Comment · Tue, April 12, 2016
Mushroom Tinctures. Questionable Value.
Original post in this thread
realmushrooms · 8 points
I’ve been trying to figure this one out for a while. I couldn’t comprehend how a significant amount of fungal material could be present in a 1-2oz tincture bottle when they are typically 30-40% alcohol and who knows how much % water. They never report the active compounds and many are made from mycelium on grain and not mushroom. And the price is typically the same or more than a powered extract.
Oriveda just published an excellent explanation in their recent newsletter:
We get a lot of questions about how we think about tinctures and other liquid 'extracts'. Here are the objective facts...
In a liquid extract or tincture the main ingredient is always the liquid. This can be water, alcohol or something else, but it is a liquid that has no therapeutic potency in itself. It is only a carrier for the actual active ingredients, and contrary to popular belief liquid extracts do not have better bioavailability, although they might be digested slightly faster (but this has nothing to do with bioavailability).
To jump straight to the conclusion, all liquid extracts and tinctures are offering a ridiculously low value for money. Even without knowing how much bioactives are ac…
What they were answering
JohnnyP51 · 1 points
/u/misteryouaresodumb might be able to help you out, Nootropics Depot recently become involved in dealing with mushroom extracts.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
I agree with them on their tincture assessment. Making a tincture of a mushroom extract does not make sense to me. If you are just mixing an extract into solution, or creating a suspension, then you are not really doing anything buy diluting the natural ingredients. Furthermore, the extract that you use for the tincture could still be a shitty extract, or like in Real Mushroom's example above, just ground up mushroom powder. For the nootropic solutions we produce, we do not go over 200mg/ml of active ingredient, as you just cannot physically fit more than that in a stable solution. Even then, most of the time you need lower dosages for most. That's not really conducive to mushroom extracts, as the dosages are higher. Plus, you are not dealing with a single compound that has a predictable solubility/stability. You are dealing with a bunch of different actives in the mushroom, along with inactives. Making a solution of Noopept is easy, since the dosages are low, and the chemical properties are consistent. Making a tincture of a mushroom, with a bunch of different actives, doesn't make sense. You just don't get any benefits, only drawbacks.