About Lion's Mane and the fruiting body vs mycelia controversy.

You get a lot of that in the research surrounding mushrooms. Remember, most of these researchers go in looking to prove their stance. You can modify your methods to make things look more statistically significant depending on your study design. Pair that with the fact that no researchers publish their null results, and we get a hodgepodge of varying results. I really think we need to make a push in the scientific community to publish null results. If you set out to prove something, and your study shows it doesn't do that or your results don't reach statistical significance, publish it! That information is useful to other researchers. At the bare minimum it prevents researchers from rerunning studies over and over, and getting the same null result that others got, but not knowing it because nobody is publishing it! Knowing an experimental outcome did not show an expected effect is useful. I think we would be better for having these null results published and searchable.

Regarding lion's man specifically, placebo controlled human trials are the gold standard in science. The only placebo-controlled human clinical trials have used lion's mane fruiting bodies. In vitro studies on certain types of cell lines, like you see with erinacines a lot, are useful as well. We learn more about mechanisms, and can better design human studies on them later. However, it should not invalidate existing human clinical research. Factor in the fact that null results are not published, and it makes it very hard to find the "right" answer. How would we have known if a human study was ran on any of the erinacines, but they just got a null result, if nobody publishes them?!? Do you see the conundrum? Right now all we have is speculation in humans, animal studies, and in-vitro studies. Erinacines, with erinacine A being the most promising, do look like they could be really cool. I do think there is a future there for their use in humans. However, you need to get the science squared away before you can honestly say it is better in humans. We very well could prove that someday soon. However, until it is proven with valid science, you have to fall back on the available human research.

Regarding whether or not erinacines are in the fruiting bodies, that gets more complex. From a practical sense, the answer is likely no. However, there may be trace amounts in there if you use sensitive enough equipment. Also, how you harvest the fruiting bodies makes a difference. If you pick the fruiting bodies and pull in some of the mycelium, you could find erinacines. The growing conditions affect erinacine production a lot, too. So one strain of lion's mane grown a certain way might produce no erinacines, while another one of the same strain grown in different conditions will produce a lot. Science is difficult. When you throw natural growing into the equation, it gets even more so. Your methods have to be accurate and valid, or you can get misleading results. Erinacine A actually fluoresces similar to another compound in lion's mane. So if you don't have your chromatography set right, it can look like you are measuring erinacine A, when it is actually not it. However, from a practical standpoint there are not significant amounts of erinacine A in the fruiting bodies of lion's mane. Many people out there misinterpret that to mean that only mycelium affects NGF, and the fruiting bodies don't. However, that's a huge oversimplification, or deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. Lion's mane fruiting bodies absolutely do affects NGF. This is why valid science and valid numbers matter. Placing a non-validated and faulty number on a product just misleads people and gets them more confused about an already complex topic. There are currently no erinacine A reference standards, or any for the other erinacines and hericenones. So doing valid chemistry on their content is not just hard, but impossible for most labs. In this instance, it is prudent to wait for the science to lead before jumping into offering new products without any human clinical research behind them. We should at least know for sure it contains the levels stated before having people consume them. Currently nobody can. Anyone putting those number on their product is lying to people about it. Fake numbers from shitty chemistry are worse than no numbers at all. However, it's easy to price gouge people and make them think they are getting something valid, because most people don't understand analytical chemistry enough to know what is being said is total BS. I would have fucking had the chemistry validated by now to call people out, but COVID-19 screwed that up. Our main researchers are stuck outside the country under travel restrictions. We have preliminary data on erinacine A content, but I don't want to release any of that till it is validated. The preliminary data is fitting right into our expectations, though. Erinacines are much higher in the mycelium, and hericenones are in the fruiting bodies. However, erinacines are much lower than people think in most samples of mycelium. You can't just grow mycelium normally and have high levels, and you certainly are not getting them by growing them on rice and grinding the rice up with it. There are also a ton of different strains of lion's mane out there, and other Hericium species that produce differing amounts of actives. So the devil is in the details.