Why Chaga Is The "King" Of Medicinal Mushrooms (Inonotus obliquus)

they call it the king of medicinal mushrooms which is a little bit weird because technically it's not actually a mushroom chaga otherwise known as indonotus obliqus has an interesting history and some potentially powerful medicinal properties so in this video we're going to go over everything you need to know about this incredible fungus [Music] okay so if it's not technically a mushroom then what is it now what most people call a chaga mushroom is actually a sterile canker it's kind of a hardened mass of chaga mycelium and birchwood you'll find it growing on birch trees and the fact that it grows on birch is actually pretty important to the medicinal properties of this mushroom which i'll talk about a little bit later in this video now chaga is actually a parasite to the birch tree where it kind of oozes out of the cracks on the birch tree in an unassuming lump now most things in the woods that are growing on trees aren't chaga so there's a lot of things that kind of superficially look like chaga such as burls or other kind of lumps on trees but chaga has a very specific look and if you know what to look for it's pretty obvious what it is real chaga again if you're looking for it it does grow on birch and this is kind of what it looks like it's just this hardened mass with a black outer layer and the inside of it is kind of this nice golden kind of orangey color and when it's super fresh it'll feel like cork but otherwise it's just kind of a hardened mass chaga grows in birch forest in canada but it can also be found in the u.s in parts of northern china and in russia now i was hoping to come out here in this forest and find a whole bunch of it for you but i can't seem to find any except for this tiny little chunk right here so let's take a look at it so here you can see it's growing on this birch tree and if i get the camera to focus you can see the chaga here it's kind of got this hard outer layer and if we look around on the other side you can see the part of it that's orange and this is the part that kind of feels like cork when it's fresh and it looks like somebody has already come here and harvested most of it but there's still a nice little chunk that they left there but we don't need it right now so i'll just leave that there as well so chaga is definitely not a gourmet mushroom it's basically hard as wood because it kind of is wood and if you're going to harvest it you really need to bring like an axe or saw especially because you'll most likely be wanting to harvest it in the winter and it will be frozen and kind of hard to get off the tree so you need to hack it off with an axe or use a saw and you'll probably need a ladder too to be honest because quite often chaga is not growing right at you know eye level it's usually growing pretty far up the tree um that's not uncommon at all so again chaga is best to harvest in the winter and if you're gonna harvest it it's best not to go in and clear out a whole area just take a little bit or just take as much as you need and leave the chaga there to continue growing chaga does take a really long time to form it can take like three to five years to form a full-on canker so it's best to just leave it if you don't need it right away if you're gonna harvest it a good rule of thumb is just to leave like a third of it on the tree like these people did here so you might be wondering why you have to wild harvest chaga and why you can't just cultivate it instead chaga has kind of a complex growth cycle that isn't really that well understood and this part here that is harvested and used isn't actually the fruiting body again it's a sterile canker so if this is in the fruiting body how does chaga actually reproduce chaga actually does have a fruiting body and since i'm like insanely unlikely to find it out here i brought a nice little pitcher but you can see chaga has a fruiting body that doesn't grow on the outside of the tree it actually grows underneath the bark like puts out these tubes or pores that grow underneath the bark and eventually that will burst open and it will be exposed now there's a couple of theories how the spores are actually released one is that these tubes that grow underneath the bark when the tree dies it bursts open and the spores just go into the wind and then they find another tree or another birch tree where they can get inside the crack and infect another tree another theory is that when the fruiting body appears it's only there for a few days because insects pretty quickly eat it up and then those insects fly away and they transport the spores into other birch trees that can then infect the birch tree and start the cycle again but either way the fruiting body of chaga mushroom is super rare it's like very unusual to find it and that's why again i brought this picture but unless you're a mycologist the fruiting body of chaga is pretty unimportant what most people are looking for is this sterile canker which although it's not technically a mushroom most people just call it chaga mushroom so because of this complex life cycle you can't really grow chaga mushroom like you would other medicinal mushrooms like reishi or turkey tail that you can grow in kind of a compressed short life cycle you can grow the mycelium of chaga mushroom out on grain but unfortunately it doesn't have the same beneficial compounds that people use chaga for that being said there are projects and experiments going on where they take large birch forest and purposefully infect the trees with chaga mushroom and then go back three to five years later and are able to harvest these sterile cankers it's kind of a neat project i don't know how successful it is i don't know how scalable it is but until that's kind of figured out the only real way to get quality chaga is to wild harvest it by the way if you like mushrooms and mushroom content now's a good time to take one second and go hit that subscribe button and while you're down there go ahead and hit that like button as well it really helps the channel mushroom and i appreciate it so much now there's a reason why chaga is known as the king of medicinal mushrooms and that's because of the compounds that are inside of it and how they can be extracted and used like all other medicinal mushrooms chaga contains beneficial beta glucans which are a special type of polysaccharide that are able to support the human immune system but chaga also contains other compounds like sterols melanin polyphenols and terpenoids specific terpenoids like betulin and vetulinic acid have shown promise in scientific studies and may hold the keys to the most powerful benefits of chaga mushroom you might be wondering why is it important to use wild harvested chaga and again it all comes down to the compounds that are actually going to be in this conch you see betulin is a compound that is naturally occurring in the bark of birch trees in fact the name betula is the genus name for birch trees so it makes sense that the sterile conch of chaga that's growing off of the birch and is partly made up of birch wood would contain betulin and in fact chaga mushroom does contain high concentrations of betulin now interestingly enough betulin does actually occur in chaga mycelium that has been grown out on grain although in much much lower concentrations so what are the benefits of chaga and why do people actually use it now much of the research that has been done on chaga has been done in vitro which means in the glass i.e in petri dishes or test tubes and although the data from these studies can't be directly extrapolated to humans it might be useful in figuring out how chaga actually works and what chaga actually does for humans so first of all chaga is extremely high in antioxidants now antioxidants can be measured in something called the orac value which stands for oxygen radical absorbance capacity or in other words how effective a substance is at neutralizing free radicals in the body chaga has one of the highest orac values in the world like higher than acai berries which are known to be a really powerful antioxidant now there is some controversy about the orac value and what that actually means in terms of the effectiveness of antioxidants in the body and i'm not a biochemist so i don't really know what to make of it but that aside you can definitely consider chaga a powerful antioxidant which is why it's considered to be used for anti-aging and for dna protection of course as mentioned earlier chaga also has immune supporting properties and again this is because of the fungal beta-glucan content inside the sterile conch of this mushroom fungal beta-glucans have the ability to interact with and modulate the human immune system these beta glucans are water soluble which is the reason why people use chaga tea or hot water extract of chaga for immune support now chaga is also commonly used for skin health the outer layer of chaga contains melanin which is the same compound that is in your skin and is thought to be able to protect the skin from uv rays although there is no evidence that consuming melanin actually changes the concentration of melanin in your skin as mentioned earlier it is an antioxidant so it kind of makes sense that it might be good for skin health chaga is also commonly used for digestive health polysaccharides and chaga have been found to be able to induce changes in gut bacteria and may help keep a healthy bacterial balance in the gut now these are just some of the reasons why people use chaga there's a whole host of potential benefits and reasons why people actually use it so if you want to dive deeper be sure to check out the full guide on our website the link to that is in the description below okay so how do we actually use chaga well if you can find naturally wild harvested whole chocolate chunks that is totally awesome but you're definitely not going to be able to just grind it up and eat it or cut it up and put it in your meal it's just way too hard this thing's like a rock now the most common way that chaga is used is by making a tea there are lots of ways to go about this but the most simple and most common way is to simply just simmer either chunks or powdered chaga on the stove at sub boiling temperatures for a number of hours you can do this with whole chaga chunks or like little nuggets or you can also do it with whole powder just remember that the larger the chaga chunks the longer you will need to simmer it in order to get those beneficial compounds out for chunks or nuggets this can be three to four hours and for ground up powder this can be as quickly as one to two hours either way what you're going to want to do is simmer it until the water turns into a nice dark liquid similar looking to maybe black coffee and in my opinion chaga tea is actually quite delicious and earthy it doesn't have that extreme bitterness of something like reishi it's just kind of nice and smooth and could actually form a nice coffee replacement now keep in mind if you make a tea you're only going to get those water soluble compounds because well only the compounds that are soluble in water can actually be pulled out when you do the hot water extraction luckily beta glucans or the immune supporting compounds are water soluble so if that's what you're using chaga for this is a perfectly fine method but some of the other beneficial compounds like the triterpenes actually require alcohol extraction so another way you can consume chaga then is to either buy a powder or a tincture that has been dual extracted a properly extracted powder won't require any further processing so you can even just toss it in a smoothie or toss in your coffee or toss it into any other foods now dose can vary depending on the extraction method or the intended use but it typically ranges somewhere between one to two grams of thoroughly extracted powder you can also find extracted chaga powder that has been encapsulated and that might just be the easiest way to get your chaga again just make sure the source of the chaga is a wild harvested sterile conch because that'll make sure that if it's extracted and turned into a powder that'll actually contain those beneficial compounds that you're looking for in a chaga mushroom supplement so i hope that was useful i hope it provided a good intro to this amazing fungus the chaga mushroom now if you want to dive a lot deeper and get some more information and check out some of the links to the research we used to put this guy together feel free to check out the guide again the link to that is in the description of this video plus if you want to use chaga powder or chaga mushroom tegan has helped put together some recipes and those are on the website as well and you can go ahead and check that out so thank you so much for watching i'm tony and keegan from freshgap.com and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: FreshCap Mushrooms

Views: 567,460

Keywords: chaga, chaga mushroom, chaga tea, chaga tincture, chaga double extraction, chaga benefits, chaga dosage, chaga harvesting, chaga mushroom tea, wild chaga, chaga identification, inonotus obliquus, siberian chaga, birch tree fungus, birch chaga, betulin, beta glucan, triterpene

Id: ZEmUZdgUMA8

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021