Dr Rupy: My panellists are shiitaking science to new heights. If you think the jokes are going to get better, you got another thing coming. Okay, we're going to start off this panel with a quick round of one favourite thing about mushrooms. I'm going to start with you, Esther, if that's all right. What is the one favourite thing about mushrooms?
Esther Gayer: Favourite or interesting? I find I find them fascinating because they are chemical factories. We relate with environment with our behaviour, moving and acting. Other organisms like plants, they grow and have morphology that allow them to survive and adapt to their environments. Fungi communicate with chemicals. They are all chemistry. They eat through chemicals, they release enzymes into the environment and decompose the food and absorb them. They have chemical wars, that's how they compete with their competitors. So this is their they are chemistry, pure chemistry. And I find that quite fascinating and unique.
Dr Rupy: Amazing. Chemical warfare, I love it. So, Tom, what is your favourite thing about mushrooms?
Tom Baxter: I think the thing, I would have also said biochemistry as well, because it is quite probably the most interesting thing about mushrooms. But what I love about mushrooms is their sort of randomness, the fact that you never actually know when they're going to appear. So from a forager's perspective, you always think it's the right time to find mushrooms. I have spent literally days searching for mushrooms where I was adamant it was the perfect conditions. And I think that sort of inability to nail down the fungi and the fact that they're sort of have such a intrinsic part of a lot of folklore and the idea that they're there for a very short period of time, and if you're not there when they're there, 36 hours later, you'll be walking past them and they won't be there anymore and you had no idea they were there. So I think the transient nature of fungi is probably one of their most alluring characteristics.
Dr Rupy: Wow. And Tim, what is what is one of your favourite things about mushrooms?
Tim Spector: I like the fact they're closer to humans than they are to plants and that they produce amazing products like they sunbathe and will, like humans, produce vitamin D. And they can also produce vitamin B12, which really important for for vegans. And so, it's those sort of human similarities that I quite I like and makes me really fond of them.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Wow. So already, I'm sure you can get a sense of just how incredible mushrooms are. The way I like to think about mushrooms myself, and I and I want to get your opinion on this, Esther, is I sort of categorise them as culinary mushrooms, so mushrooms that you cook with, wellbeing mushrooms, nootropics that we'll get into a little bit later, and then you've got therapeutic and medicinal mushrooms, of which there's a lot more research these days around mental wellbeing, etc. How would you is that a fair characterisation of of mushrooms in general or?
Esther Gayer: Yeah, definitely. I perhaps I would add one more category would be fungal applications in general in in industry. We we are suffering a plastic crisis, for example, and there's lots of research now and companies that are trying to find solutions to that and producing biomaterials out out of fungi, that includes building blocks, furniture, fabrics, clothing, all all types of things. Almost there's any any material that you can think of right now is being researched on fungi to be replaced with mycelium. It's easy to grow, doesn't occupy much space, it's sustainable, it's biodegradable. And there's, I think, I think that's a almost a treasure trove in terms of applications of fungi, apart from the obviously the classic edibility and the medicinal properties they have as well.
Dr Rupy: At the start, I I I messed up the 1.25 million fungal specimens by saying there were species. I wonder if you could talk us through the difference between the species, how many species we know of and what what we've yet to discover.
Esther Gayer: Definitely. We like to show off a lot about our collection in Kew. It's, yeah, as as as as you mentioned, is is the largest collection in the world. But more importantly, we know very, very little about fungi and probably heard about that already. We we only have described about 150,000 species. This is species of fungi that have actual names, that a scientist or someone has put a name on them. But our estimates is that most likely there are 2.5 million species of fungi out there, unknown fungi that don't have names yet, that need to be discovered. And those fungi can be almost anywhere, in your bodies, inside plants, in the soil, in the ocean, anywhere. And we're using just a handful of them. So it's it's we're at the tip of the iceberg in terms of fungal fungal knowledge. We need to we need to discover much more and put names to those, at least know what they are and where they are.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you were saying before we started this panel about deserts, you find them in the sea, you find them, where else do you find them? Because I just think of mushrooms in in the forest, you know, perhaps where where where Tom might grow them.
Esther Gayer: They are everywhere. You can find them, they they adapt to almost any environment. And you can find them even in the driest valleys in the Antarctica, for example. Other organisms, for example, lichens are symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, and they they are able to colonise deserts and very dry environments because they bring their own food with them. So they can colonise almost anywhere. There are other fungi that are thermophilic, that means that they can survive to very high temperatures, like some groups of bacteria. So you can find them in very hot habitats. Almost anywhere. And the other thing is that they evolve very quickly and they can mutate very quickly and adapt to to climate change and global change. And that's something that we we're keeping an eye on because that allows them to adapt to different environments and that includes our bodies. It may be that some fungi that right now are not harmful to humans, in the short period of time may may be problematic.
Tom Baxter: They drilled an ice core in Antarctica down to 20 million years ago and they found a couple of spores and they managed to fruit those spores. The thing about mushroom spores is they are unbelievably tough. They've taken them up to space, they don't get seem to get affected by radiation. And within the spore, it has all the energy it needs to basically fruit. So like a seed stores, but they are just so much tougher. And so fungi do have, you know, there's a admittedly not a very popular theory, but there is a theory that life has potentially spawned through a spore travelling on an asteroid and coming over here because they can survive for tens of millions of years in space.
Tim Spector: They'll definitely outlive us, won't they? That's for sure. Way after us.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I think.
Tim Spector: A bit of humility there that these guys are much better adapted to our planet than we are.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. And Esther mentioned food there. I want to bring you in, Tim, because you're a food guy now, you've got a new cookbook out. Mushrooms feature quite a lot in your diet. Tell us a bit about the the benefits of mushrooms to to our health.
Tim Spector: I was very sceptical about mushrooms and mushroom coffee and just thought it was a bit of a wacky thing until I started for food looking food for life where I've got a chapter on mushrooms and fungi and going to the literature and actually working out what was going on. And although a lot of it is done on, you know, from Chinese medicine and from lab sort of test tube projects, which I don't always rate very highly, there are enough clinical studies now to show that mushrooms have big anti-inflammatory effects, they have big anti-cancer effects. And number, you know, four or five studies now showing that if you give it with chemotherapy, you can actually improve health outcomes by 50%, which is amazing really. Not instead of chemotherapy, just in case anyone's, you know, out there, but in addition, what we call adjunctive therapy. And so once I started reading this from reputable journals, that really converted me to say, gosh, there must be all this stuff in here, all these chemicals in here that we don't really understand that have these really powerful effects that could affect every bit of us, not just our immune systems to to beat inflammation and cancer, but our mood and energy and and depression levels and things just from the tens of thousands of chemicals that these guys can produce. And yes, you eat them, but we also have other fungi in our in our guts as well, which we know are crucial for our immune systems. So when they've done experiments and they're trying to take away those fungi in our in our guts, you know, colitis gets worse and many conditions get worse. So they're we don't understand it very well at all because they're much harder than bacteria to look at from a genetic point of view. But everything we see about them is they're super beneficial. So it's always odd, I'm always laugh when people come back and say I've been to Harley Street and I've been told I've got overgrowth of fungi or yeast and I have to have the go on this one year cure. I said, why would you do that? You know, yes, occasionally they go out of balance, but that's usually because of antibiotics or something, not naturally, we should be embracing them and not fearing them. I think that's really important.
Dr Rupy: You mentioned there about eating mushrooms and stuff, particularly from the perspective of supporting your immune system. Are you talking about the sort of regular mushrooms that we can all buy at our local supermarkets as well as the perhaps the the more novel mushrooms that we'll get to talking about in a moment?
Tim Spector: Well, when you look at the literature, it's hard to tell exactly. No one's systematically gone through all the mushrooms and said, you know, from the ones, the button mushrooms you buy, the cheapest ones in the supermarket to the most expensive, you know, lion's manes or whatever they are, the trendy ones at the moment. They've taken generally the ones from Chinese medicine that have been used for many centuries or thousands of years and used those rather than the common ones. But I suspect that the common ones are nearly as good. They may not have the same concentrations, but they'd have a lot of the same ingredients as these other mushrooms. But I'd be interested to hear what these guys think about the difference between the standard field mushroom, button mushroom, portobello mushroom that you can get cheaply everywhere and, you know, the more expensive exotic ones that you're paying lots of money for and they're often dehydrated forms where all the studies have been on. But there's definitely, you know, I tend to go based on what the science tells me. So they say that yes, reishi mushrooms, lion's mane, they're the ones where most of the evidence is, they've been tested. It doesn't mean the others don't work, just means there is we're still don't really know. So I personally believe that they're all good for you. And in a way, we've got a with Zoe work, we've got a product out where we have 30 freeze-dried, I call them plants, but no insult for the any fungi out there. Mushrooms, there's plus six, six freeze-dried mushrooms in small amounts containing, you know, these ones that are in these medicinal ones. And I think it was for that reason, we don't know what the exact chemicals are in each of them that that is producing the benefits. So best to have as many as you can and in variety. And that's why I think these sort of approaches in the future, rather than relying on only one for the whole of your life, we should at the moment until we know more, try to be eating a diversity of mushrooms. And I've certainly changed so that, you know, every week I'm having, you know, several big mushroom dishes and with this daily 30, I can then have a small amount daily. And I think a lot of these other supplements are based on this, whether it's coffee or whatever it is, to try and change our our habits until we know precisely what it is and what the doses are.
Tom Baxter: Yeah, there has actually been a long-term study done in Japan with 30, I think 38,000 men over 40 years looking at prostate and colon cancer. And the group of men that were eating mushrooms on average five times a week, as opposed to the group of men that were eating mushrooms twice a week, had around about a 30% lower incidence of prostate and colon cancer. And so I think fundamentally with mushrooms in terms of the compounds, we know that one of the dominant sort of groups of compounds that are relevant from an immune regulation perspective are things called beta-glucans, that are interesting because of their unique molecular structure, the sort of 1,3, 1,6 of the third and sixth carbon atom they spike. And they're ubiquitous across all mushrooms. And so fundamentally from a health perspective, the best thing you can do is just eat more mushrooms. It's not really that important whether or not it's shiitake or oyster. Probably in this study in Japan, the dominant ones probably would have been shiitake and oyster, probably some others as well. But yeah, fundamentally just eat more mushrooms. That is the best thing you can do from a long-term health perspective.
Tim Spector: There are some studies showing their effect on the gut microbiome as well. A lot of them in mouse microbiomes where they've sort of managed to get the doses right and they do show that you can improve the gut microbiome by feeding mushrooms. So having as a prebiotic. And I think what's interesting is because they're so different, because they're not plants, you've got these different in a way foods for your gut microbes to live off. I think that that's really important as well. So it adds diversity because you can't get them from anywhere else. There's these unique structures of the cell walls that I always say chitins, but is it chitin?
Tom Baxter: So chitin's an absolute nightmare from our perspective because, and this is also one of the other issues with comparing studies that are done in Asia and then assuming the same thing will happen with, you know, a man from Stoke. Fundamentally, mushrooms are made of chitin, which is the same thing as the exoskeletons of insects or crustacean shells. The structure of chitin is a nightmare to break down. So we're interested in breaking down the chitin cell wall or extracting from it. It's a helix shape. So, you know, a professor I was talking to the other day, a professor at Exeter Uni, who's spent 40 years trying to extract from chitin. And he said the best extraction methodology in the world, so he's used ultrasonics, pressure, different pHs, all sorts of things to try and, you can get maximum 20% of the compounds out. Now, the issue in comparing our gut biomes in the UK, we eat a lot less crustaceans and a lot less mushrooms. So our naturally, we have lower levels of chitinase, the enzyme in our gut we need to break down mushrooms. So by us eating a lot of mushrooms, obviously our gut biome will change over time, but initially we won't be getting as much as a man from, I don't know, Hokkaido, for example, out of that mushroom. And so you've got to be very careful looking at making assumptions on studies done in different population groups where the gut biomes are very different, where their history of, you know,
Esther Gayer: And I would add to that the recommendation of eating always cooked mushrooms.
Dr Rupy: Cooked and not raw. Okay.
Esther Gayer: For a simple reason, I agree that they are really good, but as I was saying earlier, they have lots of compounds. And you never know when you have a raw mushroom if you have any component that you may be allergic to. If you, if you cook them, you get rid of some of those enzymes that may be bad for your, yeah, for your body. And you still get the benefits of of eating mushrooms.
Tom Baxter: One of the interesting is dehydrated mushrooms seem to have the same nutrients as the ones with the water in. And of course they're about, is it most of them are nearly 90% water?
Esther Gayer: But you inactivate the other compounds as well.
Tom Baxter: Yeah, well the nasty ones that you don't really want that keep predators away. So
Esther Gayer: Yes, yes.
Tom Baxter: It's interesting with shiitake, a personal experience of being Elle, my partner. So shiitake, about 5% of people that eat shiitake get something called shiitake flagellate dermatitis. And this is an unbelievable skin condition. It looks like you've been mauled by a tiger. And literally scratch marks all over your body. And Elle was going, I think it's the mushrooms. I was like, don't be so bloody ridiculous. It's not the bloody mushrooms. And then she Googled it and guess what? Yeah, you do look like you've been, you know, Genghis Khan or whatever the name of the.
Tim Spector: She survived to tell the tale.
Tom Baxter: So like it is a real and actually it's the same with about 5% of people with certain types of oyster mushroom have the same reaction. So it is a, there are a lot of chemicals in these mushrooms that are, you know, difficult for your body to metabolise and for a decent proportion of people, raw mushrooms, you know, can be have an unpleasant side effect.
Dr Rupy: All the mushrooms you've consumed so far have been thoroughly cooked just to, and everyone's probably checking their skin. Let's talk a little bit about nootropics. Tom, how would you, what what do you, how would you describe what a nootropic is?
Tom Baxter: I'm a bit sceptical on nootropics. I know that, I know that everyone. The word or the product? Well, I mean both. I mean, I love words. So I got, you know, the word has value, but quantifying or qualifying what the effect of a nootropic is. So I think the idea with a nootropic is that it can outside of the value it brings from a sort of nourishment perspective, it can have added benefits from a health perspective. Quite often people are keen on improving their sort of cognitive function. And we find a lot of people, for example, especially in the modern day, feel that the issue is in the head. And if they can just sort their head out, everything would be fine. More often than not, you know, what manifests in the brain is just a product of what's happening in the body. And so I'm quite sceptical and, you know, there's a lot of people into biohacking. I'm a little bit sceptical that this is again just indicative of where our society is at the time where technology has progressed so far and we used to think that we were going to be able to solve all our societal ills through the progression of technology. And now we're turning technology, we realise that's not going to happen. We're now turning technology onto ourselves to try and improve ourselves. And I think that's sort of perhaps where we are from a, but nootropics is a big market because everyone's trying to live forever.
Esther Gayer: Does anyone, everyone know what that term means?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, what what is it? Do you know?
Esther Gayer: No, I think we should, do you want to? Okay, so I was wondering. I don't think everyone knows exactly what nootropic refers to. So, as Tom was saying, this enhances the cognition, but it's basically physically what it means is that your neural branches grow, are enhanced. But how can you measure that? And and it's it's it's been proven that it's very difficult to prove that in measure that in vivo. And that's why how can you measure that you're, yeah, neural networks are growing and getting longer and more connected. It's
Tom Baxter: So whilst I am cynical, we are actually funding the only people funding a PhD looking at the neurotropic and neuroprotective compounds in mushrooms at the neuroscientists. So I am cynical, but I'm also interested in actually finding out because there are a couple of studies that have been done in Japan which look at people taking lion's mane, for example, at four, eight, 12, 16 and 20 week and they're tested on international cognition scores at every four weeks and they do go up every time to 16 weeks. But these are people with early onset dementia. So what that probably shows is that actually there's, and what we think is happening, there's a precursor to an enzyme that breaks up, breaks down to a degree the amyloid plaque buildup on the synaptic receptors. And so more of the signals are getting, it doesn't show that for a healthy brain, anything's going on. But what was very interesting in that study, when they tested them at week 20, where they hadn't been taking the lion's mane for four weeks, all the test scores fell back down to where they'd started at. So there does seem to be something going on which is contained within the lion's mane, which these people with early onset dementia, but it was a tiny study, it was 40 people, you know, which their brains are making use of. So, and I think at the end of 16 weeks, they'd improved their test results by 13.8%, which is statistically significant. So
Dr Rupy: I was just going to translate because this is this is going to turn into a real academic scientific explanation here. And I'm just conscious that everyone's probably been bombarded with like an advert that says, take this product and your brain will grow. Is everyone, I'm seeing a few nods there, or like, you know, it will boost your your neurons and it will help you think sharper. And what you're saying is there's no actual way of being able to scientifically validate that.
Tom Baxter: We're trying to.
Esther Gayer: I wanted to because we were chatting before with Tom about lion's mane. So, yeah, everyone was like, no, lion's mane, lion's mane. I went to the pharmacy, 40 pounds for a pot of powder of lion's mane, such a miraculous powders. So, yeah, so with another student at Kew, we've been sequencing lion's mane genomes. Is that genome is the whole sequence of DNA that we all have and all organisms have, right? So we are comparing the whole DNA sequence of several lion's mane strains and comparing them with other other species of fungi that are related to to lion's mane, Hericium in the Latin name. And we found that lion's mane species has particular genes that are involved in the production of the compounds that are beneficial, that that have been proven to be active in these clinical trials. The genes involved in those in those compounds that that that code those compounds seem to be duplicating in the fungi, in the lion's mane that is medicinal. So through evolution, through lots of, lots of millions of years, those species of fungi have developed a genomic signature. They they have duplicated the genes that are useful for that particular compound. You will wonder, but why do they want to be beneficial to humans? Well, probably those compounds are useful for them for another completely different purpose, but we can recycle that that process and those genes that have been duplicated and copied many, many times to produce lots, lots, lots of that compound that is actually useful for us. But now we can say there is something in the DNA and we can compare the species that is beneficial versus species that is not with the signatures of the DNA.
Tom Baxter: Also, I think one of the ones that has been hopefully profiled is the one that we grow because I gave one to Rich who works at the fungarium at Kew. So hopefully it's actually going to be, it's actually going to be one of the ones in there. So
Esther Gayer: But that's that's the idea of finding evidence for those claims. So we can look at the DNA, we can look at clinical trials and put all all together all this evidence and say, okay, we're safe, it works and we can we can prove it. We can sequence or we can, yeah, test it with humans.
Tom Baxter: I've always wondered why the mushrooms even create these products. And I think the the reason being is that the mycelium of mushrooms is one cell wall thick. So anything can pass into the body of mushrooms. And like 1.5 billion years ago, the only family of life on earth was fungi. It was just fungi, bacteria, other fungi and viruses. And so these were getting into the bodies of all these different fungi. They were having to launch biochemical reactions to out compete them or to somehow adopt them into their being or to form symbiotic relationships. And so over 1.5 billion years, that's a lot of research time they've had. And because of the fact that they've developed these compounds for whatever reasons for their own benefits, but because of where the humans sit from the evolutionary perspective, a lot of the the actual shape of these compounds that mushrooms make are recognised within receptor cells in the human body. They are actually useful. Not all of them, but some of them are actually useful. And you don't get that so much in plants, much less in plants. And so that's the reason, you know, why there is this crossover between the biochemistry that the fungi conduct for their benefit and the biochemistry that our body is conduct for our benefit.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. I mean, Tim, you you've done a a series of books on the benefits of plants more generally to our health. Can you see the sort of comparisons or or parallels with other plants in in different kingdoms that have benefits to the human health?
Tim Spector: Yeah, I mean, all all plants have defence chemicals, as you're alluding to. And so there's a general idea in nature that the more susceptible the plant is to nature or to bugs, the more chemicals it's going to produce. So that's why you take a lettuce, a loose leaf lettuce is going to produce more plant chemicals than a really tight iceberg type lettuce, which is physically protected, therefore it doesn't have to produce anything. That's why it's got nothing in it. It's worthless. But if, you know, but if you've got a rosso lolo that's got, you know, leaves that are sort of flapping around, it's quite vulnerable. So it has to have a bit of bitterness, it has to have colour, all these other things that that make it special. And so they produce plants predominantly polyphenols, polyphenollics, this type of defence chemical, but it's it's their way of doing what the the fungi are doing. Fungi are much more precise. They'll produce, you know, penicillin or they'll produce, you know, so antibiotics as well, a much wider group. And these polyphenols, you know, will ward off insects and other things. But when they get inside a human body, the microbes in our gut will process them and use them. And I think the same is likely to be happening in in fungi. When you're ingesting some of those extra chemicals, then that's actually helping our own microbes produce their own, you know, who are also factories, produce even more chemicals. So I think this is general rule in nature that is that is there. But definitely, you know, fungi are the powerhouses here. I don't know anyone's done relative comparisons of them. But you there's huge variations in the plant world. And I suspect the fungi is more at the top end. There's not many equivalents of an iceberg lettuce of the fungi. But there may be a really bland one that does nothing, but I'd be surprised.
Dr Rupy: So, Tom, look, we've heard so much about the benefits to our gut health, just how varied everything is. This audience is sold, I'm sure, on the benefits of having all these different trendy types of of mushrooms. How do you tell the difference between a lion's mane powder on one sort of pharmacy or wellness shop and another one that you might find online? Because it all seems to be the same.
Tom Baxter: I've spent the last six years trying to understand what people are selling. So it is. Does anyone check it? No one checks it. No one checks it. So what the, so there was a study done interestingly in 2019 in in the US where a company bought 17 different reishi products off the shelves in health food shops. And then they DNA profiled those 17 powders and 12 of them didn't have any reishi in them. Because the majority, the vast majority of companies are buying in powder from China. 95% of the mushrooms that are used in the UK and globally to a degree is from China. They're far ahead of us when it comes to cultivating mushrooms, the science, you know, they are very, very much ahead of where we are in terms of their knowledge and everything else. But the reality is that no one who's buying in these powders is testing them. The only test they're doing is heavy metals. No one's checking to see if it is even reishi or lion's mane. You don't have to. Are they generally mushrooms of some kind, do you think? No, what the majority of them, we know what what makes it's maltodextrin, the vast majority. It's an agent. The interesting thing about maltodextrin is you don't have to put it on the ingredients list. So you can claim 100% pure mushroom extract powder and it'll actually be 90 plus percent maltodextrin.
Esther Gayer: Yeah, this is something that we're trying to develop at Kew. We have some quite a tradition on testing for plants and, yeah, making sure that what is imported is the right plant. But there's a there's a legal gap with with fungi. So we are thinking of,
Tim Spector: This is not a plant. No, it's not. It's viewed as having no medicinal value. Yes, according to like the regulatory perspective. Doesn't matter, just let them get away with whatever they want.
Esther Gayer: At the moment, yes. So it would be one of the options that would be easy is just simply sequence a piece of the DNA, a little piece of DNA, barcode and and that's what we do with plants and it would be easy for fungi as well. So the infrastructure is not there yet, but yeah, I think that would be the next step.
Tom Baxter: Some substrates where they can grow anywhere, right? We said we can grow anywhere, but they can grow, for example, on top of coffee beans. And if you eat the that mushroom, that mycelium would be full of of caffeine or heavy metals. And so and they they don't they don't, so they absorb them from the the the environment, but they don't metabolise them. They don't destroy them. So if you eat the fungus, you will eat whatever has been absorbing. So you have to be careful and make sure that you know where it comes from.
Tim Spector: This is why fungi are so interesting from a bioremediation perspective.
Dr Rupy: So as consumers, are there any telltale signs that there is a company that is doing the due diligence despite not being mandated to?
Tom Baxter: Like anything in life, fundamentally, if you know the provenance of something, so if you know it's grown here, that's a good start. So I think, I think fundamentally the only thing that you can actually know or try and find out is the source of it. And if you know the source, you're like halfway there. So try and find out.
Tim Spector: Has gone to China to actually see them growing and
Tom Baxter: Yeah, I mean, I mean, no, I know most of the people in the medicinal mushroom market and apart from one guy, a guy called Martin Powell, who's an amazing, he's sort of the godfather of medicinal mushrooms. He's a biochemist by training and a classic Chinese herbalist. His products I believe in, pretty much every, if you see any big brands, don't buy them. That's a pretty much a guarantee. So any dirty, for example, that has next to nothing of any significance in it. So any of the bigger companies, generally, you can be relatively confident that they're not doing a particularly good job. So I think it's really hard because it costs a lot of money to do the research and there's no profit in doing the research, especially when there's no requirement to substantiate what you're doing. I was on a panel discussion with the sort of largest medicinal mushroom, the CEO of the largest medicinal mushroom company in Europe. And someone asked the question about dosage, which is for us, we have a lot of people with quite acute conditions that take our products. So we're obviously interested in, you know, what is a meaningful dose for these people. And Eric, you know, said it wasn't, he wasn't a doctor, so it wasn't his job to decide what a dose was. And we've tested his products, we know his products are six times weaker than ours. But he's very profitable. And the problem is when there's no regulations, there's no standards to be adhered to, you can make money if you want to by just selling shit. And that is, and you're never going to get caught. And so, obviously from our perspective, we hope that or we believe that there's enough evidence that the compounds in these mushrooms have clinical value, fundamentally, and therefore by making sure that we have something meaningful from a sort of molecular weight perspective of a group of compounds in one millilitre of our tincture, people will notice the difference and that fundamentally
Tim Spector: And is your warning about powders? Does that the same as freeze-dried products where you can see them?
Tom Baxter: I think freeze-dried, when you can see them, then you can be okay. The again, the issue is to a degree how they've been grown.
Tim Spector: It's a uniform powder that you've got no clue what's in it.
Tom Baxter: You've got absolutely no clue. Absolutely no clue. And what's kind of, what, yeah, I mean it, the other thing to bear in mind from a, you know, the reality of what's happening in China. So traditionally everything was grown in Fujian province on sort of east coast. Because of the desertification that's taking place at the moment, two and a half years ago, the Communist government stopped them from cutting down trees and the majority of the mushrooms we grow are wood decomposers. And so about, I don't know how many thousand now, about 30% of production has shifted over to Xinjiang province in the northwest, basically the Uyghur area. And most, a lot of the mushrooms now are coming from the one part of China you're not supposed to be buying anything from.
Dr Rupy: What where do you think our mushroom culture is going to be in five to 10 years? That's what I interpreted. Is the UK going to catch up? Is the UK going to catch up? Yeah.
Esther Gayer: I mean, I hope, I hope that we are very, we are in a very different position that we were just five years ago. And this has been done, happened, I think, very, um, just simply making people aware of unknowns like like fungi. Merlin Sheldrake wrote that famous book, Entangled, right? And suddenly everyone knew about fungi. And actually, yeah, he's made a big favour to us because, uh, yeah, has made people aware that there's a third kingdom called fungi. There's the three F's for, um, flora, fungi and fauna now. And so we've gone from not knowing almost anything and people being completely unaware of fungi. I would say, yeah, I'm a mycologist, I work with fungi. What? And people wouldn't know what we were working on. And we've moved from that to, wow, you're a fungirl. You love fungi. So we were in that situation and now, yeah, fungi are getting into our health and wellbeing practices and food. I I hope that, yeah, in 10 years time, they become something completely integrated into
Tim Spector: But in Italy and Spain, every school kid knows when to go out and collect the mushrooms, right? And it's a big family thing. Everyone knows this is the week we go and do it.
Esther Gayer: Every Sunday you go out to to pick mushrooms. Now it's the season now, now everyone is out there foraging. Yes.
Dr Rupy: It's to pardon the pun, cultivating a culture that actually appreciates food more generally and mushrooms definitely being one of them.
Tom Baxter: I think it's an interesting time we're in. I think COVID had something to do with the sort of bigger interest in nature. A lot of people were out walking because there was nothing else to do. And a lot of people, you've probably noticed it in terms of like the, a lot more mushrooms that we used to think were a lot rarer because now people are, people are identifying a lot more of these ones that we thought were very uncommon, just because of the levels of knowledge. And I think also in the sort of society where we're in at the moment where there's been a sort of, um, a collapse in sort of organised religion, fungi are sort of filling a bit of a space at the moment for people wanting to believe in something because we've lost, you know, the ability to have awe in things. We don't have ritual anymore. There's, there's a big chunk of the routine of the sort of modern human that is very unlike what's happened for the last 100,000 years. And I think at this particular moment in time, fungi are occupying a bit of a space where maybe spirituality that, you know, used to be far more a part of our existence. And so I think there's an element to that as well where people want something to believe in and, you know, fungi are unfortunately and fortunately filling a bit of a, yeah, that's what I think.
Dr Rupy: The question was about psilocybin and the new research around psilocybin and its benefits for mental wellbeing. What, who wants to defend that? Do you want to go for that?
Tim Spector: I can start and you can correct me. Yeah, so the data are very clear that medicinal levels of psilocybins, either in the in the mushrooms themselves or extracts, is a really good treatment for depression, anxiety and potentially schizophrenia. These are done in randomised control trials with placebo arms, perfectly balanced. People are using that to say, okay, well, let's use tiny doses of this, so you don't get any hallucinatory effects, on a daily basis and this will have some other benefits. As far as I know, there are no good placebo controlled trials showing that is of benefit. Lots of anecdotal studies, people saying, I feel better on it. We don't know how much of that is the placebo effect of taking something that you believe is good for you, which still has a beneficial effect, versus the reality. So there might be some ones I don't know about, but that's the last time I looked, I couldn't find any serious scientific study with a placebo, fake psilocybin tiny doses to to be true. But do do correct me if I'm wrong.
Tom Baxter: So it may work. It may work, but it hasn't been disproved either. Yeah, what I slightly, so there have been, I mean, I guess it depends on, so there have been a couple of reasonable sized studies looking at microdosing with acid, and one small one with microdosing psilocybin. So Rick Doblin from MAPS in the US, who's sort of heads up a lot of the, I don't know how much he's raised to do research. But this is what's quite interesting. So the people that were microdosing did claim less anxiety, more focus, you know, all these things. But the people that were taking the placebo claimed exactly the same thing. So there was no actual evidence. The belief that you're microdosing was as powerful as microdosing, fundamentally. And so again, it's dosage. There is no doubt from an outcome perspective, when people are taking macrodoses of psilocybin, it has profound, yeah, changes in things like chronic PTSD, certain addictions, alcoholism, for example. And if you compare that to sort of talking therapy, the outcome, you know, there's no, there's no argument. The other thing is pretty much everyone who does the psychedelic therapy who starts it completes it and the dropout rates on talking therapy is enormous. So you're not even comparing the same at the end.
Esther Gayer: They think, I think the Imperial College is is running a proper clinical trial with placebos and they are they are finding positive results with with psilocybin.
Dr Rupy: Is that with microdosing or is it with the macro? Okay.
Esther Gayer: Yeah, yeah, yeah, microdosing and placebo and they are finding, yeah, correlations with, yeah, depression and and schizophrenia and and bipolar.
Tim Spector: But it's not finished, you won't know whether which group is which.
Esther Gayer: They are working on it. They've been doing presentations at conferences recently and they're finding positive results.
Dr Rupy: So, watch this space basically. I think the the general, the weight of evidence doesn't look like it's trending in one particular direction. There are positive signs. I'm going to shamelessly plug my podcast here, the Doctor's Kitchen podcast, where we talk to Professor Nutt, who's the Imperial College researcher, who who's done a lot of the early groundwork as well with other colleagues and they were talking about this at the moment. So there's early positive signs. I personally think it will become part of psychiatric therapy, but we're not at that point right now where I would recommend anyone go and do this themselves because of what Tom was actually saying earlier about how difficult it is to know whether the, you know, the lion's mane is actually truly lion's mane. It's very hard to to to find quality, um, uh, pharmaceutical grade products out there.
Dr Rupy: The question was about ultra-processing.
Tim Spector: Well, it depends on your definition of ultra-processing, but the daily 30 is not ultra-processed, it's freeze-dried. So that doesn't count as ultra-processed. You're basically just rapidly taking out the water and you're leaving everything else. The benefits will still be the same. But if you had it as part of, um, uh, you know, cornflakes or something, where you you you mash, you take all these extracts, you stick them together, you add flavourings, you add artificial sweeteners, then you'd have a balance of the good effects, which might still be there against the bad effects of all the other chemicals. And you wouldn't really know whether it's positive or negative. I think that's that's the difference. So what it's so easy to freeze dry, you don't need to ultra process it. I think is the what most people would say. But you will be seeing it more in snack bars and things like this. People adding it to really cheap toffee or, you know, so I think that's the danger. We are going to, as soon as anything gets into the sort of headlines as good, then you've got to start getting mixed up with these other chemicals and generally that's going to have a negative effect. We won't know how much it counteracts the good effects.
Dr Rupy: Do we have any other questions? Sorry. Yeah, we've got one over there. Gentleman with the glasses. The question was about the traditional uses of mushrooms and the claims for them, like in Chinese traditional medicine, etc. How much that factors into the research understanding or whether it does at all?
Esther Gayer: I think it does, it it does. We have to be a bit mindful about traditional Chinese medicine, TCM, um, in that package, you still have rhino horns powder. So there's a lot of, um, yeah, lots of things in there that that are not good for multiple reasons. It can be a bit of a road map, it can be a bit of a guideline because they've used it for many, many years. They've used some some species that we have later on tested and seen that they have some some activity, bioactivity, what we call these compounds that are doing, yeah, antibiotics or or other other other activity. Um, so there's some some species in there that can be tested and you can use TCM as a as a reference to look at things. Um, what we're also doing at Kew is is trying to use our, for example, our collection to get the DNA of all those specimens that we have and and uh, data mine and look at the properties of all of them using their DNA and characterise them and use that for modelling and and predict where we can find new molecules. That's I think is a bit more objective and not as biased as looking at at some traditional practices that might be biased by culture and other other reasons not so objective. So we're using DNA data to to mine, to look at as many species as we can and see if there is some predictive power there, if we can tell, okay, all these groups of fungi may have some properties or others not or how, because the funny, the funny thing now is that we're using from antibiotics to statins to many, many, many, um, um, drugs that come from fungi were found just by chance, random by random. And and uh, and it's a bit inefficient. And we have lots of companies that are trying to find new new drugs and they have strains of the a handful of species. We need to expand on that and for that we have to increase the number of species of fungi that we look at. I think, I think using collections or or fresh material, but yeah, looking at diversity of fungi without a bias is the best way to go.
Tom Baxter: I think what's interesting from our perspective is that, you know, if you look at lion's mane, for example, that in traditional Chinese medicine was given for upper digestive tract issues, so for acid reflux. And now there's an isolate of a beta-glucan that is prescribed as an adjunct for oesophageal cancer. So it's kind of, you could call it ironic, but the one area that lion's mane was traditionally given is the one area that we've now found a compound that is particularly effective against a cancer in that area of the body. It's the same with maitake with Grifola frondosa. There's a an isolate again of another beta-glucan which is called D-fraction, which is again an adjunct used for colon cancer. And traditional Chinese medicine, maitake is given for the colon. We see some really interesting results with people who are injecting insulin. Um, three of the mushrooms seem to massively regulate insulin, i.e. they drop the amount they inject colossally. And this is sort of pretty much uniform. Um, and so Tim, who's the professor of neuroscience we work with, he worked at Oxford for 12 years on doing diabetes research. And so that's the next PhD we're going to get is going to be looking at diabetes. So I think there are, I completely understand, like, you know, there's a lot of Chinese medicine which is bollocks. However, what's been interesting for us is that over the last decade, a lot of the adjunctive treatments for cancer, so for example, in in Japan, the second and third most prescribed adjunctive treatments for cancer are isolates from turkey tail mushrooms called PSK and PSP, polysaccharide krestin and polysaccharide peptin. Um, and they both are very good for numerous types of cancer. So there are lots and lots, increasing number of isolates of compounds in these mushrooms that are being shown to be useful in, quite often, in areas of the body that in traditional Chinese medicine, they'd be given for. So there is, you know, it's not that we're being like narrow-minded, it's just what's happening is as we're doing the science, quite often, it's not all the time, but quite often there does seem to be a correlation between, because fundamentally, you know, folk medicine, the reason things were used in folk medicine was because of the outcomes. And I think there's nothing wrong with looking at outcomes in the West, obviously we've got a far, you know, empirical evidence is what's needed. In the East, they take a very different like view of health and outcomes are sufficient, quite often, to justify usage. And so it is a different, it's a different approach. It's a more holistic way of looking at things.
Dr Rupy: We're going to wrap up there actually because we've got some brownies coming around, not the kind of brownies that you probably think we're giving given that this is a mushroom event. But uh, I just thought we'd um, we'd applaud our wonderful panellists here as we close this evening and I hope you enjoy those. We will be milling around for a little bit longer. So if you did have any burning questions, I'm sure our panellists won't mind. But thank you so much to to Esther and Tom and Tim. Thank you for inviting us.
