Anthocyanin-fucoidan nanocomplex

Then we start working on Erinamax. This is literally the most advanced lion's mane mycelium on the planet. We have been working for 8 years on this, both on our own at our lab here in Tempe, and with our partners in Taiwan. Millions of dollars has been put into Erinamax. It has more erinacine A content than anything else out there on the planet, and it is not even close. If you are involved in the backend of the industry, you would see that nobody disputes this. Everyone knows our Erinamax has more erinacine A than anyone else, and people have been trying a long time to try and catch up and replicate. We are working with cancer research institutions on clinical studies they are running on it. Chromadex bought our retail bottles of Erinamax to use to make their erinacine A standard, because there was no better source than it. Other vendors and mushroom growers have all bought it to try and figure out how they can get to that point. Obviously these competitors aren't blasting this from the rooftops, but it's indisputable we are the leaders in erinacine A right now. So what does that have to do with beta-glucans? Well Erinamax has TONS of alpha-glucans in it. That's right, it would fail these supposed tests to see if it was mycelium on grain... It is NOT mycelium on grain. This is a pure liquid culture process, and what comes out is pure mycelium. There is no grain anywhere. So now I have numbers showing our Erinamax, the most potent pure lion's mane mycelium in the world, fails beta-glucan testing. With everything else I know on the limitation of the kits and methodology, how can I treat the idea of using beta-glucans as any more than a completely flawed metric for mushroom quality? It's problematic at best, completely useless at worst. This is why we have been doing the things we have been doing the past 1-2 years, like joining the AOAC functional mushroom advisory board, and pushing for standardization to secondary metabolites like erinacine A, hericene/hericenones, cordycepin, ganoderic acids, etc. It's been a hard fight, because people don't want to change the status quo. They want to keep selling beta-glucan standardized mushrooms to everyone, because that's what consumers want to see. It's difficult and expensive to educate consumers on changing science and get them onboard with new things. It's much easier to just let things ride, and not upset the gravy train. For some reason, I am allergic to taking the easy path, though.

So that was a very long story, but what does any of this have to do with fucoidan (fucoidans). Well this is the beta-glucan thing all over again. Fucoidans are essentially the beta-glucans of seaweed. They are not really well elucidated. There are no real validated methods to quantifying them. Even then, there is no solid evidence that these are the things we want in there, or are the primary bioactives of the specific species of seaweed. Futhermore, there is no way to tell if they are not being adulterated or spiked to fool the shitty methods that do exist to test them. That's another issue I didn't speak to above. Many mushrooms out of China are being spiked with 98% pure beta-glucan from yeast to get the numbers up. This makes these shitty mushrooms (and sometimes not even mushrooms) look like they are the best product out there. However, they are just spiked with beta-glucans from yeast. There is no indication that is not also happening all over the seaweed market. In fact, I know it is! I have spoken to suppliers that are doing it. I am getting Vietnam flashback to the whole beta-glucan issue, and I am NOT going to put my name behind something again without running the science to ground. That's why we have not released a fucoidan product.