Comment · Wed, February 17, 2016 · Ceretropic & Nootropics Depot
Info on the nootropic value of mushroom extracts
Original post in this thread
AZNman1111 · 37 points
Nootropic Depot just got 9 in today and I haven't heard of a single one of them.
Does anybody have any experience with them? Or better yet, any studies about effects? Are there some that are have been used for a longer time and others that are being used as a nootropic more recently?
I'm interested in where to start looking into this new stuff and all of my mushroom searches came up with Lions Mane.
What they were answering
AZNman1111 · 11 points
Man you're a hero in this community. I seriously feel like a solid majority of what I know about Nootropics has come from one user. That one user, my friend, is you.
I'm gonna take some time and read through these bad boys and see what I can find.
It seems that some of these mushrooms are also edible. Do you know if the medicinal value of these compounds is lost in the cooking process?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Ceretropic & Nootropics Depot
Thanks! That really means a lot to hear. Sometimes when I am still here at the office till 9pm, and in the middle of writing a wall of text, I wonder if I am just annoying people and wasting my time. It's good to know that sometimes my rambling helps people, or at least gets people more interested in things.
Regarding the cooking of mushrooms, it's actually crucial to release the beneficial nutrients. The cell walls of fungi are made of chitin, a glucose polymer that is also makes up the exoskeleton of crustaceans and arthropods. It's very similar to cellulose, which makes up the cell walls of plants. Humans cannot break down chitin or cellulose, because we lack the enzyme needed to do it. So eating raw mushrooms means that you will be unable to absorb any of the nutrients in the cell walls of the mushroom, just like we cannot eat grass. Cows have bacteria in their stomachs that can break down cellulose, making them able to digest grasses. Certain fish are able to digest chitin. However, most animals are not. It's also the reason arthropods molt, as chitin is not able to expand. So they have to shed their exoskeleton to grow larger.
Since chitin cannot be broken down by humans, we need to break it down before consuming mushrooms. This is done by heat. Once broken down, we can access the beneficial nutrients inside the call walls of the mushroom. The vitamin content in mushrooms ranges based on cooking. Some nutrients (like vitamin C, fiber, protein, calcium, zinc, and iron) increase with cooking. Others (vitamin Bs, D, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and sodium) lower when cooked. The beneficial nutrients we are talking about from a medicinal perspective (beta-glucans, cordycepin, palmitic acid, pachymic acid, threitol, ergosterol, triterpenoids, hericenones, and erinacines) all are made more bioavailable by heating and breaking down the chitin. So doing a proper extraction, with the appropriate heat, is crucial to you being able to benefit from it. Just grinding up the substrate and mycelium, and calling it an extract, is worthless. Nammex does even better, and puts the whole mushroom material used back into the extract, so you don't lose any of the nutrients. Even regular extracts are going to lose some nutrients, due to the loss of the less soluble components. You can kind of get around that by doing a dual water/ethanol extraction. However, you will still lose some things.