Comment · Fri, November 11, 2022 · ND Owner
🎙️Red Reishi Podcast Q&A | Post Your Questions From Our Latest Podcast Episode!🎧
Original post in this thread
NootropicsDepotGuru · 14 points
In this month’s podcast episode, your hosts Emiel u/Pretty-Chill and Erika u/NootropicsDepotGuru discuss the long mushroom growth process, the many health benefits of Red Reishi, and how Nootropics Depot created the most potent Red Reishi extract on the market!
Now, we want to discuss your questions from the podcast with you!
Post your podcast questions in the thread below to discuss what you've learned about Red Reishi with Nootropics Depot's Product Specialist, Emiel u/Pretty-Chill.
If you haven't already, you can listen to this month's podcast episode, all about Red Reishi, on your favorite streaming platforms: YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/p…
What they were answering
TheOptimizzzer · 11 points
What is the actual ganoderic acid DM content out of total?
Apart from hair loss/increased aggression (which are probably not issues to most that are not predisposed) what are downsides of higher DHT? Not trying to strike an accusatory tone but it seemed like the episode was slanted towards higher DHT being a negative (which made it sound a bit like this opinion was being taken because the potential for Reishi to lower DHT) even though in the average case (at least for males trying to maintain or gain reasonable amounts of muscle) this doesn’t seem to be true. DHT is proven to be one of the most anabolic hormones (multiples higher than testosterone), no? Was just a little confused about this given that ND’s prior opinion seemed to be that it’s unlikely that Reishi’s effect on DHT is actually even very significant.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
So we finally have data on the ganoderic acid DM in the 9%. Reishi is a pain in the ass to test, let me tell you! We developed it as a UPLC method. However, because of the complexity of the sample and the amount of analytes we are looking at, the run time is 35min. That's an eternity for a UPLC method. The other main issue issue is the difficulty in separation of the ganoderic acids. The USP monograph looks at 10 of the ganoderic acids. That's the STAG, which is the term we have coined to stand for "standardized target analyte grouping." It's the grouping of actives that we define as "ganoderic acids" for the purposes of the measurement and standardization. Every monograph has a STAG. There are more ganoderic acids than in the USP STAG, as we can clearly see with ganoderic acid DM, but we have to set a defined list for like-for-like measurements. The other main issue is that the USP monograph only uses a ganoderic acid A standard in the measurement, then assumes that every other ganoderic acid has the same response factor. I've spoken about this before, but normally that's not good chemistry. USP have done the work to measure and ensure that the ganoderic acids in the USP STAG do have the same response factor as ganoderic acid A, though. This is why it can be used in that manner, similar to the USP ashwagandha method only using withaferin A as the standard, then applying that response factor to the other withanolides in the STAG. However, that was not good enough for us. We actually bought all the ganoderic acid reference standards in the USP STAG, which cost us like $5,000, then we performed the validation ourselves. We personally made sure that every ganoderic acid in the USP STAG had the same response factor on our UPLC machines. The other advantage to doing what we did is that we validated exactly which peaks were the correct ones, rather than just assuming based on the retention times.
Take a look at the chromatogram from our 9%: https://imgur.com/a/bjtamWx
You can see there are a bunch of other ganoderic acid peaks in there, and some of them are extremely close to each other. Without using all the reference standards to validate which are which, you are making assumptions based on the retention times that USP gives. You could also use mass spec data to confirm, but reference standards are the proper way to go. Since we did that, we can be absolutely sure that the peaks we are integrating for each ganoderic acid in the STAG are exactly what we claim them to be. We put in a LOT of work into this method, and I am confident we have one of, if not the most, accurate ganoderic acid assay method in the world for reishi fruiting bodies.
So where does that leave us with ganoderic acid DM specifically? Well that's not part of our STAG, and was not part of what we optimized these methods for. However, we purchased the reference standard and ran the test to see if we could get numbers.
Here is the chromatogram from the ganoderic acid DM run: https://imgur.com/a/UQfPrPJ
You can see that we found 0.19% ganoderic acid DM in our reishi 9% extract. So it is there, but in low amounts. However, I want to preface this by stating that these methods were not optimized for ganoderic acid DM specifically. Because of the complexity of the sample and chemistry, that is not an easy task. We would have to dedicate weeks of our method development specialists time to optimizing the methods for DM specifically. However, these results are reasonably accurate, and do use the ganoderic acid DM standard for calibrating the response factor.
Here is the PDA of the ganoderic acid DM run in our 9% extract: https://imgur.com/a/1Xh4nah
If you zoom out, you will see where it falls in the run: https://imgur.com/a/lVWmplw
As you can see, we developed the method to focus on the USP STAG. We can measure ganoderic acid DM with a reasonable level of certainly on assay, but it wouldn't be exact without a lot more work. However, the 0.19% number is close to what the final number would be.