Comment · Sat, October 18, 2025 · ND Owner
What makes Erinamax Vegetarian but not Vegan?
Original post in this thread
nexusoflife · 5 points
I was wondering what makes Erinamax a vegetarian product and not a vegan product? Should note that I've been vegan for over 10 years. I absolutely love using the Lions Mane 1:1 extract and the 8:1 extract and have been using them for a while now. I wanted to compare the benefits of Erinacine-A in Erinamax but noticed that in the Dietary Information section of the product page it's labeled as 100% vegetarian and not 100% vegan like most of the other ND supplements.
What they were answering
CrimsonMax · 2 points
I had no idea about these studies, I'll have to read them both! Will you guys do studies on what happens if BOTH erinacine A and hericenones are consumed? I feel like that would have a more rounded and bigger effect on cognition than say just erinacine A. And then of course having all 3, erinacine A, Tiger Milk and hericenones!
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Yeah, most people around the world have based their erinacine A research off Wojciech's 15 year old paper he did.
That's the paper that set all this off. We found that paper like 9 years ago, and decided to just reach out to Wojciech and see if he would collaborate with us. That's what really set off our lion's mane mycelium research. He worked with us for years to not only isolate erinacine A to make the world's first reference standard, but also understand the biological process enough to be able to grow lion's mane and have it actually make erinacine A. I built out our mushroom lab for him to be able to have the equipment needed to do it at scale, because in Poland he was doing it the old fashioned way, with manual column chromatography. Like that crazy. It's a long, tedious, and slow process that way. That's why I bought our Buchi flash chromatography/prep HPLC system. Then we flew Wojciech out from Poland to work in our lab. His visa was only valid for 3 months, so we had him come out in two stretches. I also then hired a scientist to work with him that lived here. This was the foundation of all our mushroom research in the lab. Then after we isolated and purified enough to make an eriancine A reference standard, we found Grape King in Taiwan. They too had their work triggered by Wojciech's paper, and were naturally protective and hesitant to talk too much about their work. However, when they learned that Wojciech was in our lab, and we had already made erinacine A ourselves, they opened up. Then we decided to partner on both the science and on collaborating on a retail product. That's what led to Erinamax.
Since then we have collaborated on a lot of science with them, not just on lion's mane. In tandem with all this, we were doing our own lion's mane fruiting body research at our facility. Using the same processes, we grew many different strains and species of Hericium at our facility in Tempe, then used our Buchi system to make reference standards. However, the fruiting body proved much more difficult than the mycelium, as the hericenes and hericenones often have fatty acid sidechains. That's very difficult to separate with just a prep HPLC system. That's what led us to expand our reference standard lab out with a Buchi supercritical CO2 prep system. That has allowed us to massively speed up our work on lion's mane fruiting body, and we now have the world's most accurate hericene and hericenone assay method. Grape King's efforts are all focused on the mycelium, so all the fruiting body research has been on our end. Then I invested in a Canadian mushroom growing company, and became their chief scientific officer. This is had led to us expanding on our efforts to optimize mushroom production
I know I have said it before, but we have been able to make the world's strongest Cordyceps for native cordycepin. In fact, we just won the Cordy Cup! This is where companies and mycologists from around the world sent in their best Cordyceps they were able to make as a competition. The average cordycepin levels for all the samples that were sent in from around the world was 4.37mg/g. Remember, this is native. That means this is what is in there without any post-processing or extraction. What do you think we were able to reach? 14.87mg/g! So we didn't just win it... we SMASHED it. We had 3.4X the average of all the best Cordyceps from around the world! They had a Cordyceps extract category as well, and that winner was at 16.46mg/g. So we almost beat the extract category with our non-extracted Cordyceps! We probably should have done an extract of ours and entered that as well. Maybe next year.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPoT-uuiIKY/|
Then myself and two other people from my team are on the AOAC functional fungi standards initiative board.
https://www.aoac.org/scientific-solutions/bidsi/bidsi-supporters/
This is where we are setting the standards for how to test for mushroom quality. Lion's mane is the first one we are working on, and our efforts are resulting in calls for official methods for erinacine, hericene, and hericenone testing that will be approved as official AOAC methods. We have actually already submitted our hericene and hericenone method to AOAC. I am glad we got on this admin panel, because it wouldn't have been great if we hadn't. Amongst all the people who are on that panel, we are the only ones that have submitted data and methods. THE ONLY ONES! Many of the other people on the panel only sell mushrooms, yet we are the only ones really doing science on them?!? Crazy. So to say we are doing more mushroom science than anyone else in the world is an understatement. That's to say nothing of our cell culture lab, or our collaborations with other research institutions we have going on. We just don't tell people about it enough. I did hire a new PhD researcher that has experience in writing, so he will be working on that soon. We are going to be publishing a bunch more white papers, studies, and scientific updates, so people understand all we have going on. We have some super cool shit happening, but if we don't tell anyone about it, then we are just selling it short.