Comment · Mon, July 3, 2023 · ND Owner
Study: 10 Grams of Lion's Mane Useless
Original post in this thread
zidatris · 11 points
What do you guys think of this fairly new study, in which 10 grams of Hericium Erinaceus for the duration of 4 weeks was useless in a young college cohort compared to placebo?
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
LOL, they fucking baked the lion's mane into muffins... I assume that was at like 350 degrees for 30-60min? They did no testing of the finished muffins to see if they degraded the actives? We've been doing a lot of science with lion's mane for the past 7 years. One big thing we have learned is temperature in processing is a big factor in the amount of actives we get in testing. Hell, just in our sample prep the temps make a huge difference. We saw literally a 100X difference in actives between a high temp and low temp sample prep. Randomly chucking 10 grams of lion's mane powder into batter, then baking them into muffins at high temps without any validation that they didn't destroy the actives, then testing VO2 max and fat/carbohydrate oxidation of all things, just seems silly. The study design is all whack. If they wanted to assess cognition, why use a weird dual task challenge test pre and post exercise? There are much better ways to assess cognitive effects, and frankly they should have been testing cordyceps for the cardiovascular function stuff. Also, if you look at their data, the lion's mane group did perform better on all measures... In trial 1, the control group answered 19 questions correctly post-workout, and the lion's mane group answered 21 correctly. That's a 10.5% improvement. Maybe they don't consider that statistically significant? However, they even admit their groups were not properly stratified, so is the data even relevant at all? Trial 2 post was 22 correct for placebo and 23 correct for lion's mane. Pre trials were 19 correct for placebo and 20 correct for lion's mane in trial 1, and 21 correct for placebo and 22 correct for lion's mane in trial 2. The lion's mane group performed better on all trials, both pre and post workout... Sure, they are mild improvements, but improvements nonetheless. I don't think there is enough participants or data points to really glean anything from this paper, especially given the baking at high temps and lack of stratification for the measures in the groups.