuff going on. Richard has made some beautiful videos of our fungi growing. And, yeah, hopefully, we'll be able to do more of that because they are unbelievably beautiful Totally.
Speaker 1:Things. Yeah. They're an expression that I think captivates once someone sees them. They're caught, aren't they? Yeah.
Speaker 1:By the just by their by the not only the beauty, but the curiosity. There's a it's an unknown. They're a mystery still so that it kind of peaks And
Speaker 2:they are alien.
Speaker 1:That. And they are alien.
Speaker 2:They are alien. They fundamentally are. Mushrooms are interesting. They're made of chitin, which is the same stuff as, like, crustacean shells or excess cousins of insects, and that's one of the reasons it's very difficult for the human body to break down unless you have a high level of the enzyme chitinase in your belly. Just by eating mushrooms, most of them most of the sort of compounds you're likely to just shit out.
Speaker 1:This is something that I'd like to move into. So let's talk now about there's loads of mushrooms we could talk about, but I think the two that stand initially for me are lion's mane, cordyceps, and then Serbang B. Reishi. Let's start with lion's mane. Like I say, it seems really popular to people who don't know anything about this world.
Speaker 1:Why lion's mane? Why would someone want to take a tincture of lion's mane? Oh, okay. And let's do you go one step. Two two questions in one.
Speaker 1:Why tinctures when yours are triple extracted versus dried powder?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. If we start with Lion's Man, I think, personally, I believe Lion's Man has almost got its own PR department behind it because I think the reason for that is in our society where our society is at the moment, in the sort of acute individualisation that's taken place, this sort of, yeah, this sort of atomisation as Hallbeck would call it, the atomisation of the individual. We all think the problem's in our head, and if we could just sort our head out, everything would be fine. And so I think this mushroom is very much indicative of the sort of general perversion of the individual as god, which is almost what's happened.
Speaker 2:And so the individual with the sort of breakdown in the community and familial sort of structures, of the mind quite often gets, as Jung would, separated from the the archetype and the ego and the archetype. And so I think fundamentally lion's mane is a mushroom for modernity
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Because it tells you, or at least this is what people want you to believe, that you can sort your focus, clarity and mind out, and everyone believes that's the recipe to a healthy existence and a virtuous life now. If they could just have
Speaker 3:a clearer mind, everything would be fine.
Speaker 1:Is that almost out of the productivity community?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. A 100%. A 100%. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's exactly what it is. Fire hacking. Hacking. But also the desire to be perpetually productive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And love working.
Speaker 3:So am a man.
Speaker 2:I love gardening. I like being busy, so I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with being busy and doing things that, you know, you enjoy. But just being I think there is it's gone a bit extreme in certain sort of corporate environments. So interesting. This was the reason why we funded the PhD initially.
Speaker 2:So the the I think the title of the broad sort of three year engagement is exploring the neuroregenerative and neuroprotective compounds, medicinal mushrooms, with obviously lion's mane being probably the reason why the Tim, the professor of neuroscience, was keen on getting me to pay him to hire someone. Lion's mane, there are a couple of things that are genuinely interesting with lion's mane. So lion's mane in traditional usage and there is some evidence of it being used to aid in meditation in the sort of fifteenth century, but more often than not in terms of a TCM perspective.
Speaker 1:And that's traditional Chinese medicine?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was given for upper digestive tract issues, so like acid reflux. And and what is interesting, actually lesser reliance on based on the research that we've done, but there is obviously an acknowledgement now of the key role between the sort of gut and the brain. And so there has actually been a compound isolated from lion's bone, which is now used as an adjunct treatment for oesophageal cancer. And interestingly, oesophageal cancer is often caused by acid in the stomach breaking down the lining of the bottom of the esophagus.
Speaker 2:So that was a big part of Lion's Way in terms of its actual traditional usage. Now what we're exploring as part of this PhD is what compounds, if any. Firstly, we're exploring what does our tincture do, what effect does it have from on the specific neuronal cell lines and certain stem cell lines as well from a neurodegenerative perspective. And so we're one of the things we're doing is we're treating this neuronal cell line with trans fatty acids to restrict the growth of them, and then we're putting a wash of our lots of different ones of our tinctures, but a wash of our tinctures to see if that does encourage new growth. And it it does interestingly on a couple of them, but not as much as one of the other ones that no one actually takes for neuronal growth, which is quite interesting.
Speaker 2:And so there are certain compounds that have a very low molecular weight called erinacines and herosimones and heronacines that are tiny compounds that seem to be able to cross the blood brain barrier and potentially create the precursor to an enzyme, which is the first step in a two step process of developing something called NGF nerve growth factor. So it's a lot more complicated than and in the research we've been doing, the one thing that I that lion's mane does seem to have a meaningful quantity of is a compound called ergothionein. Ergothionein used to be is brutally important for bodily function. We have ergothionein receptors in every organ of our body. Before we eat, they get fired up in anticipation of ergothionein being delivered and being able to be shifted through the body.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, we used to get it mainly through the soil. Unfortunately, due to how we farm, the quantity of ergophyll in in the soil in much the same way as invertebrate numbers, worm numbers Yeah. Has literally collapsed. Wow. And so it's another reason to probably, if you can afford it, either buy local or buy organic because there is more ergophylline in the side of organic, and no one's really testing for it.
Speaker 2:But but anyway, so we're not really getting it in our diet. You can get some from chicken liver, a small amount. There's a tiny amount in red beans as well, but the only other source is mushrooms. They have around about a thousand percent more ergothione
Speaker 1:in there. And this is all the kind of edible strains
Speaker 2:All mushrooms. Mushrooms to a certain degree. Some of them have more, and so ergothione, interesting, the ones that have the most are the pleuritis, the oyster family. Also, my taqui has a higher amount, but also lion's mane has about three quarters of what the Claritus family have. And so I think possibly the reasons we're seeing the outcomes for people or the if it's not just the placebo, if people because we sell a lot of lion's mane.
Speaker 2:If you add up all the other mushrooms, they equate to about the same amount as we sell a lion's vein. And so the effects people are reporting to us, if it's not the placebo, and I think it's probably not these infantism, these small compounds over very low molecular weight, if I was to guess, I think it's probably ergothialine, and especially we know in all degenerative diseases and with age as well, ergothionein plummets in the body anyway. People have not been getting anything like the same level of ergothionein they've been accustomed to for millennia. And so if I was to guess, and every time I write a guess, I'm wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So bear in mind I'm wrong. Yeah. But I would say ergothione in lion's vein is probably one of the reasons why people are reporting the changes that they are. What I will say What
Speaker 1:are those reports? What are the changes?
Speaker 2:The people find that they are able to concentrate more Okay. Focus, have less issues from a sort of memory perspective. So the one element that I haven't discussed with lion lion's mane, this is one of the reasons why people make the jump into it being potentially beneficial from a neuron perspective and a couple of the studies that have been done. So lion's mane definitely, from a lot of studies that have been done, seems to help speed up the reparation of the myelin sheath. So the myelin sheath is the the outside of all your nerves made up of this myelin sheath.
Speaker 2:And so there's lots of studies looking at the effect that lion's marine has on how quickly the myelin sheath repairs itself. I think I'm comfortable saying it does appear to repair the myelin sheath quicker than for people who aren't.
Speaker 1:And the myelin sheath does what?
Speaker 2:It protects all your nerves throughout your body. Okay.
Speaker 1:So it's not just brain?
Speaker 2:No. It's not brain at all. No. But but so I'm comfortable with that. We've had lots of people who've had injuries, sports people for example, who have seen remarkable improvements in a relatively short span of And the the interesting thing is with nerve issues, you tend to find that the nerves improve over the first eighteen months.
Speaker 2:And then if you haven't seen any improvement, you won't see much improvement beyond eighteen months. And so for a few of the people that have taken our lion's vein products that have had what they thought dead nerves or these people that have had this issue for years and then suddenly they take the lion's vein, their nerves and their triceps start working. And so I'm comfortable possibly believing that it might be the lion's vein that's doing that. They certainly the individuals concerned certainly believe it is. But the other element with lion's vein that's outside of the sort of myelin sheath perspective is that and this isn't talked about very much, is that there's definitely a percentage of people that have a bad reaction to it, like a genuinely bad reaction.
Speaker 2:And so I'd say probably of say there's around twenty thousand people that have taken our lines, Wayne. I would say four people have had a bad reaction.
Speaker 1:And what does that mean?
Speaker 2:Means that their heart rate rockets
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:And then plummets. Oh, wow. And it's over a sort of twenty four hour period. And for some people, they can feel very anxious. And and this isn't just our product.
Speaker 2:I've heard this from so many people. Sure. Actually, I was speaking to a woman at this conference we were at in London at the weekend. She was a long distance swimmer. She swims 35 kilometers in the ocean for fun.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. Takes all sorts. Yeah. That is a marathon swimming.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that's like the the swimming the channel and swimming back just for fun.
Speaker 2:But she told me that she'd had this reaction with Lions' Man, and I was like, it won't take you out of Lions' Man, take you to someone else's. And I was like, that is definitely the Lions' Man. We've had two or three people
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Say exactly the same. Actually one guy had, you know, had all this sort of whatever it is, like, tracking stuff for his heart rate and his sleep, it was he sent it over. My god. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:10 high. And so I think as Tim, the neuroscientist, the professor of neuroscience, would say, it's positive in a sense, Tom, because it's proving biological activity. This is one of the this is one of the the sort of things that makes us more comfortable in terms of believing that the mushrooms are having biological effects on people because, for example, with Reishi, which in traditional Chinese medicine is given for high blood pressure, it opens up the capillary. So it actually acts in the same way as a couple of blood pressure meds anyway. It opens up the capillaries, allows the body to hold more oxygen, which in turn slows the heart rate down.
Speaker 2:But when people are on, for example, antiplatelet medication where they're dropping the quantity of large oxygen carrying hemoglobin cells, they start feeling awful because there simply isn't enough oxygen. And so again, that's indicative that something is actually going on. But ironically enough, where because of the fact that fungi or mushrooms are not viewed as having any medicinal value, you're not able to put on any warnings because they have no value with this, so how can they have any?
Speaker 1:And that's EU or is that UK?
Speaker 2:Everything's fundamentally EU. Okay. So, yeah, I think with Lion's Vein, we're hoping to understand more. So through Payam, we've just ordered around another 12 different standards for different compounds.
Speaker 1:Payam is?
Speaker 2:Is our Turkish, not Turkish, God forbid. Okay. Persian. Persian.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The bear.
Speaker 2:Teddy. Yeah. Beautiful man. Very cuddly. And, yeah, so hopefully in about three or four weeks, we should start getting data sets back from another 10 different compounds in our lion's way, and I'm feeling about three or four months, you'll be able to see exactly how many compounds are in each one of our products.
Speaker 2:To touch on the tincture side as opposed to powders, in an ideal world, either would be grape. Okay. Interestingly, in order to make a powder, you first have to do an extraction, so you first have to make a tincture anyway. The reality is, the vast majority of products available globally emanate from Asia, India, mainly China, the vast majority of China or Vietnam, and latterly India to a certain degree, which has been interesting because obviously in the Ayurveda, mushrooms are not good. So it's quite interesting Yeah.
Speaker 2:That that there has been this sort of explosion in mushroom growing in India, whereas in direct contradiction to their sort of cultural Sure. Mental. But it's nice to see that even ancient traditions can take on or can adapt, whereas certain religions were slightly more tolerant to to the march of march of knowledge. But yeah. So in terms of tinctures versus powders, fundamentally, one of it one one element of it is that you can obviously shift a lot more product if it's not held in water and alcohol and so from an efficiency perspective.
Speaker 2:So in order to make extract powder, what you do is you extract into liquid, be it water or ethanol like we do. I mean, we use ultrasolics as well to basically, they send sound waves into the kiting cell walls, fracture them, and allow a lot more compounds to be pulled out into solution. But the process for making an extract powder is extract into your liquid, be it ethanol or water, then you put it through a spray drying tower between either two seventy or 370 degrees Celsius. That blasts all evaporates off all the the liquid. And then you have a carrier, a sort of powder that's circulating in that tower, and well over 95% of the time, that will be multidextrin because you don't have to put on your ingredients list maltodextrin
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And it's water soluble. Wow. So you can claim pure, a 100%
Speaker 1:Bloody mushroom
Speaker 2:extract powder, but it's the vast majority of it's maltodextrin. It's why quite often when you taste Yeah. These mushroom powders, they're slightly sweet.
Speaker 1:Sweet. Sure.
Speaker 2:So it's a multidaction. Actually, multidaction can have a bit of an issue for people with people's guts. And so number one, you can create a product that is much more shippable. Sure. Two, theoretically, you can create a stronger product as well.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, the reality is there's a great opportunity for creating a large volume of product at a very low price with not a lot in it. Yeah. And, also, it's water soluble, you can make it and put it into drinks. You can
Speaker 1:Yeah. So my friend who goes under eBay and buys organic
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That'll be mainly multidosteron. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yep. Which is a shame.
Speaker 1:It is a shame.
Speaker 2:It's also the one nice thing with
Speaker 1:That people are now being made aware Yeah.
Speaker 2:Through this. Yeah. But don't get me wrong. There are some really good products that I actually have had. There's some really good ones, and some of the ones we've tested have been amazing.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, some of the ones we've tested have literally nothing in them. Yeah. But also the same with tinctures, but it's the one thing with tinctures is it's a lot easier. You can trust your senses. Yeah.
Speaker 2:If they look clear and pale and they taste of very little, that's because there's nothing in them. If they look thick and dirty and taste of mushrooms Yeah. You can be confident that there's something in them. And so it's much it's much easier. It is easy with tinctures.
Speaker 2:You can it's very easy to compare our product to another company's product. Just look at it Yeah. Taste it, smell it, and that's there's no hiding with tinctures, although lots of brands do try and hide behind all sorts of other things. And, yeah, we have obviously the other thing that's great having our ability to have the research on one side and the testing on the other side now is that we can obviously test lots of other companies' products Sure. Which is always what's the best way to describe it?
Speaker 2:Always, for us at least, always encouraging Yeah. But also slightly depressing Sure. Because we are limited by the amount of mushrooms we grow to the amount of product we can sell, but obviously no one is checking anything. So I could write as a lot of companies do anything on the packaging, and I could just make a much weaker product. Wow.
Speaker 2:And I could suddenly have a business that is worth or potentially could sell a lot more. I have a lot more product off the same amount of mushrooms, which lots of companies do. Yeah. Lots and lots. The smaller, yeah, the smaller guy is probably less.
Speaker 2:One of the main interestingly, with the research we've done, one of the main differences between our extraction process and other companies' extraction process is actually the amount of solvent we extract into. Although I didn't actually take you into the well, I'll take you in before you leave, but the tincture kitchen. So we'll extract one kilo of dried mushroom into in the two processes we do on the water side, about 45 liters on the slow cook with the high high hydrasonic and then 20 liters on the high pressure ones. We'll have about 65 liters of water, and then we'll evaporate that down under vacuum to about 3.4 liters. So there's a lot of energy Sure.
Speaker 2:And a lot of time. And the the relevance for that is that water only has a carrying capacity, a solubility level, so you need to use a lot of it's like making a stock, basically, but you need to keep it under 70 degrees to in order to not denature a lot of the compound. And so, unfortunately, this is a lot of companies obviously just don't do that. They extract into the same amount of solvent they want at the end of trees. You just don't have enough in there or they boil stuff when they need to evaporate it down, which just smashes loads of the compounds.
Speaker 2:I think fundamentally, if you're looking to buy a decent product, Amazon is probably not your friend. Sure. Probably not.
Speaker 1:The word organic is questionable.
Speaker 2:Organic nowadays. What I find so frustrating with it is people no one gets pulled up on anything anymore. Yeah. The amount yeah. There's a company that I think is a we all take it as a bit of a compliment.
Speaker 2:Basically, they call themselves a farm. That's another UK company. They don't farm anything. They're based in a flat in Derbyshire. And yet to look at everyone that buys those stuff, thinks they've got a farm.
Speaker 2:They've they put this extract ratio on the on the surface appears to be stronger than ours. What they're doing is buying a maltodextrin and just putting it in water and putting some ethanol in there.
Speaker 3:That's all they're doing. And, obviously, theirs is cheaper, and it looks like a far more just utter twaddle. But 30% of the
Speaker 2:people that take that pollock will probably experience a positive Proceed. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so even even though there's literally nothing in it. And then there's other companies we know, like, European companies that look, the companies that we used to venerate and try and mimic. Oh my god, they're doing such a good job. It's so pure, so clean. But then when you test them solo, like solo, and then you think if I had if I was comfortable putting a product out there, which was that weak, suddenly overnight I could shift five times more product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're not the only one in our community of plant and fungi people that has said this. There's other very science focused friends and colleagues who have done their own tests on other people's stuff and
Speaker 2:it's It's depressing It
Speaker 1:is really depressing because it is that predatory, predating on the naivety of the consumer because everyone's hearing about medicinal mushrooms and obviously it's a jungle and in jungle there are predators.
Speaker 2:They're very clever, some of these ones, though, because what they do is they extol the virtues of the transparent supply chain and give you, like, these data sets, and it's just bollocks. Because I mean, a part of it is because there aren't enough companies actually saying what's in their product from a compound perspective Yeah. Because there aren't any labs that you can go to. There's a lab that do a lot of testing for various things in in The UK called Eurofins, and lots of people get heavy metals tested by them, and they don't actually do microbiology, Popular is the big sort of brand for certificate of analysis for a lot of supplement type things. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so when we went to them a few years ago asking if they could test for some of these fungal compounds, they were quoting us 6,000 to £8,000 just to set up the methodology before they could do the tests, And so there are and there aren't really any labs apart from r one that are doing this in The UK because it is expensive to set up methodologies. If you've got if you wanna test for, say, 40 different compounds, and that's how they give you a good deal and just charge you £5,000, That's £5,000 times 40. That's whatever that is 200,000. Yeah. So it's a lot of money Yeah.
Speaker 2:To get, like, a decent library of things set up. So we're very fortunate to have Payam, who's working unbelievably hard for next to no money and is very stressed. But, hopefully, we've introduced two other companies in The UK to him. So, actually, I'm going down with Martin Powell. Martin Powell is initially, I think, in training a microbiologist, but he is a traditional Chinese herbalist fundamentally.
Speaker 2:He went to I think he went to university in China. He speaks Mandarin fluently. Yeah. He actually brought over a couple of people to the farm a couple of weeks ago. He's written the books on medicinal mushrooms and the compounds.
Speaker 2:He's like the sort of grandfather of Yeah. Medicinal mushrooms in The UK, and he's just an entirely decent human being. If the world is made up of people like Martin, we would be we would be all the richer for it. So Martin has been doing what we do for decades. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A bit like sort of Matthew Rooney was the man doing what we were doing before we even thought about doing it. Yeah. You know, Martin has yeah. Martin's level of knowledge, and he goes to China every year. He knows everyone out there.
Speaker 2:He knows everyone, you know, in The US who's set up martial related businesses over the last thirty years. He's an absolute an absolute he's a diamond geezer, basically. Anyway, so we're going down together to see to I'm gonna introduce him to Pyam, and he's gonna start using Pyam to test his product over here. And I think that's the thing. There will be other companies now that it's available that are gonna be actually give a shit about what's in their products, but there's gonna be a lot that do not want to know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think it'll probably be easier for me putting about twelve months time because the companies that people are gonna start accounting compounds and putting them on there, it won't be very many. Yeah. I think the other issue is you'll have with certain ones of the most of it, almost everyone's importing from China, and some of the issues you have with the Chinese and I used to live in China. I've got nothing against Chinese. I've had brilliant times living there, but they they can be slightly unscrupulous when it comes to opportunities to make money in the same way that there's a lot of European country companies in my space that are quite unscrupulous when it comes to selling a product that doesn't have a lot in it in order to make money.
Speaker 2:And what sometimes happens is they'll do analysis on a batch, and then everything they sell for the next twelve months, that'll be the bit of paper that goes with it, but it's got no relationship to what they're actually selling you. And so there was an interesting study done in 2017 where in The US, they bought, I think it was 23 Reishi products, both Amazon and, like, whole food shops. And of the 23 they tested, so they did like a DNA profile. Only 17 of them didn't have any Reishi in them whatsoever. And so that's probably around who knows what it's like now.
Speaker 2:Some of the big brands in The UK don't do any testing, and so these are brands that you can see in anywhere, boots. These guys are literally just using the certificate of analysis, and that certificate of analysis, all it says is heavy metals. Yeah. And actually what really, what you really need to test for on product coming out of China is pesticides and no one's testing for that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's, we're in this sort of slightly odd situation. And when you're doing an extraction and then concentrating stuff down so much, the last thing you wanna be doing is using a product that has Sure. Potentially like the anyway, so we have tested a few Chinese mushrooms for compounds, in particular, reishi's. What is interesting is when you start testing stuff, the picture does not become clearer.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:And the trouble with science is you can't argue with it. Sure. Yeah. And I think that's the same bit indicative exactly of what's going on with the sort of bigger picture with climate, the financial systems. If you look at a systemic perspective, there are so many knowns that are not acknowledged Yeah.
Speaker 2:And behaviors that should follow for that acknowledgment. And so on a smaller scale, can see it in the space that I'm in from a supplement perspective where, you know, I think that's when you're in a society which is not acknowledging these preeminent, these like
Speaker 1:Scientific reality.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But these like actual fundamental threats to our very existence. You know, I'm always reminded that it took the first city on Earth that had supply chains sufficient enough to support a million people as rope, And then it was fifteen hundred years later, the next city on Earth had enough of a stable empire and supply chains to be able to do that, and that was London. And the idea that we are going to be able to continue to supply the amount of cities that are now well in excess of a million people given what's happening climactically. And the trouble is what happens climactically, also massively influences politics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the reason we're seeing this sort of rise in tribalism across the board and probably this return to hereditary religions is because when people are fearful, they return they return to whatever's familiar. Sure. And, you know, what from a fungi perspective, they're sitting pretty. I know.
Speaker 2:Even the last few extension events, it was boom time
Speaker 1:for them afterwards.
Speaker 3:There's lots of recycling that Leeds doing. Guess all the fungi's was right there. In fun. It's happening again, guys. I think we could have free reign.
Speaker 3:Give it a century or two. Think it's gonna
Speaker 2:be bone house again. Yeah. So all is not lost if you're a fungi.
Speaker 1:And we will be recycled. Yeah. Returned to time. Totally. Tom, it's been fascinating.
Speaker 1:I haven't even asked, I came with a load of questions which is Rift, which is actually how the podcast is meant to be. Like you say, it's such an extraordinary world. We're barely really it seems, getting a handle on it. We have some kind of handle. Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 1:A lot of unknowns.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of unknowns. I think humans benefit from having a closer relationship with fungi. Fundamentally, thing I always say is just eat more mushrooms. Yeah. There's so much evidence.
Speaker 2:There have been two long term studies, one done in Latvia and one done in Japan, and fundamentally the groups actually in Japan it was all men, about 30,000 men that they followed over nearly forty years, And the incidence of colon cancer, prostate cancer, and pancreatic cancer was all about over thirty percent lower in the groups of men that ate mushrooms five times a week.
Speaker 1:Unless even button mushrooms and things like that.
Speaker 2:Any mushrooms. Yeah. Any mushrooms. Just there are there are just eat more mushrooms. Fundamentally, if you're interested in your health and you're interested in what benefit mushrooms can bring, if you can eat mushrooms three or four times a week regularly that is going to have almost the best outcome you can imagine from any dietary change.
Speaker 1:Thank you again and people can find you at?
Speaker 2:Bristolfungarium.com or on Instagram bristolfungarium.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
