medicinal mushrooms

Tis the season here in the Southern Rockies to go bolete hunting!  I’ve been foraging for nearly a decade what I thought were true King Boletes (Boletus edulis). Turns out that despite what the older guidebooks say, what I’ve been roasting, eating, and making medicinal extracts from is actually the newly named Boletus rubriceps, with “ceps” being another word for bolete and “rubri” meaning red. The mushroom cap ranges in color from a burgundy red to an orangish red if sun faded. The mushroom is, appropriately enough, now known as the Rocky Mountain Red. 

Mushrooms seem to do just about everything, medicinally-speaking, and I’ve written previously about mushrooms for the liver, heart and immune system.  This time, let’s take a look at what mushrooms can do for the 

Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotis) and others are both a delicious edible mushroom and a great medicinal as well.  The wild ones are the tastiest, if you’re lucky enough to find them, though you can often find them at the grocery store or even grow your own with one of the many commercial growing kits available.  I found a small cluster this summer during what was an otherwise dismal mushroom season here in the Southern Rockies.  They smelled like aniseed…something

I always say that my favorite way to use medicinal mushrooms is to eat them.  Sometimes we need stronger mushroom medicine or are working with one that isn’t edible (ever tried biting into Reishi?).  In these instances, concentrated mushroom powders are a great way to go.

Button mushrooms don’t get the respect they deserve. They’re often thought to be good for nothing but slapping on top of a pizza. But read on for a different story…

Edible mushrooms are fantastic for our health. Eating mushrooms is my favorite way to reap their benefits, but at times a stronger dose may come in handy.  This is where mushroom extracts can be handy.  For those who’ve purchased commercial mushroom extracts, you may have noticed that they’re a bit expensive.  Why not learn to make your own?

I teach classes on medicinal mushrooms and, invariably, there’s a student who doesn’t like to eat mushrooms despite their interest in mushrooms as medicine. I usually think “?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!”, but don’t express that out loud. I love mushrooms. Embarrassingly enough, I even used to like the floppy, pallid, canned kind I grew up with.

Thank your liver daily.  The liver deals with almost everything that enters the body via the mouth, nose, and skin, sorting out the good from the bad and processing the bad so that it doesn’t damage the rest of the body.

Mushrooms are valued in many parts of the world as nutrition and medicine. Cardiovascular health is one reason among many to eat mushrooms regularly, and science has been figuring out just what it is that mushrooms do to keep the heart and blood vessels healthy.  Some easy to obtain heart healthy mushrooms include delicious edibles like shiitake, maitake, oyster and button mushrooms.  Other medicinals like Reishi and Turkey Tails are also great for the heart but not so chewable!

If you’re looking for a point-of-view that scares you into dropping your coffee habit ­­­­­by trash-talking coffee as unreservedly as coffee snobs trash-talk Starbucks, you won’t find it here. Sure, there are better things to put in your body than caffeine, and sure, your body will function far more effectively if you keep caffeine out of the everyday mix, but if you’re reading this, you’re likely already aware of the benefits of avoiding caffeine. If not, hang tight—we’ll get to that.