Lion’s mane 8:1 vs 1:1

Show me one product that has that level of erinacine A and erinacine C, even at small scale, and I will get some to test. Myself and two people from my team are on the AOAC functional fungi advisory panel, along with people from Host Defense, Nammex, M2, Aloha, Nature's Way, Pharmavite, Amway, Alkemist, Eurofins, and PhytoLab. This is where we are setting the next standards for quality testing of lion's mane. We have gotten into heated arguments on multiple calls about this, because nobody has high levels of erinacine A in their products, and many of them are trying to say we should focus on other things like ergosterol and beta-glucans instead. Some have even said things like: "How do we know eriancines are really what we want in lion's mane mycelium? I don't think we really know, and I don't think we will solve it in the next 10 years." This is even though we not only have mechanism studies for erinacine A, and how it works in the body, but we have multiple double-blind human clinical studies on our Erinamax. So this is a big argument in the background right now about lion's mane standardizations, because people are starting to get data showing their mycelium products don't have any erinacines. I will say that our efforts on this AOAC board are paying off, though. The project is looking like it will be moving forward for method calls for a large grouping of erinacines, hericenes, and hericenones. So it is moving in the right direction. It's just many entrenched brands seem to be trying to slow it down because they know their products don't have any/much of these bioactives yet.

There are some other smaller brands claiming erinacine A levels, but we have tested some that we have found, and show they do not meet their claims. I'll give you some example results.

Here is the Oriveda lion's mane mycelium chromatogram

We found there was some erinacine A in there, but only at 0.001%. That's 500 times less than our Erinamax.

Here is MycoMedica, another small European brand claiming to have 0.3% erinacines, or 1.5mg per capsule.

We found 0.019mg erinacine A per capsule, or 0.0038%. That's 131 times less than our Erinamax. I am also calculating those off our spec, not actual results. If you go by our actual results, we have even more. Our spec for Erinamax is 2.5mg erinacine A per dose. Our most recent capsules have 2.8mg erinacine A. If you go result-to-results, we have 147X more than that MycoMedica batch, and 560X more than that Oriveda batch.

Here is a chromatogram from Life Cykel lion's mane.

This is a brand I am seeing constantly talked up by influencers on Instagram, and with a ton of people in the comments saying it's the best lion's mane they have ever tried. They all look like bots, which made me suspicious, so we got some to test. You can see there is a peak there for erinacine A, but look at the scale on the left. It's too small for even our extremely accurate UPLC to quantify, meaning less than 0.0009%. That's at least 555X less than Erinamax.

Here is Triquetra's MycoMax

Not even a blip in that one. To be fair, they don't make an erinacine claim at least. If you don't set a standard, you can't fail it, I guess... Infinity times less than Erinamax.

Here is Swanson's "full spectrum" lion's mane.

Swanson doesn't claim an eriancine A content, but they talk up erinacines in their description. As you can see, they are technically not wrong. There is erinacine A in there. It's just only 0.0843mg per capsule, or 0.016%. That's 33X less than our Erinamax.

Now there has been one small European brand that claimed erinacine A levels that we found was getting close. That was one called GOBA. They are out of Solvenia. We bought some of their lion's mane mycelium, and tested that in the lab.

Here is GOBA's chromatogram.

We found 0.79mg of erinacine A per capsule. That's only 3.5X less than our Erinamax. So they have gotten the closest so far. However, not long after we bought this batch from them, they discontinued it, and moved to a fruiting body product. So you can't even get that GOBA product anymore. However, they were the second highest concentration of erinacine A in a retail product that we found, behind our Erinamax. If you have some other smaller brands you know of that are making erinacine claims, or that you think might have meaningful amounts of erinacines in there, let me know the names. I will buy them and run them through our lab. No doubt we have people trying to catch up to us, but for now, nobody has gotten close.