ZOE Science & Nutrition - Mushrooms as medicine: Uncovering the health secrets of fungi

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

They’re not a plant or an animal — fungi are their very own kingdom of life. And their unique composition means they offer novel, often unbelievable, benefits to our health. Certain species of fungi are currently used to treat conditions ranging from cancer to depression.  The love of mushrooms (or mycophilia) has grown in recent years. And at the heart of this movement is biologist Dr. Merlin Sheldrake, author of the bestseller Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures.  In today’s episode of ZOE Science & Nutrition, Jonathan, Merlin, and ZOE Co-Founder Prof. Tim Spector ask: Why are mushrooms so special? 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily 30 *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system Learn how your body responds to food 👉 zoe.com/podcast for 10% off Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes: 00:00 - Introduction  1:42 - Quickfire round 3:04 - What are fungi? 8:40 - The connection between fungi, plants & gut health 14:10 - The human impact on fungi 19:41 - Mushrooms and mental health  28:01 - Fungi as medicine 35:34 - Why should we eat mushrooms 40:39 - How to introduce more mushrooms into your diet 46:56 - How often should you eat mushrooms 51:17 - Summary 56:01 - Outro Mentioned in today’s episode:  Potential role of ergothioneine rich mushroom as anti-aging candidate through elimination of neuronal senescent cells from Brain Research Medicinal mushrooms in adjuvant cancer therapies: An approach to anticancer effects and presumed mechanisms of action from Nutrire Immunomodulatory effect of mushrooms and their bioactive compounds in cancer: A comprehensive review from Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy  Episode transcripts are available here. Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here

Welcome to ZOE, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. I'm your host, Jonathan Wolff, founder and CEO of ZOE. Today, we dive into the captivating world of fungi and mushrooms, and learn about the surprising reasons why they're so important for us. Fungi expert, Dr. Merlin Sheldrake and my scientific co-founder at ZOE, Professor Tim Spector, take us on a psychedelic tour of mushrooms,

why they're a promising treatment for debilitating mental health conditions like depression. We'll also hear how the chemicals in mushrooms might be protecting us from other diseases. And of course, why eating more mushrooms is beneficial for our health. Merlin is a biologist and the author of the best-selling book Entangled Life, How Fungi Make Our World. And Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists

and a professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London. Merlin and Tim, thank you for joining me today. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about this one because I really enjoyed the book. And those of you who are on video can actually see the new version of it has these amazing pictures in it, which when I read it, it didn't have the pictures. And now suddenly it all makes way more sense. So I think that is the ultimate book for people who love like really getting this vision into something you haven't seen before. But at this point, no one probably has any idea what we're talking about. So what I'd like to do is start with a tradition we have

here, Merlin, which is a quick fire round of questions. Are you up for that? Sounds good to me. So we have very strict rules, which are always tough for scientists. You can say yes or no, or if you absolutely have to, you can give us a sentence. You're willing to give it a go? I'll try. All right. Are mushrooms and fungi a kind of plant? No. If there were no fungi, would a kind of plant? No. If there were no fungi, would we be alive today?

No. Do plants rely on fungi as much as we rely on gut bacteria? At least as much. Brilliant. Well, we're going to go into that in a bit more detail. Now, Tim, do all mushrooms have the same health benefits? No, but they're all good. Are dried mushrooms as good for our health as fresh mushrooms? Usually and sometimes more. And finally, do psychedelic mushrooms have the potential to revolutionize medicine? Absolutely. What's the

most surprising thing about fungi that you found in your studies? It's very hard to answer that because there are so many surprising things. I'll choose one. The fungal networks in a teaspoon of soil could stretch from anywhere from 100 meters to 10 kilometers. Monik, we start at the very beginning because I think most people here, like me, didn't know what a fungi was. What are fungi and are they the same as mushrooms?

Fungi are a kingdom of life. So that's as broad a category as animals or plants. So there's lots of ways to be a fungus, just like there's lots of ways to be an animal, there's lots of ways to be a plant, but they're not plants and they're not animals. Mushrooms are the reproductive structures of a small group of, well, a large group, but a smallally small group, of fungi. Mushrooms are the places where fungi produce spores which help them disperse themselves over potentially large distances. When we think of mushrooms, we're just thinking of a small part of the overall life of a fungus, which is usually in the form of a network. Most fungi live most of their lives as networks of branching, fusing cells called mycelial networks.

And so that means I should think about mushrooms a bit like a fruit. So it's like a tomato or a pear within this thing that isn't a plant. It's analogous to the fruit of a plant, except that the tree, say the apple tree that produced the apples is underground, and the mushrooms you see usually are sticking up through the ground, and you're not able to see the rest of the tree. Why aren't they a plant? Because it feels like they're not an animal, and they're not a bacteria. So my very simple view of the world, they're a plant, aren't they? I think perhaps the most important difference is that plants, on the whole, photosynthesize. So they produce energy from the light coming from the sun and from carbon dioxide in the air.

And it's a really fundamental process on the planet, photosynthesis. It's kind of like they're eating air and eating light to produce the energy they need to grow and do the things they do. Fungi don't photosynthesize. So like us, as animals, we have to find food in the world, ready-made, as it were, and put it inside us. Fungi have to find food in the world and consume it. They can't make their own energy-containing carbon compounds like plants do. They will steal the energy from something else that's made it. So that's fascinating. So they don't have the ability to photosynthesize. They can't take the energy from the sun, but they can't just walk around, right? Like an animal or even,

I think, like a bacteria that's sort of free. Does that tie into what you're talking about before, about these incredible number of roots that you were describing? Yes. So they grow into networks, mycelial networks. And what these networks allow them to do is, whereas animals tend to find food in the world and put it inside their bodies, fungi put their body inside their food. Which sounds disgusting. Well, I mean, they're not disgusting if you're a fungus. And the way that they do this is by growing these networks, which allow them to bury themselves, insinuate themselves within their food source. Because they're highly branched, they can make contact with as much of their surroundings as possible, which they then digest by releasing enzymes and other digestive compounds, which allow them to break down their surroundings and absorb those nutrients into the networks.

Nobody told me anything about this when I studied my school biology. I don't feel like people are constantly talking to me about fungi. Do they matter? Well, I'm bound to say yes, but I do believe that they really do matter, and I'm not alone. One of the things that they're able to do, remember this is a big group of organisms, a kingdom of life, but on the whole, fungi are metabolically ingenious. They're chemical wizards. They can produce all sorts of fascinating chemicals that allow them to interact with the world in strange and remarkable ways. So what this allows them to do is to play really important roles in the biosphere, for example, by decomposing wood. If all the wood that plants produced piled up, unrotted, then we'd be buried kilometers deep in unrotted forests. Of course, we wouldn't exist in that situation, but you get the picture.

And you need the fungi in order to break down the wood? So wood wouldn't decompose if it wasn't for the activity of fungi, which are able to break down the wood by producing an arsenal of chemicals and enzymes that allow them to do so. But they aren't just powerful decomposers. They also play really important roles in making life on land possible. So all plants, for example, depend on fungi, on symbiotic fungi that live in them or on them in order to survive. Plants would not have made it out of the water and onto the land 500 million years ago were it not for the fungi that they formed relationships with. So they're symbionts, they're decomposers, and through all this activity they play a part in regulating the composition of the atmosphere. Because when they

decompose things they release carbon dioxide. When they support plant life, they help pull down carbon dioxide into stable forms in the soil. They also make soil by decomposing organisms. You can think about soil as the kind of the guts of the planet. I often think about it like that. And fungi are key players in the life of that gut system, if you like, in the soil. They hold soil together. They form a sticky living seam that holds soil together. If you take away the fungi,

the soil will wash away. They play all sorts of roles like this. You can think of them as ecosystem engineers. Hi, I want to take a quick break here and tell you about something new we've created, a free guide that will kickstart your journey to better gut health. Now, if you're a regular listener of this podcast, you're no doubt already aware of how important the gut microbiome is. It's responsible for so much, from digestion to immune support and even our mental well-being. As we've heard many times on this show,

and as our members know through using Zoe, we feed our gut microbiome through the variety of foods that we eat. And in return, our microbes give us this wealth of health benefits. So how can you nurture your gut in the best way? Which food swaps can you try to nourish those good bacteria? What does a high fiber shopping list look like? Our free gut health guide shares it all. Emails and actionable tips that are designed to put you in control of your gut health. To get yours for free, simply go to zoe.com slash gut guide. Can I touch for a minute?

Because you mentioned this word symbiosis, which definitely brings me back to like 15 year old biology. And I feel like it's really interesting because we talk a lot about sort of gut bacteria and this realization, and we have Tim here about how important they are for us and that these bacteria aren't all our enemies, but actually, it seems clear now that there's a lot of ways in which the human body and bacteria actually fit together. I think there's something analogous that you're talking about between fungi and plants, but how essential are fungi for plants and how does that fit together? Yeah, so symbiosis just means living together, right? There's lots of ways to live together, like we know as humans. There are lots of kinds of relationships that we

can form. Some of these are healthier relationships than others. Some are more productive, constructive relationships than others, and some can be really problematic. It's like that in the living world at large as well. So fungi form relationships with plants perhaps in the most important way by living in and around plant roots, extending their exploratory webs into the soil and foraging for nutrients like nitrogen or phosphorus, which they're able to find more easily than plants can. They transport this nitrogen phosphorus back to the roots and they exchange it with plants for sugars and fats that the plants have produced in photosynthesis. So they have a trading relationship with plants. Trading meaning they're giving plants something good and the plants are giving them something

back. Something good, yeah. On the whole, both are benefiting from this association. It's what you might call a mutualism, but it's based on the exchange of resources. So the plant's getting something it can't so easily get by itself. The fungus is getting something it can't so easily get by itself. And together, they're able to extend their reach

and do things that neither could do alone. The links between soil health and gut health are just so obvious. And anyway, the life of the planet and the healthy human is also deeply interlinked. And it's interesting that the ratio of fungi to microbes in soil is actually a really good indicator of the health of the soil.

And in areas where there are less fungi networks, then that soil isn't as nutritious or it's hard to grow things. So in a way, that's just like humans that have lost diversity of our microbes. We know there are fungi in the human gut, and we're estimating that about 8% or so of our microbes are fungal. That's a bit of a guess because they're hard to sequence genetically and they're much larger than the equivalent bacteria. So we don't really know, but we

used to think of them as harmful inside our guts and lots of clinics everywhere set up to eliminate gastric fungi like candida. And there's no real evidence that for most people they are harmful. And a lot of evidence that they do play a really protective, again, symbiotic role, working with the bacteria in this case to maximize nutrition and reduce things like inflammation and keep the gut wall structurally really sound and a real defense mechanism, particularly for the immune system. So we think fungi in the gut are really important for the immune system. So it's really lovely to see these analogies, these crossovers, how yes, they work with plants. They also work with humans. And it's a two-way exchange mechanism

that's really cool. Your research is about how fungi can engage with the environment even though they don't have any brains, right? There's no, a fungi doesn't have a brain. Could you tell us in very simple words like what you're doing and what it tells us? So I'm working with a research group and we're trying to understand the way that these symbiotic fungi that live with plants in and around their roots, how these fungi are able to behave as networks. How are they able to live in a changing world, sensing their environment, sensing lots of things, sensing temperature, sensing any number of chemicals, sensing acidity, pressure, all sorts of things.

How are they able to sense all of these aspects of their environment? How are they able to integrate all of these different sensory data streams and decide in their way, decide on the right course of action at any one moment? We know very little about this. And so we're looking inside these networks using microscopes and watching the flow patterns, like rivers of fluid moving through the network. And sometimes like getting to a junction, going up one way and changing direction and going down the other branch of the junction. And so it's really exciting work because there's a lot of looking involved.

And when I read it, it reminded me a bit of like these sort of science fiction movies where we experience some completely foreign creature that doesn't seem to have a brain or whatever, but actually turns out to be cleverer than us. And I definitely get a sense from you of some sort of awe that this thing is actually much smarter than you would have expected or we could imagine, despite the fact that it's sort of invisible to us and doesn't have a brain, these things that we would classically think of as what's required to imagine that something has any intelligence or capability. I think that's right. One of these fungi might be sprawled over tens of meters. It might be engaging with hundreds of thousands, millions of different plant root tips. It might have very different

environmental situations in different parts of its network, managing an uncountable number of trading decisions with these plants, and constantly remodeling itself and readapting in these trading relationships to changes in the situation from moment to moment, from day to day, from season to season. These are non-trivial problems to solve and of course they solve them in their way and they've evolved over hundreds of millions of years to do this but yeah that does boggle my mind has there been a significant human impact on the fungi around the world and the way that it supports plants in the way that we're obviously very aware there is on trees? For sure. If we cut down a forest and the bodies of those plants were home to a whole load of fungal species that depend on those plants for somewhere to live and for

symbionts to live with, for partners to live with. We cut down the forest, you've destroyed the habitat for a whole load of fungi that no longer can live there. You've also created habitat for a whole load of different types of fungi, right? You might have fungi that thrive on rotting wood. So if a forest is killed by a disease and you have a lot of dying wood around, that will create habitat for a different group of fungi. So again, there's so many ways to be a fungus, it's a little hard to generalize. But on the whole, yes, when we do really huge scale industrialized agriculture, we are often damaging fungal communities by plowing. I was wondering about that, this constant plowing and fertilizer. Do you get the same density, I guess, of fungi in the way that we do modern agriculture as we would have done in

historical approaches? No, you disrupt the fungal communities and you get lower fungal diversity and you get less healthy, less active groups of fungi in those places. Plants have evolved for hundreds of millions of years to do what they do in association with fungi. So some modern strains of plants, some modern crops, for example, a wheat variety might have been bred to grow quickly when you feed it with loads of chemical phosphorus. This is like giving it fertilizer. Yeah, give it lots and lots of fertilizer.

And so that modern bread variety might not be so good at forming relationships with their companion fungi as a variety that has been grown by humans for a long time before this chemical phosphorus started to be applied. So on the whole, if we're breeding this kind of plant, we're breeding quite spoiled plants. Spoiled plants with maybe not very good symbiotic manners. They're not so good at forming these associations. And they might form quite dysfunctional relationships with the fungi that would otherwise be key parts of their lives. So you take away the phosphorus the plant needs, the plant won't survive, and nor will it have fungal partners to strike up a relationship with. I've sort of got this analogy now of plants almost being fed on their own version of

ultra-processed food, right? So they grow really fast, but in a way that isn't quite right. And then of course, probably therefore ending up without some of the things that you would expect to see in a healthy plant, which we then go and eat. Am I stretching this too far? No, it's like if you suddenly feed any animal massively and it balloons up in size, it might have more height and weight, but it's going to lack some of those nutrients and things that its defense chemicals, its complexity and its interaction with the world is going to be

different because all you're focusing on is the size of that animal or that plant. They're lazy. They just sit back, don't have to do much hard work, and the fertilizer is this massive growth hormone that just pushes them up. It's a bit like they've lost their own microbiome. Only in this case, it's their fungi and it's spread out and dispersed rather than sort of sitting inside. Yeah, they don't care. They don't need it. I'm getting all the growth I need, all these extra nutrients. They're just icing on the cow. I don't need to worry about that. Let's not give the fungi as much and the fungi don't return the favor. So I think that's partly it. But also, you know, the heavy plowing, the chemicals in the soil, all these things are disrupting these networks as well.

And Merlin, presumably this is all unintentional, right? It's not the people 70 years ago or whatever, we started this big growth in agriculture like, oh, we know all about the fungi and we don't care. It's just that they were seeking to get more and more food. Nobody knew about any of this, I'm guessing, and this is another example of sort of an unintended byproduct because we generally didn't realize how complicated the world was and I think tended to think that there were very simple answers and only now starting to realize there was much more complexity underneath? I think that's fair to say, that largely it's been driven through ignorance rather than through people being malicious.

However, that wouldn't be something you could necessarily apply today where you have powerful lobby groups for the chemical industry, for the big machinery industries, for all of these different parts of the heavily commercialized agricultural world. I don't think that all of those vested interests and powerful lobbies are acting out of their concern for the soil. I think they're acting for a profit motive. Can I ask about herbicides and glyphosate, for example, the commonest herbicide used? We don't really talk about its effect on

fungi and fungal networks. Is there any data on that? Is it resistant to it? I've read some studies that suggest that herbicides are damaging and disruptive to mycorrhizal fungal networks. I don't know what context they were studying those studies took place in. I don't know how much these herbicides affect decomposer fungi, which are also important parts of the soil. But certainly there's some evidence that they are disruptive. And of course, they're disruptive in another way because they kill the plants, no, kill plants that fungi depend on. And on the whole, lower diversity of plants in an area means lower diversity of fungi. I'd love to talk now about the role of fungi and mushrooms in human health.

And maybe starting with medicine, because I know, Tim, that you're quite excited about some of the new things that are coming along. And so could you maybe talk, Tim, talking to us about hallucinogenic or psychedelic mushrooms, which I was definitely brought up with something that my parents told me I should never do. And now you're talking about it as potentially real treatment for mental health issues. Yes. Well, mushrooms have been used medically for thousands of years in China. And there's a huge history there that, in a way, the West sort of forgot about and is recently rediscovering. The so-called magic mushrooms in the West

really seemed to come to light after a family were having a picnic in Green Park in the 17th century. Okay, keep going. And they were reported by, I think it was the Times, as going crazy and delirious and having to be sort of arrested by the police because they'd-

Fits of giggles were mentioned because they're hysterical and they couldn't be sort of controlled. And this made the newspapers at the time. And it turned out they'd been foraging in Green Park and found these mushrooms. And that's really how, at least in the West, this idea that mushrooms had this mood-changing effect. But some mushrooms, psychedelic or magic mushrooms, produce a substance called psilocybin, which is a very powerful neurochemical in the brain. And it's very closely linked to the drug LSD, lysergic acid. LSD was around in the 1960s and it had a brief time when it was thought to be useful therapeutically. And there were studies, you went to Johns Hopkins University

and you were a student and you enrolled in the LSD study. And they did a group of students there and found that it did have profound effects on these students, generally positive. There were a small amount of them that got rather anxious symptoms, but most had very positive life and life-changing type experiences. And I think Merlin, you actually rather more recently than the period you're talking about, took part yourself in one of these LSD trials, I think in the UK, if I remember rightly from the book. That's right. In this resurgence of interest in psychedelics, which has taken place in the last 15 years or so. And it was a study into the effects of LSD on the problem solving abilities of scientists. So they got a lot of scientists which i was recruited in the team at the department of plant sciences i was working there was a poster on the wall that said do you have a meaningful problem that needs solving

as i call this number so i called the number um because it seemed like i had many meaningful problems that needed to be solved that's what you could recruit more or less anyone that way if they were silly enough to call the number. I was silly enough to call the number. And they said that this was a study involving scientists and giving them LSD to see if it changed the way that they solved problems. So I said, well, sign me up. And I went to the hospital. And they give you a battery of tests, you know, of psychometric tests and questionnaires and so forth. And then you lie in the hospital bed.

They very politely actually made the hospital room less hospitally. They'd hung hangings on the walls and they had mood lights and music. So you didn't feel exactly like you were in a hospital, but it was quite a thin disguise, I'd say. Anyway, I lay there and had the LSD and a remarkable experience it was.

Did you solve your problem? Not in any straightforward way. But I got new perspective on the problem. It felt like lots of very familiar parts of the problem landscape became unfamiliar again. And so I could kind of re-examine the situation. And it felt like there were lots of really helpful insights. If there was not one key solution, there were helpful insights that allowed me to proceed in a way that felt fruitful. And how was the experience overall? Very positive. I had a great time. I had to do these questionnaires questionnaires to you know to

assess um how you're feeling because one of the problems of doing this research as a scientist to the scientist doing the study is that they're they're trying to be objective you know they're looking from outside um but they're looking at my subjective state and the subjective state of the other participants um it's hard to be objective about subjective things. So they had these questionnaires. One of the questionnaire questions, I remember having to answer this question again and again, was, how do you rate your experience of infinity on a scale of one to ten? This question never ceased to amuse me. Every time it came around, every hour or so, I would descend into even more intense fits of

giggles um and eventually pull some number out of the air but um this is not to make fun of the question as an approach it's just sometimes these things can seem absurd um when you're in that it's supposed to change your your concept of ego isn't it so that's that's one of the big things it removes your ego so you can see everything more objectively that's what people who do this regularly and therapists say did you yeah it's certainly it becomes the boundaries of where you start and stop become um more confusing feels like you become more porous um there's less easy to distinguish you from your environment. For me, I felt like my mind became a much larger place. It's like I spend time in the garden of my mind.

But in this experience, it felt like I noticed there was a gate at the bottom of the garden leading into a path, leading into a forest like leading into a much bigger place which was um which was quite an amazing place to explore and that's something actually i brought back with me from the experience and it's i find it helpful sometimes to remember that my mind is a bigger place than the room that i am spending time uh my mental room that i might be spending time in at any given moment and tim what does the latest science sort of show about this? Is this just an excuse to let like fancy scientists be able to do LSD without getting sent to jail? Or is there like something real here? No, well, I mean, you know, for 30 or 40 years, LSD was seen as a bad drug. Definitely what I was brought up to believe. And it got

labeled, you know, as these bad trips and bad acid trips. And it got labeled the same way as heroin and cocaine and crystal meths, et cetera. And it turns out that was really a blanket reaction to all drugs and threw out what is actually therapeutically a very useful tool in psychiatry. And you've got to remember that there's been no new drugs in psychiatry for at least 30 years. And they've started to do proper clinical trials with proper doses of psilocybin, which is easier to dose than just LSD, and shown remarkable benefits of people with quite severe depression that have been resistant to medication and also some case of anxiety and depression and also some psychosis as well.

There's some encouraging signs that it can reset the brain through these chemicals and so actually changing some neural pathways inside the brain in positive ways. compounds that, you know, again, kind of crazy and thinking how fungi are producing these amazing compounds that we're now using as medications for mental health. It just, again, illustrates how, you know, we need to be embracing nature and using all these things together. So I think, you know, in five years, we'll be seeing these drugs prescribed. I was going to say, I think you were talking to me the other day about lots of other uses you know in five years we'll be seeing these things these these drugs i was gonna say i think you were talking to me the other day about lots of other uses of mushrooms that people are investigating in medicine there's quite a lot going on in cancer interesting in um and not as

a main main treatment um there are some sort of test tube studies show that that when you dry these mushrooms and you put them in little test tube plates, you can get immune benefits and you can get anti-cancer benefits. But often, most things can show that. So the proof is often in human studies. There aren't many of those, but there've been several, there was 13,000 elderly people with dementia who had given lots of mushrooms and reduced their dementia outcomes after six years. 36,000 Japanese were given it and should have reduced their risk of prostate cancer. These are observational studies, not trials, so they're not the gold standard. And lots of mouse studies showing particularly things like button mushrooms or reishi mushrooms can have some beneficial effects. And I think the most important is these cancer trials. So there are five small studies of, again, these reishi mushrooms, which show that

if you give it in addition to chemotherapy, so this is adjuvant treatment, you get improvements in those cancer outcomes. And this was looked at independently by the Cochrane Review, which is a generally unbiased way of looking at it, saying, yes, up to 50% improvement. The trials could be bigger, could be better. Yes, we need more of them. Reishi and Turkey Tail seem to be coming out as helping side effects of the drugs and helping them have a bigger immune impact. So I think this is where that field is going is that these have hundreds of chemicals in these mushrooms and fungi are having these benefits on our immune systems that maybe help us respond better to these drugs.

And I think this is again, similar to what we see in the human gut as well. And worth remembering also that fungal enthusiasm, as you said, Tim, is not equally distributed around the globe. And so in East Asian cultures, there's maybe a kind of mycopheria, you might say, more of an enthusiasm for things. Mycopheria is loving mushrooms, is that? Yeah, loving fungi. Fungus loving. Slightly surprised you haven't come up and turned up with that on your T-shirt, Merlin.

I'm disappointed now. You have another one. I have it tattooed on my chest. But in Japan, there's a chemical from shiitake mushrooms which is used very widely for treating cancer alongside more conventional cancer treatments, and also a compound from turkey tail, which is used very widely in quite conventional medical contexts.

So the research, the science is unequally distributed. And some of the reasons why those are not used so widely here is because it's not totally clear how they're working, although it seems to be very clear that they work. Talking about all these chemicals in fungi, there's one that's sort of hitting the headlines at the moment called ET. Tell me about ET, which makes me think of a famous 1980s movie. He looks a little like a mushroom now I think about it, but that's not, I think're going yeah ergothionine is is is a compound produced in many fungi particularly the what's

called the the bolette family which is like seps and porcini mushrooms and quite high doses of it and it's it's been shown a number of studies to have these particularly powerful effects on the body, on the immune system. And interestingly, humans have adapted systems to actually take this chemical and bring it into their bodies. So it's like a vitamin. Some marketing person called it the longevity vitamin. And there's quite a hype around it and you can now buy ET supplements. There are people saying it has amazing powers, but in the end of the day, it looks like you're still much better off eating the whole mushrooms rather than this, again, this reductionist supplement, which probably doesn't work in that artificial form as much as it would do if you're

eating the whole fungus. Just to make sure I've got that, you're as often skeptical with extracting the one chemical as ET, quite bullish about eating the underlying mushrooms? Absolutely. I mean, it's definitely a healthy compound when you eat it in the context of the whole fungus, the mushroom. Once we make it industrially and commercially and you eat it in the context of the whole fungus, the mushroom. Once we make it industrially and commercially and you take it outside, the evidence isn't really clear. It's that beneficial. And that's where marketing takes over. So I think that's what I've learned.

So go out and pick those, you know, seps and those porcini mushrooms and have a, you know, fantastic meal, knowing that just one of the hundreds of amazing chemicals you're getting is going to be this ET that may have anti-cancer properties. You know, it may do, have all these other benefits,

but I think we're better off just by eating more mushrooms rather than these supplements. I think this touches on an important point as well, that many of these medicinal fungi have been used for a really long time by traditional cultures, and have been known about by traditional knowledge systems, including psychedelics as well. So it's easy to forget that when we are talking about the stories of modern science, it can seem as if we're just discovering that these things work. I think a lot of what's going on in these modern scientific contexts is that we're

understanding a little bit more about how they work. But many of these fungal species like reishi and lion's mane chaga, these have been used for a very long time. It makes me think of this analogy with aspirin, right? Which is from a tree, and you're going to tell me which tree it's... Willow. Willow. Bark of a willow. Where I think similarly, it was used in traditional medicine for thousands of years.

Is this right? And it's only then much later that we came along and understood, in this case, identified the individual compound and figured out how to mass produce it. So is that the analogy? It's definitely an analogy. So many of the medicines that are very familiar medicines in the modern pharmacopoeia have come from folk medicines. And actually with these more traditional medicinal fungal species, one of the reasons why we don't know as much as we should is because it's very expensive to do big human clinical studies. And with these traditional medicines that we've known about for a long time, there's not much IP to defend. So big companies aren't so motivated

to do those studies. And it's one of them. So we understand that no one is going to spend a billion dollars to prove that eating a particular mushroom improves your health because they can't lock up the mushroom in the way they can lock up a pill, which I think is very familiar to us, right, Tim, as we think about nutritional science. People haven't spent the money on these studies because nobody can lock up olive oil or whatever it is, which is actually a brilliant transition to talk about food. And I think that our listeners will not tune back if I haven't had a chance to talk. Really interested to talk about specifically for these, you know, like cancer and mental health. But more broadly, Tim, as I said, I love this chapter. You're talking about why mushrooms were so valuable for us to eat. But

can you give me the, you know, the quick rundown again? Like, why should anyone care about eating mushrooms? Well, they taste fantastic. They have this amazing range of chemicals that give you this umami taste, this savory taste, which is sort of mimicking meat in many ways. And some people it's better than meat, particularly if you've got a range of different mushrooms there and you've slow cooked them or even get more taste if you dehydrate them and rehydrate them in many cases. So you actually get even more savory flavors and more chemicals. But as well as being super tasty, there's a lot of water in them. So once you've got rid of the

water, they have huge amounts of protein, about 25% protein, pretty good amounts of fiber as well. All these chemicals we've been talking about that have a whole variety of these effects. They're a source of selenium. They're actually a source of vitamin D. And they sunbathe like humans. You mentioned this before. Is it really true that if you leave them out in the sun before eating, they have more vitamin D? It is. I mean, it depends slightly on the variety, but some of them are really good at converting natural steroids in them to vitamin D, which is a steroid. And basically you can get half of your vitamin D amounts from eating portions of mushrooms.

Is it just a lucky by-product for us that these mushrooms are so nutritious and have all of these chemicals we don't access elsewhere? In some sense. I mean, it's also important to remember that they haven't been busily evolving for over a billion years to give us vitamin D. How selfish of them and um uh although it no obviously it is irrelevant um when we're talking about what it's like to eat them um but they need these molecules themselves to do a lot of the basic things that they need to do so for example when we use fungal drugs like penicillin which is a very famous drug produced by a fungus um the fungus is producing that antibiotic to defend itself from bacteria. When we use it in our lives, we are rehousing a fungal solution within our bodies and our societies. And so I

think that you can think of a lot of the nutritional content of mushrooms as something similar. They'll vary from compound to compound, of course. It's interesting. We talk a lot about diversity as we think about what you're eating and in a sense what i'm hearing is like fungi aren't even plants so i guess to make it very think about this very simple it's hardly surprising you're getting more diversity in the same way you're describing these these fungi carrying out tasks that plants can't do similarly it's perhaps not surprising you might have access to like these different sorts

of complex chemicals from fungi that we wouldn't just get through our normal plants? Or am I stretching this too far? I think there's lots of things that fungi can do for us chemically that plants can't because they're so chemically ingenious, because they produce all these different compounds, they do all these different things. In fact, lots of the chemicals that you'll get by eating a plant have originally been concentrated or even made by a fungus. Much of the phosphorus that's in your body would have passed through a fungus on its way to the plant that fed you. The show you're listening to right now that's providing you the latest evidence-based

health and nutrition information from the world's top scientists. Well, making it takes a lot of time. We think it's well worth it, all in the name of improving your health. All we ask in return is this. Send a link to this podcast to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click follow this podcast wherever you're listening right now.

Okay, let's get back to the show. And is it okay to eat them raw or should I always be cooking my mushrooms? Unless you're very careful, you're better off, I think, cooking them. There are quite a few poisonous types and there are other ones that just by cooking them, you get rid of those nasty chemicals and they're easier to eat. And it's often easier to get the nutrients from them if they're slightly cooked as well because they have this special layer, chitin, which is very hard to break down and gives it that structure.

And also they're full of water as well. So if you're cooking them, you actually get rid of a lot of the water and you get actually more flavors that way. So that's my view. I don't know whether you eat lots of raw mushrooms, but I think they taste better cooked generally. And so that's the way I digest. Easier to digest.

They're breaking down the cell walls um for sure um the times when i might eat them um that when they haven't been cooked formerly cooked with heat is when they've been fermented so if you're eating like a mold like koji which is used to make soy sauce and miso um you haven't cooked that but it has been transformed through a fermentation process cold Cold cooking. Yeah, we call that. So yes, no, I've started fermenting mushrooms. It's quite tricky, but they do taste amazing.

And how do you access this? Because most people will feel like if they go to their local grocery store and mushrooms, maybe there's like one type of mushroom or, you know, I think we start to see a few more, but still not very many. And I at least have been told by my mother again i feel like there's a long list of things that my mother told me not to do on this podcast but one of them was not to eat random mushrooms that you find like in the forest because you're likely to kill yourself so how do people i assume that they're not eating random mushrooms is a good idea merlin

it's definitely a good idea because quite a lot of them are genuinely poisonous there are some poisonous mushrooms which will give you a really bad time and potentially kill you. So the general rule of thumb is that you never eat a mushroom that you've found unless you can positively identify it. What that means is that you're not just saying, well, it's not that and it's not that, so it must be this. What you're saying is, I know for a fact that it's this. Which is a high bar for most people listening to this, just wandering into their local park and seeing a mushroom. But there are lots of ways to learn about what mushrooms are which.

Just like you can learn about what trees are which or what birds are which. And it's actually a really exciting thing for many people to do. And there's lots of great resources online for those who want to learn more. So I wouldn't discourage anyone from doing that. It's not like you need to become like the expert

who knows all all mushrooms overnight. I think there are about 300 edible types of mushroom I read somewhere, but about 30 are cultivated. And they're the ones you'd see in the shops. So up to 30, I guess, is the most you're going to see probably in this country. And most of us aren't going to see 30, they're maybe going to see a few. So that brings me back to the question at the beginning about dried mushrooms. And are they still good for your health? Or does it need to be fresh in the way that I think you talk about a lot of other plants?

You say if they just sit out there for months, there's not much left in them. I was surprised when I was reading this that there are studies looking at the nutritional content of dried mushrooms. you know, left in them. I was surprised when I was reading this that there are studies looking at the nutritional content of dried mushrooms. I think a lot of it's done on shiitake mushrooms, but porcini as well, which the Italians often store dried. And they are just as nutritious,

just they've looked at the chemical composition and are super healthy. And some people think they have more taste when they're rehydrated. You have to add water back into them, usually warm water. And so these seem to be very, very healthy. So it's a bit like our stories about canned tomatoes or beans. Some of these things which you might think are not healthy because they're dried, you know, are actually still really good for you. And I think it shouldn't stop people eating mushrooms out of season by eating these dried ones. I think that's the message. Although you should find a reputable

source because sometimes when dried mushrooms are imported, you can't tell by looking at the fragments of dried mushrooms that you can't confirm just visually that it's the species that says it is. And there are cases of contamination or the wrong kind of mushroom ending up in your bag of dried mushrooms. You're not really getting the variety that you want or the diversity. They're just giving you a bunch of the cheapest ones. Yeah, or there are a few thrown in with the ones you want, and those might not be the ones you want to be eating. So, reputable source. But button mushrooms are the sort of common ones in the UK, and they're often the cheapest, and they're cultivated in large amounts. And although

they look fairly dull compared to some of the exotic ones you see, I think they've still got plenty of nutrients in them. Is that right? Because they sort of look like the white bread of mushrooms, but you're telling me that actually they still... I feel like they can't have any nutritional value whatsoever, but you're telling me that actually they still, I feel like they can't have any nutritional value whatsoever, but you're telling me that actually I'm being unfair? I think you are, yes. I apologize. There may be better ones,

but you'll be generally paying more for the better ones. But Berlin probably knows the differences between all of the varieties. But I still think there's no such thing as a bad mushroom. I think that's my point. I agree with that. I personally think there are ones that taste a lot better and are more and more available, actually, like oyster mushrooms or shiitake

mushrooms, which I would always choose over a button mushroom. I would agree that there's no such thing as a bad edible mushroom. But for those that don't like or have not liked as a child, for example, button mushrooms, there may well be mushrooms out there that you do like because there's quite a range of flavors and textures. That's a bit like saying, so you can't give up on all mushrooms because you had a bad one, a bit like saying you're giving up on all plants because you don't like artichokes or something. Exactly. You'd be like, well, that's ridiculous, try a tomato. That's fascinating. And presumably,

Tim, because we talk a lot with Sarah about this idea of like the food matrix and complexity. Am I right in suspecting that a ground powdered mushroom is not likely to be as good as one of these dried but still sort of whole mushroom? I think it depends how much it's been crushed, if you like. So I'd like to see something that still resembles a mushroom in some way. So it's not a fine chemical powder. It hasn't been reduced to those few chemicals we've talked about. It still has some of the complexity of all the things going in there. It hasn't been fiddled with too much.

But if we take just pure, fast-drying whole mushroom, getting rid of all that water, and then as long as you grind it up and it's not too fine a dust, I think you're still getting most of those components. Because there are some studies showing that actually the cell walls of these fungi can have some benefits as well on health. And I thought that was really interesting on the immune system. So you don't want to get rid of those. You still want to keep some of that structure. It's a story we always keep coming back to, isn't it? Which is like you extract a few chemicals, as people do, and they want to make famous, and you lose like the 9,000 other

that are actually contributing to the overall benefit. You lose the fiber, the structure, and things. You're throwing away most of the good stuff. But I'd also add that there are situations when you're taking a medicinal mushroom um for example where um you might want to concentrate it because you simply wouldn't get enough of those active fractions um if you i mean it would take you'd have to eat so many mushrooms to get those those active fractions that you might never get to that point. So I think there are cases where you might want to take an extract alongside your diet of whole mushrooms. That makes lots of sense. So this question came up a lot with people emailing in to us. How often should people

be eating mushrooms? I would say try and get some mushrooms in every day if you can, at least three times a week. Most of the studies done for preventing cancer, et cetera, have done at least two cupfuls a day. So I think if you're really trying to make a big difference to your health, the more you get the better. And try and vary the species as well. I think that's the other thing, because we don't know yet what the particular advantages are.

So as for plants, diversity, I think, is going to turn out to be key. So this is something, you know, this is a very new field, but I think going for a diverse range of mushrooms, trying to pick some new ones, you know, even if it's small amounts. There are these mushroom teas and mushroom coffees. Generally have very small amounts of actual mushroom in them. So don't be fooled into thinking

that's really the same as having a full mushroom meal. Before we wrap up, I'd like to ask you both this sort of final question. What's your favorite way of eating mushrooms and what mushrooms would be in there? I love a creamy mushroom tagliatelle. It's mine. I'm using, if I can get three different types of mushroom and I fry them up, get rid of the water, add garlic and some creme fraiche, maybe with a bit of kefir just at the end to give it a bit more microbial tone, mix it with my fresh pasta. That's one of my

favorite meals. Sounds delicious. And what are the mushrooms? It's whatever I can get, really. I don't think you should be too fussy what you can get. So I like shiitake mushrooms, porcini, the Seps variety. But I always like trying something new, actually. So they've all got different textures and things. But I haven't found one I don't like yet. Merlin? I often just saute them, just fry them lightly in a pan,

get some of the water out and eat them like that, maybe on toast or just by themselves. But also I love making soups. And I probably have a miso base in the soup. I might add some kefir to give it some creaminess. And I throw in as many different species as I could get into the soup, and the way the flavors can meld together in a soup form is something I really enjoy. In terms of species, of the cultivator varieties, the varieties you could buy at a shop that had a good selection all year round, shiitakes, enoki, which of white tufts of mushrooms with thin, slender stalks.

Maitake, I love. Oyster mushrooms are great. And if they're talking about wild species, then it's whatever is around. But there are various, various favorites. I just was in France eating por porcini which were fantastic and mountains of chanterelles which i also really enjoy if someone's listening to this and now they're really interested in saying okay like i can get a certain amount in the shops and maybe i can get some more that are dried but i'm really excited about all these wild ones that aren't don't even

exist but i don't want to poison myself how could they get started there are great websites and field guides books um which field guide you get which website you visit will depend on where in the world you are um so it's important to find somewhere that's talking about a relevant fungi um and um there's a great app called i naturalist which is also a um a good resource brilliant well we'll talk to merlin to see if we can get a few of those links. We'll put them in the show notes. And I know you mentioned actually just beforehand that in a country as big as the States, for example, the West Coast mushrooms and the East Coast mushrooms are really quite different. So you would need to have a different guide. Well, there'll be common mushrooms, but they're quite different ecosystems. So you might be better

off with a local guide, which has fewer species in it than the big one that has all of them in. Um, it might be an easy place to begin. Brilliant. Thank you both very much. Um, Merlin, I would like to try and do a quick summary and, um, both you and Tim, please correct me if I've got, um, any of this wrong. So we start off by just saying like, what is fungi?

And amazingly, it is a kingdom, which I love because it's not a word that we use very often. It's a kingdom of life. So it's as big as plants or animals, but it's its own thing. And it turns out it's lived, I think you said, for 500 million years, like in this life with plants where they've grown together and where until we invented these modern agricultural chemicals over the last 100 years, it was essential for feeding the plants that we all ate. We've done a lot of damage to fungi with modern agriculture, probably without really being aware of it originally. And this is likely to affect the plants we eat. So historically, the plants we ate would have been in these deep relationships with the fungi and there would have been all these chemicals.

Now we sort of feed them with these fertilizers. They're sort of much simpler as a result. And we talked about this being a little bit like sort of ultra-processed food for plants, which we now know is not very good for people. Soil, therefore, historically is absolutely full of life. And today, in a lot of the places where we are doing this intensive agriculture, there's a lot less of it. So there has been this sort of profound breakdown. Why does this matter? It matters because we think this affects the food that we eat as well as affecting the ecosystem around us. We then talked quite a lot about mushrooms, which I discovered are like the fruit

of the fungi. Firstly, talking about medicine, and there's lots of places in which it's been investigated. It sounds as though around areas of mental health. Tim was quite skeptical about ET supplements, which are not a way to get into a movie, but apparently are the latest rage. But I think, Tim, you said once again, you're very skeptical about something which is one chemical that's been extracted from these mushrooms and therefore leaving behind maybe hundreds or thousands of others. And then we talked about mushrooms for eating. Both of you are incredibly positive, starting off with a tasting great, and therefore this should just be part of what we do, but also

because they have all of these complex chemicals. And for the same reasons that fungi extract all of these chemicals that plants can't, there's a high chance that we're going to access a set of chemicals that are probably not in our regular diet. So again, creating more diversity, which is something that we talk about a lot on these podcasts. Often better if slightly cooked, which is the reverse sometimes of what we hear. It makes me pleased because I definitely prefer them that way. Even the humble button mushroom is just fine and that I should not have been so prejudiced. Though I heard Merlin definitely say oyster or shiitake were probably his preferences in taste. But above all, there's no such thing as a bad mushroom.

And really what you should be looking for is, just like with plants, like diversity of them, trying different mushrooms. There are a limited number that are cultivated. I think you said there are about 30. I think I'd be lucky to find more than four in my local grocery store. So there's an issue about access, but the good news is actually dried mushrooms might be even better than fresh. So there is a way to do that. If you really want

to go and access all the others, then you're going to have to figure out how to do it for yourself. And we'll put some links in the show notes for those of you who are interested, but but do be aware that some of them are poisonous so you need to make sure you really know what you're doing and also if everyone goes out and picks the mushrooms in their parks and in the surrounding countryside um there won't be many mushrooms left so um foraging isn't really a a sustainable way to feed a population at the moment. So if you were going to go out and look for mushrooms, if you found some edible mushrooms that you were convinced were edible mushrooms, you knew were edible mushrooms, you might take a few of them to eat and leave most of them behind. Brilliant. Thank you both very much. Once again, I started,

but I'm going to finish at the same time saying you have to look at the photos in this book. I think they will really blow your mind in the same way for me as like first listening to Tim talking about the microbiome being inside us and how much that shapes you. I think it's, I'm definitely not going to look at a plant in the same way as I did before. You realize that there's something really magical going on sort of under the soil. So I couldn't recommend it more. Merlin, thank you so much for coming in. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Tim, as always, thank you so much for guiding us through this.

It's been fun. Thank you, Merlin and Tim, for joining me on Zoe's Science and Nutrition today. It's been fascinating to hear about the incredible impact that fungi have on our planet and can have on our health. Now, if after listening to this, you're hungry for more science-backed nutrition and health insights, why not download our brand new guide, which captures 10 of the most impactful discoveries from the podcast so far. You can download it for free by going to zoe.com slash podcast, and you can also learn more about Zoe. You'll also find the link in the show notes.

As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yela Hewins-Martin, Richard Willan, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time.