Comment · Fri, April 28, 2017 · Ceretropic & Nootropics Depot
Why the lion's mane you're buying is probably bunk.
Original post in this thread
1337sh33p · 16 points
If you've spent any time around this sub's lion's mane threads, you'll have seen /u/realmushrooms warnings about products containing mycelium on grain and standardized to polysaccharides rather than beta-glucan.
While these are perfectly valid critiques, IMO this is only half the picture when evaluating lion's mane extract. Research indicates that it's at least equally important to use a product containing material extracted with ethanol (or certain other solvents). I've poured somewhat extensively through the extant research and failed to find a single positive result using water extract, ~~which it seems almost all products currently exclusively contain (including ND & realmushrooms).~~ (see edit)
Furthermore, Beta-glucans are not the 'active ingredients' of lion's mane as far as NGF is concerned (as is commonly claimed) but research indicates that this effect is due to hericenones (in the fruiting body) and erinacines (in the mycelium).
Addendum: While pulling up references for this post, I found a couple of rat studies on aqueous extracts, and while they do help neurons recover from injury, there was no inve…
What they were answering
edefakiel · 2 points
I'm my opinion, you will save a lot of headaches if you manage to make more visible the fact that your "water extracts" are only breaking the cell wall and all the compounds are still present. I was confused too when I bought my Reishi, but I sent you a message instead of doing it publicly. Just my two cents. Consumers should be treated sometimes like we are five years old. It is sad, but it is how it is.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Ceretropic & Nootropics Depot
Roger that. Let me work on making the site descriptions more clear. I can definitely see how it could be confusing if people were thinking it was a traditional solvent extraction, where the non-soluble compounds were discarded.