Comment · Thu, April 2, 2020
A scientific study of Chaga that concerns me
Original post in this thread
Sorin61 · 4 points
My wife and I are big consumers of medicinal mushroom extracts including Chaga. Today I read a study that kind of worries me :
\- https://www.jkms.org/DOIx.php?id=10.3346/jkms.2020.35.e122
What are your thoughts?
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
Well to start, that guy was taking a LOT of chaga.
Initially, he had taken 3 g daily for 4 years following company's recommendation and 9 g of powder for another year because his symptom did not improve.
We recommend half a gram to a gram a day. In that last year, he was taking 9-18 times that much. So the dose makes the poison, for sure. It's something I would monitor, just like if I was eating lots of spinach every day. Spinach is high in oxalate as well. The reason oxalate can cause problems is its ability to form crystals with calcium. It's literally just two carbons with four oxygens, so it is a very reactive molecule. It is attracted to positively charged minerals, like calcium. This is also why some foods are not the best for certain minerals. Spinach has a lot of calcium, but you can't really use it because it is bound to oxalate. It's the same reason I shake my head when people say to just eat nuts for their magnesium, and that nature is better than supplements. Sure, nuts are high in magnesium. However, they also have phytic acid, which does the same thing to magnesium that oxalate does to calcium. They form insoluble complexes that your body can't use, and can cause harm in too high of amounts. This is why supplemental minerals in a bioavailable form can be better than food in many cases.
So back to oxalate specifically. The most common issue with oxalate is kidney stones, as those insoluble crystals of oxalate and calcium get stuck there. If you take extremely large amounts for long periods, you can get damage like seen in the study you linked above. The two main ways to prevent this are keeping your dosage reasonable and drinking plenty of water every day. Also, many people don't realize that oxalate is the end metabolite of vitamin C. So if you are taking huge doses of vitamin C every day, you are increasing your oxalate levels without even knowing it. So limiting intake of oxalate, and the things that create it, along with drinking plenty of water are the best ways to ensure it does not adversely affect you.