Mushrooms as medicine: Uncovering the health secrets of fungi | Merlin Sheldrake & Prof. Tim Spector

one of the crazy things about mushrooms is that they produce 50 million tons of spores every year and can help to trigger the formation of rain and snow can we start at the very beginning fungi are a kingdom of life you can think of them as ecosystem Engineers help us to understand how they're important desert chemical from shitaki mushrooms which is used very widely for treating cancer nobody told me anything about this the links between soil health and gut health are just so obvious talking about all these chemicals in fungi there's one that's hitting the head lines called ET and welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health I'm your host Jonathan wolf founder and CEO of Zoe today we dive into the captivating world of fungi and mushrooms and learn about the surprising reasons why they're so important for us fungi expert Dr Merlin sheldrake and my scientific co-founder at Zoe Professor Tim Spectre take us on a psychedelic tour of mushrooms why they're are promising treatment for debilitating mental health conditions like depression we'll also hear how the chemicals in mushrooms might be protecting us from other diseases and of course why eating more mushrooms is beneficial for our health Merlin is a biologist and the author of the best-selling book entangled life how fungi make our world and Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists and a professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings College London Merlin and Tim thank you for joining me today thanks for having me great to be here Tim's doing this like extra long pause just to throw me off so I'm really excited about this one um because I really enjoyed uh the book and those of you who are on video can actually see the new version of it has these amazing pictures in it which uh when I read it it didn't have the pictures and now suddenly it all makes way more sense so I think that is the ultimate coffee book uh book for people who love like really getting this Vision into something you haven't seen before but at this point no one probably has any idea what we're talking about so what I'd like to do is start with a tradition we have here Merlin which is a quickfire round of questions are you up for that sounds good to me so we we have very strict rules which are always tough for scientists you can say yes or no or if you absolutely have to you can give us a sentence you willing to give it a go I'll try all right I'm going to have three F Merlin to start with are mushrooms and fungi a kind of plant no if there were no fungi would we be alive today no do plants rely on fungi as much as we rely on gut bacteria at least as much brilliant well we're going to go into that in a bit more detail now Tim do all mushrooms have the same health benefits no but they're all good are dried mushrooms as good for our health as fresh mushrooms usually and sometimes more and finally do psychedelic mushrooms have the potential to revolutionize medicine absolutely all right final question Merlin you're allowed more than just yes or no so give us a sentence or two what's the most surprising thing about fungi that you found in your studies it's very hard to answer that because there are so many surprising things I'll choose one um that the fungal networks in a teaspoon of soil could stretch from anywhere from 100 m to 10 km hi I hope you're learning a lot from this fantastic mushroom chat with Tim and Merlin as it turns out 63% of people who watch this podcast haven't hit the Subscribe button and 11% haven't pressed the Bell to turn notifications on so if you've ever enjoyed this podcast please do hit the Subscribe button and turn notifications on doing us this small favor will really help us to reach more people with life-changing health information and that's why we do the show every week and put in all this hard work thank you and on with the show M can we start at the very beginning um because I think most people here like me didn't know what A fungi was what are fungi and are they the same as mushrooms fungi are a kingdom of life so that's as broad a category as animals or plants so there's lots of ways to be a fungus just like there's lots of ways to be an animal there's lots of ways to be a plant um but they're not plants and they're not animals um mushrooms are the reproductive structures of a small group of well a large group but a small proportionately small group um of fungi so mushrooms are the places where fungi produce spores which help them disperse themselves over potentially large distances so when we think of mushrooms we're just thinking of a small part uh of the overall life of a fungus which is usually in the form of a network most fungi live most of their lives as networks of branching fusing cells called my on net works and so that means I should think about mushrooms a bit like a fruit so it's like a a tomato a pair within this thing that isn't a plant it's analogous to the fruit of a plant um except that the tree say the apple tree that produce the apples is underground and the mushrooms you see usually are sticking up through the ground um and you're not able to see the rest of the tree why aren't they a plant because it feels like you know they're not an animal so my and then they're not a bacteria so my very simple view of the world they're a plant aren't they I think perhaps the most important difference is that plants on the whole uh photosynthesize so they produce energy from the light coming from the Sun and from carbon dioxide in the air and it's a really fundamental process on the planet photosynthesis it's kind of like they're eating air and eating light um to produce the energy they need to grow and do the things they do fungi don't photosynthesize so like us as animals we have to find food in the world ready made as it were and put it inside us fungi have to find food in the world um and consum it they can't make their own um energy like can't they can't make their own energy containing carbon compounds like plants do able to steal the energy from something else that's made it so that's fascinating so they don't have the ability to photosynthesize they can't take the the energy from from the Sun but they can't just walk around right like a animal or even I think like a bacteria that's sort of free does that time into what you're talking about before about you know these incredible number of um sort of roots that you were describing yes so they grow into networks melal networks um and what these networks allow them to do is whereas animals tend to find food in the world and put it inside their bodies fungi put their body inside their food which sounds disgusting well I mean not disgusting if you're a fungus um and the way that they do this is by growing these networks um which allow them to bury themselves in insinuate themselves within their food source um because they're highly branched they can um make contact with as much of their surroundings as possible which they then digest by releasing enzymes and other digestive compounds which allow them to break down their surroundings and absorb those nutrients into the networks nobody told me anything about this when I studied my like school biology I don't feel like people are constantly talking to me about fungi do they matter well I'm I'm bound to say Yes um but I do believe that they really do matter uh and I'm Not Alone um one of the things that they're able to do remember this is a big um group of organisms a kingdom of life um but on the whole fungi are metabolically ingenious they're chemical wizards they can produce all sorts of fascinating chemicals um that allow them to interact with the world in strange and and remarkable ways so what this allows them to do is to um play really important roles in the biosphere uh for example by decomposing wood if all the wood that plants produced um piled up un rotted then we'd be buried kilometers deep in uh in un rotted forests of course we wouldn't exist um in that situation but you get the you get the picture so and you need the fungi in order to break down the wood so wood wouldn't decompose if it wasn't for the activity of fungi which are able to break down the wood by producing um an arsenal of uh of chemicals and um enzymes that allow them to do so but they aren't just powerful decomposers they also play really important roles in um making life on land possible so all plants for example depend on fungi on um symbiotic fungi that live in them or on them in order to survive um plants would not have made it out of the water and onto the land about 500 million years ago were it not for the fungi that they formed relationships with so their symbiots um their decomposers um and through all this activity they play a part in um regulating the composition of the atmosphere because when they decompose things they release carbon dioxide when they support plant life they help pull down carbon dioxide um into um stable forms in the soil they also make soil um by decomposing um organism you can think about soil as kind of the guts of the planet um if you like I tend to I often think about it like that and funy are key players in in the life of that um um gut system if you like in the soil they hold soil together they form a sticky living seam that holds soil together if you take away the fungi the soil will wash away um they play all sorts of roles like this you can think of them as ecosystem Engineers can I touch for a minute because you mentioned this word simbiosis which definitely brings me back to like 15-year-old biology um and I feel like it's really interesting because we talk a lot about sort of gut bacteria and this realization and we have Tim here about how important they are for us and that they weren't the bacteria aren't all our enemies but actually it seems clear now that there's a lot of ways in which um the human body and bacteria actually fit together I think there's something analogous that you're talking about between fungi and plants but you sort of skipped over a bit F could could you help to understand like how essential are fungi for plants and how does that how does that fit together yeah so symbiosis just means living together right there's lots of ways to live together like we know as humans and there are lots of kinds of relationship that we can form um as some of these are healthier relationships than others some are more productive constructive relationships than others and some can be really problematic um it's like that um in the Living World At Large as well so fungi form um relationships with plants um perhaps in the most important Way by living in and around plant roots extending their webs their exploratory webs into the soil and foraging for nutrients like nitrogen or phosphorus which they're able to find more easily than plants can they transport this nitrogen phosphorus back to the roots and they exchange it with plants for sugars and fats that the plants have produced in photosynthesis so they have a trading relationship with plants trading meaning they're giving plants something good and the plants are giving them something yeah they on the whole both are benefiting from this Association so what you might call a mutualism um but it's based on the exchange of resources so the plant's getting something it can't so easily get by itself the fungus is getting something it can't so easily get by itself and together they're able to extend their reach and do things that neither could do alone the links between soil health and gut health are just so obvious and that you know and anyway the life of the planet and you know health healthy human is also deeply interlined and it's interesting that the ratio of fungi to microbes in soil is actually a really good indicator of the health of the soil and in areas where it's the less fun networks then that soil isn't as nutritious or it it's harder to grow things so in a way that's just like humans sort of you know lost diversity of our microbes the only uh we know there are fungi in in the human gut and we we estimating that about 8% or so of our microbes are fungal that's a bit of a guess because they're hard to um sequence genetically and they're much larger than uh the equivalent bacteria so we don't really know but we we used to think of them as harmful inside our guts and you know lots of clinics everywhere set up to eliminate gastric um fungi like candida and there's no real evidence that for most people they are harmful and a lot of evidence that they do play a really uh protective again symbiotic role working with uh the bacteria in this case to maximize the nutrition and reduce things like inflammation and keep the gut wall in structurally really sound and a real defense mechanism particularly for the immune system so we think fungi in the in the gut are really important for the immune system so it's really lovely to see these analogies these crossovers how you know yes they work with plants they also work with humans and it's a two-way you know um exchange mechanism that that's really cool your research is about how fungi can engage with the environment even though they don't have any they don't have any brains right there's no fungi doesn't have a brain could you tell us in very simple words like what you're doing and um sort of I I I guess what it tells us so I'm working with a research group and we're trying to understand the way that um these symbiotic fungi that live with plants in and around their Roots how are these fungi able to behave as networks how are they able to live in a changing World um sensing their environment sensing lots of things sensing temperature sensing any number of chemicals um sensing uh acidity pressure all sorts of things um how are they able to sense all of these um uh these aspects of their environment how are they able to integrate all of these different sensory data streams um and um and decide in their way decide on the right course of action at any one moment we know very little about this um and so we're looking inside these networks using microscopes and watching the flow patterns like rivers of fluid moving through the network um and sometimes like getting to a junction going up one way and changing direction and going down the other um branch of the junction and uh so it's really exciting work because there's a lot of looking involved and when I read it REM it remind me bit of like these sort of science fiction movies where we experience some completely foreign creature that doesn't seem to have a a brain or whatever but actually turns out to be you know clever than us and I definitely get a sense from you of some sort of awe that this thing is actually much smarter than you would have expected or we could imagine despite the fact that it's sort of invisible to us and doesn't have a brain these things that we would classically think of as um what's required to imagine that something has any intelligence or capability yeah I think that's right you know you can one of these fungi might be spred over tens of meters it might be um engaging with um hundreds of thousands millions of different plant root tips it might be um have very different environmental situations in different part of its Network managing um un uncountable um number of trading decisions with these plants um and constantly remodeling itself and and re adapting in these trading uh relationships to changes in the situation and from moment to moment from day to day from season to season like these are non-trivial problems to solve um and of course they solve them in their way and they've evolved over hundreds of millions of years to do this and but yeah that does Bogle my mind has there been a significant human impact on um on the fungi around the world and the way that it supports plants and the way that we're obviously very aware there is on trees for sure if we cut down a forest and the bodies of those plants were home to a whole load of fungal species that depend on those plants for for somewhere to live um and for symbiance to live with for partners to live with um we cut down the forest you you've destroyed the habitat for a whole load of fungi that no longer can live there um you've also created habitat for a whole load of different type of fungi right um You might have fungi that thrive on rotting wood so if a forest is killed by a a disease um and you have a lot of dying dead dying wood around that will create habitat for a different group of fungi so um again there's so many ways to be a fungus it's it's a little hard to to generalize but um on the whole yes when we do um a really huge scale industrialized agriculture we are often damaging fungal communities by plowing I was wondering about that this like constant plowing and fertilizer does that you get the same density I guess of fungi in the way that we do modern agriculture as we would have done in um historical approaches no you you disrupt the fungal communities and you get lower fungal diversity and you get less um healthy less active um groups of fungi in those places plants have evolved for hundreds of millions of years to do what they do in association with fungi so some Modern strains of plants some Modern crops for example a wheat variety um might have been bred to grow quickly when you feed it with loads of um chemical phosphorus um this is like giving it fertilizer yeah give it lots and lots of fertilizer um and so that modern bread variety might not be so good at forming relationships with their know companion fungi as um a a a variety that has been um grown by humans for for a long time um before this chemical phosphorus started to be applied so um so on the whole we are um we if we breeding this kind of plant we're breeding quite spoiled plants spoiled plants with maybe not very good symbiotic manners they're not so good at forming these associations um and um they might form quite dysfunctional relationships with the fungi that would otherwise be key parts of their lives so take take away the phosphorus the plant needs uh the plant won't survive and nor will it have fungal Partners to strike up a relationship with I've sort of got this analogy now plants almost being fed on their own version of ultra processed food right so they grow really fast but in a way that isn't quite right and then of course probably therefore ending up without some of the things that you know you would expect to see in a healthy plant which we then go and eat am I stretching this too far no it's like if you you know you suddenly feed any animal massively and it it balloons up inside it might have you know more height and weight but it's going to lack some of those nutrients and things that uh it's defense chemicals it's uh its complexity and its interaction with the world is going to be different because all you're focusing on is the size of that that animal or that plant they're lazy you know they just don't just to sit back don't have to do much hard work and the fertilizer just uh is this massive growth hormone that just pushes them up and so it's a bit like they've lost their own microbiome only in this case it's their fungi and it's spread out and dispersed rather than sort of sitting inside them yeah they don't care they don't need it I'm getting all the growth I need you know um what do I care I don't all these extra nutrients they're just uh you know icing on the C I don't need to worry about that let's not give the fungi as much and the fungi don't uh return the favor so I think that's partly it but also you know the heavy plowing the chemicals in the soil all these things are are disrupting these networks as well so and Merlin presumably this is all unintentional right it's not the people 70 years ago or whatever we started this big um growth in agricultureal like oh we know all about the fungi and we're we don't care it's just that they were seeking to get more and more food nobody knew about any of this I'm guessing and this is another example of sort of an unintended byproduct because we generally didn't realize how complicated the world was and I think t ended to think that there were very simple answers and only now starting to realize there was much more complexity underneath I think that's fair to say that that um largely it's been driven through um ignorance rather than through people being malicious however that wouldn't be something you could necessarily apply today where you have powerful Lobby groups for you know for the chemical industry for the big machinery Industries for all of these different um parts of the um heavily commercialized agricultural World um and I don't think that um all of those vested interests and Powerful lobbies are acting um out of their concern for the soil I think they're acting um for a profit motive can I ask about um herbicides and glyphosate for example the commonest herbicide used we don't really talk about its its effect on on the fungi and fungal networks is there any data on that is it resistant to it um does it matter I've read some studies that suggest that um herbicides are damaging and disruptive to to micro Rizal fungal networks um I don't know what context they were studying those the studies took place in I don't know how um how much these herbicides affect decomposer fungi which are also important parts of the soil um but certainly there's some evidence that they are disruptive and of course they're disruptive in another way because they kill the plants no kill plants that fungi dependon and on the whole lower diversity of plants in an area means lower diversity of fungi hi I want to take a quick break with you from this fascinating mushroom conversation now back in March last year we created this podcast to uncover how the latest science can help all of us to live longer and healthier lives and over hundreds of hours of conversations with World leading scientists we've uncovered key insights that have the potential to help you improve your health now if you don't have hundreds of hours to spare not to worry at the request of many of our listeners our team has created an amazing guide summarizing the top 10 most impactful discoveries that you could apply to your life and you can get it for free simply go to zoe.com free guide or click the link in the show notes and please let me know what you think of it okay back to the show I'd love to talk now about the role of fungi and mushrooms in human health and maybe starting with medicine because I know Tim that you're quite excited about some of the new things that are are coming along and so could you maybe talk T talking us about hallucinogenic or psychedelic mushrooms which I was definitely brought up with something that my parents told me I should never do and now you're talking about it as potentially real treatment for um mental health issues yes well mushrooms have been used medically for thousands of years in China um it's really since records began and uh there's a huge history there that in a way the West sort of forgot about and is recently re you know redis cing um the So-Cal magic mushrooms uh in the west really seem to uh come to light after a family um were having a picnic in Green Park in the 17th century okay keep going and uh they they were reported by I think it was the times as going crazy and and Delirious and having to be sort of arrested by the police because they fits of Giggles were mentioned hysterical and they couldn't be sort of you know controlled and this this made the newspapers of the time and it turned out they'd been foraging in Green Park and found these mushrooms and that's that's really how at least in the west this idea that mushrooms had this um this mood uh changing effect but some mushrooms um the some were called psychedelic or magic mushrooms produced a substance called siloc cybin which is a very powerful uh uh chem neurochemical in the brain and it's very closely linked to uh the drug LSD um lysergic acid LSD was around in the 1960s and it it had a brief time when it was thought to be useful therapeutically and there were studies you went to John's Hopkins University and uh you were a student and you enrolled in the LSD study and they did a group of of students there and um found that it did have profound effects uh on these on these students generally positive there were a small amount of them that got rather anxious symptoms but most had very positive life and lifechanging type um experiences and I think M knew actually rather more recently than the period you're talking about took part yourself in one of these LSD trials I think in in the UK If I remember rightly from from the book that's right and this this Resurgence of interest in in psychedelics which has taken place in the last 15 years or so um and it was um a study into the effects of LSD on the problem solving abilities of scientists so they got a loot of scientists which I was recruited as a t- in the t- at the department of plant Sciences I was working there as a poster on the wall that said do you have a meaningful problem that needs solving I I call this number so I called the number um because it seemed like had many meaningful problems that needed to be solved I thought you could recruit more or less anyone that way if they were Silly enough to call the number um any I was silly enough to call the number and they said that this was a a study involving um scientists and giving them LSD to see if it changed the way that they solve problems so I S I said well sign me up I went to the hospital um and they give you a battery of tests you know psychometric tests and questionaires and so forth and then you um you lie in the hospital bed they they very politely actually made the hospital room less hospitally they' hung um hangings on the walls and they had mood lights and music um so you didn't feel exactly like you were in a hospital but it was quite a thin disguise I'd say um anyway you I lay there and um and and and had the LSD and um and a a remarkable experience it was did you solve your problem not in any straightforward way um but um I what I did get where um I got new perspective on the problem it felt like um it felt like lots of very familiar parts of the problem landscape became unfamiliar again and so I could kind of re I could reexamine um the situation um and it felt like there were lots of really helpful insights if there was not one one key solution there were helpful insights that allowed me to um to proceed um in in a way that felt fruitful and how was it experience overall very positive I had a great time um it's um I had to do these questionnaires questionnaires to you know to assess um how you're feeling one of the problems of doing this research as a scientist so the scientist doing the study is that they're they're trying to be objective you they're looking from outside um but they're looking at my subjective State and the subjective state of the other participants um and it's hard to be objective about subjective things um so they had these questionnaires um one of the question their questions um I remember having to answer this question again and again was um how do you rate your experience of Infinity on a scale of 1 to 10 and this question never ceased to amuse me every time it came around every hour or so I would descend into even more intense fits of Giggles um and eventually pull some number out of the air but um this is not to make fun of the questionna as an approach It's just sometimes these things can seem absurd um when you're in that to change your your concept of ego isn't it so that's that's one of the big things it removes your ego so you can see everything more objectively this what people who do this regularly and therapists say did you something like that certainly um it becomes the boundaries of where you start and stop become um more confusing feels like you become more porous um there's less easy to distinguish you from your environment um for me I felt like my mind became a much larger place it's like I um most like on a day-to-day basis like I spend time in the garden of my mind but on in this experience it felt like um I noticed there was a gate at the bottom of the garden leading to a path leading into a forest like leading into a much bigger place which was um which was quite an amazing place to explore and that's something actually I brought back with me from the experience um it's I find it helpful sometimes to to remember that my mind is a a bigger place than the room that I'm spending time my mental room that I might be spending time in any given moment and Tim what does the latest science sort of show about this is this just an excuse to let like fancy scientists be able to do LSD without getting sent to jail or is there like something um no well you know for 30 or 40 years LSD was seen as a bad drug definitely what I was brought up to and it got labeled you know as these bad trips and bad acid trips and it it you got labeled the same way as heroin and cocaine and uh uh Crystal meths Etc and it it turns out that was really a um a blanket reaction to all drugs and throughout what is actually therapeutically a very useful tool in Psychiatry and got to remember that there's been no new drugs in Psychiatry for at least 30 years and they've started to do um uh trial proper clinical trials with proper doses of cbin which is easier to dose than just LSD and shown remarkable benefits of people with uh quite severe depression that have been resistant to medication and also some case of anxiety and depression and also some um psychosis as well there's some encouraging signs that it can so reset the brain uh through these chemicals and so actually changing some neural Pathways inside the brain in in positive ways everyone in that area is super excited by it and there are many companies now looking at uh biosimilar compounds uh that you know again kind of crazy and thinking how fungi of producing these these amazing compounds that we're now using as medications for mental health it just again illustrates how you know we need to be embracing nature and using all these things together so I think you know in 5 years we'll be seeing these thing these these drugs I was to say I think you were talking to me the other day about lots of other uses of um mushrooms that people are investigating in medicine there's quite a lot going on in cancer interesting in um and not as a main main treatment um there are some sort of test tube studies show that uh when you dry these mushrooms and you put them in little uh test tube plates you can get immune benefits and you can get anti-cancer benefits but often most things can show that so the proof is often in in uh human studies there aren't many of those um but there have been several there's there was 13,000 elderly people with dementia who had given lots of mushrooms and um reduced their dementia uh outcomes after six years um 36,000 Japanese given it and should have reduced their risk of prostate cancer um these are observational studies not trials so they're not the gold standard um and lots of mouse studies showing particularly things like button mushrooms or Ry mushrooms um can reduce can have sort of beneficial effects and I think the most important is these cancer trials so there five small studies of again these uh RI mushrooms which show that if you give it in addition to chemotherapy so this is adant treatment um you get improvements in those cancer outcomes and uh you know this is um this was looked at independently by the cockran review which is a generally uh unbiased way of looking at saying yes you know up to 50% Improvement the trials could be bigger could be better yes we need more of them um raan turkey taals seem to be coming out as helping side effects of the drugs and helping them have a bigger immune impact so I think this is where that field is going is that that's amazing these have you know hundreds of chemicals in these mushrooms and fungi are having these benefits on our immune systems that maybe help us respond better to these drugs and I think this is again similar to what we see in in in in in the human gut as well I worth remembering also that the um fungal enthusiasm as you said Tim is is not equally distributed around the globe and so um in East Asian cultures there's maybe a kind of micilia you might say more of an enthusiasm for things micilia is loving mushrooms is that yeah I'm loving fungi uh fungus loving slightly surprised you haven't come up in turned up with that on your T-shirt Merlin I'm disappointed now my chest um but um so um but but in but in Japan um there are um some there's a chemical from shitaki mushrooms which is used very widely um in for for treating cancer alongside more conventional cancer treatments and and also a compound from turkey tail which is used very widely in um quite conventional medical contexts um so um yeah so the research The Sciences uh is unequally distributed and some of the reasons why those are not used so widely here is because it's not totally clear how they're working um although seems to be very clear that they work talking about all these chemicals in fungi there's one that's sort of hitting the headlines of the moment called ET and tell me about ET which makes me think of a famous 1980s movie but yeah it looks a little like a mushroom now I think about it but that's not I think where we're going yeah Ergo thionine is is is is a a compound produced um in in many fungi particularly the What's called the the bolet family which is like seps and and poor Chini mushrooms uh quite high doses of it and it's it's been shown a number of studies to have these uh particularly powerful um effects on the body on the immune system and interestingly humans have adapted systems to actually uh take this chemical and and and bring it into their bodies so it's it's like a vitamin and it's it's been um I think wasn't it called the some marketing person called it the longevity vitamin and uh so it it gets absorbed in our bodies and there's quite a lot of hype around it and you can now buy um ET supplements and uh you you know there are people saying it has amazing Powers uh but in the end of the day it looks like you're much still much better off um eating the whole mushrooms uh rather than these this again this reductionist supplement uh which probably doesn't work in its in that artificial form as much as it would do if you're eating the whole so your just make sure I've got that you're as often like skeptical with extracting the one chemical as ET quite bullish about the underlying mushro eating the underlying mushrooms absolutely I mean you know it's definitely a healthy compound when you eat it in in in the context of the whole fungus the mushroom uh once we make it industrially and commercially and you take it out outside that the evidence isn't really clear it's it's that beneficial and that's where marketing takes over so I think that that's that's what I've learned so go out and pick those you know seps and those borini mushrooms and have a you know fantastic meal knowing that just one of the hundreds of amazing chemicals you're getting is going to be this this ET that may have anti-cancer properties um you know it it may do um have all these other benefits but I think we better off just by eating more mushrooms rather than these supplements I think this touches on an important Point as well that that many of these medicinal fungi are have been used for a really long time by by traditional um cultures and have been known about by traditional knowledge systems include psychedelics as well so um it's easy to forget that um when we are um talking about the stories of modern science where it can seem as if uh we're just discovering that these things work I think a lot of what's going on in the these modern scientific contexts that we're understanding a little bit more about how they work um but um but that um many of these fungal species like Rishi and um Lion Man chaga these have been used for a very long time it's it makes me think of this analogy with Aspirin right which is from a tree and you're going to tell me which tree it's Willow Willow bark of a willow um where I think similarly it was used for tra in traditional medicine for thousands of years this is right and it's only then much later that we came along and understood in this case identified you know the individual compound and figured out how to to mass produce it so is that the the analogy definitely analogy so many of the medicines that are very famili familiar medicines in in in the F modern pharmac Capia have come from from folk medicines um and actually with these traditional with these more traditional um fungal um medicinal fungal species and one of the reasons why we don't know as much as we should is because it's it's difficult for um it's very expensive to do big human clinical studies uh and with these traditional medicines been known about for a long time there's not much um IP to defend so big companies aren't so motivated to do those studies and it's one understand that no one is going to spend a billion dollars to prove that eating a particular mushroom improves your health because they can't lock up the mushroom in the way they can lock up a a pill which I think is very familiar to us right Tim as we think about nutritional science they just people haven't spent the money on these studies because nobody can lock up olive oil oil or or whatever it is which is actually a brilliant transition to talk about food and um I think that our listeners will not tune back if I haven't had a chance to talk really interesting to talk about specifically for these um you know like cancer and and mental health but more broadly Tim um as I said I love this chapter in your book talking about why mushrooms were so valuable for us to eat but can you give me the you know the quick rundown again like why should anyone care about eating mushrooms well they taste fantastic they have this amazing range of chemicals that give you this Umami taste this Savory taste which is sort of mimicking meat in in many ways and some people it's it's better than meat particularly if you've got a range of different mushrooms uh there and you've you've slow cooked them and or even get more taste if you dehydrate them and rehydrate them in many cases so you actually get even more Savory flavors and more chemicals but as well as being super tasty py you know they are there's a lot of water in them so once you've got rid of the water they are have huge amounts of protein about 25% protein pretty good amounts of fiber as well all these chemicals we've been talking about that have a whole variety of of these effects uh they're source of selenium they're actually a source of vitamin D uh and they sunbathe like humans and they you mentioned this before this is really true that if you leave them out in the sun before eating they have more Vitamin D it is I mean it depends slightly on the variety but um some of them are really good at converting natural steroids in them to vitamin D which is a is a steroid and basically you can get uh you know uh half of your vitamin D amounts from from eating uh portions of mushrooms is it just a lucky byproduct for us that these mushrooms are so nutritious and have all of of these chemicals we don't access else elsewhere in some sense I mean it's it's also important to remember that these they haven't been busily evolving for over a billion years to give us vitamin D or or how selfish of them and um uh although it no obviously it is irrelevant um when we're talking about what it's like to eat them um but they need these molecules themselves to do a lot of the basic things that they need to do so for example when we use fungal drugs like ayin which is a very famous drug produced by a fungus um the fungus is producing that antibiotic to defend itself from bacteria when we use it in our lives we're rehousing a fungal solution within our bodies our in our societies and so I think that you can think of a lot of the nutritional content of mushrooms as as something similar um it'll be veryy from from compound to compound of course it's interesting we talk a lot about diversity as we think about what you're eating and in a sense so what I'm hearing is like fungi aren't even plants so I guess to make it very to think this very simple it's hardly surprising you're getting more diversity in the same way you're describing these these fungi carrying out tasks that plants can't do similarly it's perhaps not surprising you might have access to like these different sorts of complex chemicals from fungi that we wouldn't just get through our normal plants or am I stretching this too far I think there's lots of things that that fungi can do for us chemically that plants can't um because they're so chem Al ingenious because they produce all these different compounds to do all these different things um and um in fact lots of the chemicals that you'll get by eating a plant have originally been um concentrated or or even made by a fungus um much of the phosphorus that's in your body would have pass through a fungus on its way to the plant that that that fed you and is it okay to eat them raw or should I always be cooking my mushrooms um unless you're very careful you're better off I think uh cooking them um there are quite a few poisonous types and there are other ones that uh just by cooking them you you get rid of those uh n nasty chemicals and they're easier to eat and it's often easier to get the N nutrients from them if they're slightly cooked as well because they have this special um layer chit in um uh which is very hard to break down and gives it that that structure and also they're full of water as well so if you're cooking them you you actually get rid of a lot of the water and uh you get actually more flavors that way so that's that's my view I don't know whether you eat lots of raw mushrooms but um I think they taste better uh cooked generally and so that's the way I easier to digest the breaking down the cell walls um for sure um the times when I might eat them um that when they haven't been cooked formerly cooked with heat is um when they've been fermented so if you're eating like a mold like Koji which is used to make soya sauce and miso um you haven't cooked that but it has been transformed through a fermentation process cold cooking we call that so yes no I've started fermenting mushrooms it's quite tricky but uh they do taste amazing and and how do you access this because most people will feel like if they go to their local grocery store of mushrooms maybe there's like one type of mushroom or you know I think we start to see a few more but still not very many and I at least have been told by my mother again I feel like there's a long list of things that my mother told me not to do on this podcast but one of them was not to eat random mushrooms that you find like in the forest cuz you're likely to kill yourself so how do people I assume that they're not eating random mushrooms is a good idea Merlin it's definitely a good idea quite a lot of them are genuinely poisonous there are some poisonous mushrooms which will give you really a bad time and potentially kill you so the general rule of thumb is that you never eat a mushroom that you found unless you can positively identify it what that means is that um you're not just saying well it's not that and it's not not that so it must be this what you're saying is I know for a fact that it's this um so just a high bar for most people listening to this just wandering into their local park and seeing a mushroom but there are lots of ways to to learn about know what mushrooms are wi just like you can learn about what trees are wi or what birds are wi and and and um it's actually a really exciting thing for for many people to do and so and there's lots of great resources online um for those who want to learn more so I wouldn't discourage anyone for from doing that it's not like you need to become like the expert who knows all mushrooms overnight I think thir about 300 edible types of mushroom I I read somewhere and but about 30 are cultivated and they're the ones you'd see in the shops uh so up to 30 I guess is the is the most you're going to see in in probably in this country and most of us aren't going to see 30 then maybe going to see a few so that brings me back to the question at at the beginning about you know dried mushrooms and you know are they still good for your health or does it need to be fresh in the way that I think you talk about a lot of other plants you say if they just sit out there for months there's not much you know left in them I was surprised when I was reading this that there are studies looking at the nutritional content of of dried mushrooms and I think a lot of this done on shitake mushrooms uh but borini as well which the Italians often store dried and they are just as nutritious just they've look to the chemical composition and uh are super healthy and and some people have they think they have more taste when they're rehydrated you have to add water back into them usually warm water and so these seem to be to very very healthy so it's a bit like a stories about canned tomatoes or um beans some of these things which you might think are not healthy because they're dried you know are actually still really good for you and uh I think it shouldn't stop people eating mushrooms out of season by eating these dried ones I think that's the message um although you should find a reputable Source because it sometimes when dried mushrooms are imported um You Can't Tell You by looking at the fragments of drri mushrooms so you can't confirm just visually that it's the species that says it is and there are cases of um contamination or um the wrong kind of mushroom ending up in your bag of dried mushrooms you're not really getting the variety that you want or the all the diversity they're just giving you a bunch of on yeah cheap or there are a few thrown in with the ones you want and those might not be the ones you want to be eating so um reputable Source but button mushrooms are the sort of common ones in the UK and they're often the cheap and they're cultivated in in large amounts and although they look fairly dull compared to some of the Exotic ones you see I think theyve still got plenty of nutrients in is that right because they sort of look like the white bread of mushrooms but you're telling me that actually they still it's all I feel like they can't have any nutritional value whatsoever but you're telling me that actually I'm being unfair I think you are yes uh certainly I apologize there may better ones but you might be you'll be generally paying more for uh the better ones but Berlin probably knows the differences between all of the uh the varieties but I still think there's no such thing as a bad mushroom I think that's my I'd agree with that I'd agree with that I I personally think there are ones that taste a lot better and and more and more available actually like oyster mushrooms or shitake mushrooms and which I would always choose over a button mushroom um I would agree that there's no such thing as a bad edible mushroom um but um for those that don't like or have not liked as a child for example butter and mushrooms there may well be mushrooms out there that you do like um because there's quite a range of flavors and textures that's a bit like saying so you can't give up on all mushrooms um because you had a bad one bit like saying you give up on all plants cuz you don't like AR jokes or something that you'd be like well that's ridiculous like try a tomato that's fascinating and presumably Tim because we talk a lot with um Sarah about this idea of like the food Matrix and complexity am I right in suspecting that a ground powdered mushroom is not likely to be as good as one of these dried but still sort of um sort of whole mushroom or I think it depends how much it's it's been crushed if you like uh so I'd like to see something that you know still resembles a mushroom in some way so it's not a fine chemical powder it hasn't been reduced to those few chemicals we've talked about it still has some of the complexity of all the things going in there it hasn't been fiddle with too much but if we take you know just pure fast drying uh mushroom getting rid of all that water and then if long as you grind it up and it's not too fine of dust I think you're still getting most of those components because there are some studies showing that actually the the cell walls of of these fungi can have some benefits as well on health that was I thought that was really interesting on the immune system so you don't want to get rid of those you still want to keep some of that structure so I story we always keep coming back to his that which is like you extract a few chemicals as people do and they want to make famous and you lose like the 9,000 other that are actually contributing to the to the overall if you lose the fiber the structure and things then you're throwing away a lot of most of the good stuff but I would also add that um there are situations when you're taking a medicinal mushroom um for example where um you might want to concentrate it because you simply wouldn't get enough of those active fractions um if you I mean it would take you'd have to eat so many mushrooms to get those those active fractions that that you might never get to that to that point so I think there are cases where you might want to take an extract alongside um your diet of whole mushrooms that makes lots of sense so this question came up uh a lot with people emailing into us how often should people be eating mushrooms I would say try and get some mushrooms in every day if you can uh and if you know at least three times a week uh most of the studies done for preventing cancer Etc have done at least two cup fulls a day so I think uh if you're if you're really trying to make a big difference to your health uh the more you get the better and try and Vary the uh species as well I think that's the other thing because we don't know yet what the particular advantages are so as for plants diversity I think is is going to turn out to be key so this is something you know this is a very new field but I think going for a diverse range of mushrooms trying to pick some new ones you know even if small um go for it and we you know there is you know there are these mushroom teas and mushroom coffees generally have very small amounts of actual Mushroom in them so don't be fooled into thinking that's really the same as having a full mushroom meal but I think that's that's the other takeaway so before we wrap up I'd like to ask you both this sort of final question what's your favorite way of eating mushrooms and what mushroom would be in there I love a uh creamy mushroom Talia is mine using if I can get three different types of mushroom and uh I fry them up get rid of the water add garlic and some uh creme fresh maybe with a bit of uh cfir just at the end to give it a bit more microbial and mix it with my fresh pasta that's one of my favorite meals sounds delicious and what are the mushrooms uh it's whatever I can get really I you know I don't think you should be too fussy uh what you can get um so I you know I I like shitake mushrooms uh porini you know the seps variety um but I always like trying something new actually that's you know so they've all got different textures and things and but I haven't found one I don't like yet Marin I often just saut them just fry them lightly in a pan get some of the water out and um and eat them like that maybe on toast or just by themselves um but also I love making soups um and as soon might I probably have a miso base in the soup I might add some um some CAF to give it some creaminess um but and I throw in as many different species as I could get into the soup and and the way the flavors um can um Mel together in a soup form is is something I really enjoy in terms of species um of the cultivated varieties the varieties you could buy um at a shop that had a good selection all year round shiak inoi which are kind of white Tufts of mushrooms with thin slender um Slender stalks um my Tucky I love um oyster mushrooms are great um and if they're talking about wild species then um it's um whatever is around um but um there are various various favorites I just was in France eating pochini which were fantastic and and mountains of shantell which I also really enjoy if someone's listening to this and now they're really interested in saying okay like I can get a certain amount in the shops and maybe I can get some more that are dried but I'm really excited about all these wild ones that aren't don't even exist but I don't want to poison myself how could they get started there are great websites and field guides books um which field guide you get which website you visit will depend on where in the world you are um so it's important to find somewhere that's talking about an fungi um and um there's a great app called I naturalist which is also a um a good resource brilliant well we'll talk to Merlin to see if we can get a few of those links we'll put them in the show notes and I know you mentioned um actually just beforehand that like in in a country as big as the states for example like the West Coast mushrooms and East Coast mushrooms are really quite different so you would need to have a different guide well there'll be there'll be common mushrooms but but they're quite different ecosystems so um so you might be better off with a a local guide which has few species in it than the big one that has all of them in um it might be an easy place to begin brilliant thank you both very much um Merlin I would like to try and do a quick summary and um both you and Tim please correct me if I've got um any of this wrong so we start off by just saying like what is fungi and amazingly it is a kingdom which I love because it's not a word that we uh we use very often um it's a kingdom of life so it's as big as plants or animals but it's its own thing and it turns out it's lived I think you said for 500 million years like in this life with plants where they've grown together and where until we invented these modern agricultural chemicals over the last 100 years it was sort of essential for feeding the plants that um that we all ate we've done a lot of damage to fungi with modern agriculture um probably without really being aware of it originally um and this is likely to affect that the plant the plants we eat so historically the plants we ate would have been in these deep relationships with the fungi and there would have been all these chemicals now we sort of feed them with these fertilizers they they're sort of much simpler as a result and we talked about this have been a little bit like sort of ultra processed food for for plants which we now know is not very good for people um soil therefore historically it's absolutely full of life um and today in a lot of the places where uh we are doing this intensive agriculture there's a lot less of it so there has been this sort of profound um breakdown why does this matter it matters because we think this affects the food that we eat as well as affecting the ecosystem around us we then talked quite a lot about mushrooms which I I discovered like the fruit of the fungi firstly talking about medicine um and there's lots of places in which it's been investigated it sounds as though around areas of um mental health Tim was quite skeptical about ET supplement ments which are not a way to get into a movie but apparently are the latest um rage but I think Tim you said once once again you're very skeptical about something which is one chemical that's been extracted from these mushrooms and therefore leaving behind you know maybe hundreds or thousands of of others and then we talked about mushrooms for eating both of you are incredibly positive starting off with they tasting great and therefore they should just be part of um uh what we do but also because they have all of these complex chemicals and the same reasons that fungi extract all of these chemicals that plants can't there's a high chance that we're going to access a set of chemicals that are probably not in our regular diet so again creating more diversity which is something that um we talk about a lot on on these podcasts often better if slightly cooked which is the reverse sometimes of what we um hear and makes me pleased because I definitely prefer them that way even the humble butt and mushroom is just fine and that um I should not have been so prejudiced uh though I heard um Merlin definitely say oyster or shitake were probably his preferences in taste but above all there's no such thing as a bad mushroom and really what you should be looking for is just like with plants like diversity of them trying different mushrooms there are a limited number that are cultivated I think you said they're about 30 I think I'd be lucky to find more than four in my uh local grocery store so there's there's an issue about access but the good news is actually dried mushrooms might be even better than fresh so there is a way to do that if you really want to go and access all the others then you're going to have to figure out how to do it for yourself and we'll put some links in um in the show notes for those of you who are interested but do be aware that some of them are poisonous so you need to make sure you really know what you're doing and also um if everyone goes out and picks the mushrooms in their parks and in the surrounding Countryside um there won't be many mushrooms left so um foraging isn't really a um a sustainable way to feed population at the moment um so so if you were going to go out and look for mushrooms if you found some edible mushrooms that you were convinced were edible mushrooms you knew were edible mushrooms you might take a few of them to eat and leave most of them behind brilliant thank you both very much once again I started but I'm going to finish at the same time saying you have to look at the photos in this book I think they will really blow your mind in the same way for me as like first listening to Tim talking about the microbiome being inside Us and how much that shapes you I think it's um I'm definitely not going to look at um a plant in the same way as I did before you realize that there's something really magical going on sort of under the soil so I uh I couldn't recommend it more Merlin thank you so much for coming in oh it's been a pleasure thanks for having me Tim as always thank you so much for guiding us through this it's been fun great thank you thank you Merlin and Tim for joining me on Zoe science and nutrition today it's been fascinating to hear about the incredible impact that fungi have on our planet and can have on our health now if after listening to this you're hungry for more science-backed nutrition and health insights why not download our brand new guide which captures 10 of the most impactful discoveries from the podcast so far you can download it for free by going to zoe.com podcast and you can also learn more about Zoe you'll also find the link in the show notes as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and nutrition is produced by yellow huin Martin Richard and Tilly fford see you next time

Channel: ZOE

Views: 565,069

Keywords: zoe, zoe podcast, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food, mushrooms, merlin, sheldrake, merlin sheldrake, entangled life

Id: tKuoBKaMVJc

Length: 61min 47sec (3707 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024