Functional fungi: can medicinal mushrooms really improve people’s health?
Veteran broadcaster Sheila Dillon, who was diagnosed with cancer of the bone marrow in 2011, shared some personal information while presenting a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme. She began taking mushroom supplements after discovering that patients in Japan were given them to help deal with the effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and that there was, she told listeners, “a good deal of evidence” that they did. The last time she saw her oncologist, he told her she was “in danger of becoming a super-responder”.
Dillon said she did not know if there was a link between the supplements and her successful treatment. She is, nonetheless, far from alone in being open to the idea that fungi could have far more potential to treat health conditions than is acknowledged in mainstream western medicine. One market research company estimates the global functional mushroom market will grow from $8bn in 2020 to $19.3bn in 2030. High-street chain Holland & Barrett stocks 17 different fungi supplement products. “In the last two months, we’ve seen a 70% increase in the quantity of mushroom products purchased,” says
Rachel Chatterton, head of food at the company, “and we don’t expect the ‘shroom boom’ to slow any time soon.”
Dozens of claims are made for medicinal mushroom products. The Bristol Fungarium, for example, sells extracts of fungi that it says relieve anxiety, prevent wrinkle formation, stabilise blood pressure and ease hot flushes. From heart health and type 2 diabetes to allergies and cancers, the list of ailments that mushrooms are said to alleviate is long. But are these claims supported by scientific evidence? Or are medicinal mushrooms just the latest fad?
In a former grain barn on a hill at the end of a country lane in north Somerset, groups of bulbous, cream-coloured young reishi heads rear up on dark red stalks, alongside rows of giant cauliflower-like lion’s mane poking out from metal shelving units. This is the Bristol Fungarium’s growing room. Next door, seven employees are hard at work turning fungi into tinctures and packaging them to fulfil orders.
Outside, builders are constructing a second growing room to enable the company to double its production. In the last year, sales totalled about £1.4m, according to Tom Baxter, who founded the business in 2019. He expects this to double over the next 12 months.
About half of the Bristol Fungarium’s revenue comes from lion’s mane, which, according to a company leaflet, is beneficial for patients with mild dementia, has potential in alleviating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and “is purported” to help manage attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms. Evidence to support these claims from human trials is scant, however, though lion’s mane extracts have been shown to stimulate
the growth of nerve cells in Petri dishes and rodents.
“The human body is a galaxy of trillions of cells that are interacting with one another and microbes in our microbiome,” says Prof Nicholas Money, a mycologist at Miami University in Ohio, who published a review on medicinal mushrooms in 2016. “Preliminary cell and animal studies are an interesting starting point, but extrapolating effects seen in cultured human cells to treatment of serious conditions is beyond absurd.”
Baxter acknowledges that many of the claims made for medicinal mushrooms are based on extrapolating from cell cultures. He does, however, highlight two clinical trials of lion’s mane, one published in 2009, that found extracts of the mushroom improved cognitive test scores in older adults with mild cognitive impairment, and another that suggested benefits for those with mild Alzheimer’s disease. In the first trial, just 15 participants took the supplements and in the second study, only 20. Both also involved researchers working for companies that sell mushroom supplements.
Many health claims have been made for reishi, dating back more than 2,000 years, including that it can boost the immune system and gut health, alleviate fatigue and improve sleep. Some researchers also say cell culture and animal studies suggest it can promote anti-cancer activity in immune cells and suppress cancer cell growth. “Reishi can activate the body’s natural killer cells that can target cancer cells and increase apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in cancer cells,” says Giuseppe Venturella, a botanist and mycologist at the University of Palermo in Italy.
While most research on the fungus has been in cell cultures, one review identified 26 human trials of reishi, including some that found benefits for patients with high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hepatitis B and cancer. Its author highlighted that these findings were often undermined by participants knowing they were receiving the treatment, small sample sizes and a lack of confirmatory followup work.
Extracts of turkey tail have been used as mainstream cancer treatments since the 1970s in Japan and 1980s in China. “Turkey tail is an immune system regulator,” says Baxter. “It’s very good for lung cancers and a lot of different cancers.”
A group led by Dr Karen Pilkington, a research evaluation expert at the University of Portsmouth, reviewed seven randomised controlled trials examining whether PSK (polysaccharideK), an extract of turkey tail, reduced the side effects of radiotherapy or chemotherapy in colorectal cancer patients. The group found the small numbers of study participants, a lack of placebo control groups and the possibility that patients might report side effects differently because they knew they were taking PSK meant any benefits were unclear.
Chaga, which grows on birch trees and resembles burnt charcoal, prevents wrinkles, helps counter IBD and fights bacterial and viral infections, according to some of those that sell it. Cordyceps militaris, the “zombie fungus” that inspired the HBO series The Last of Us, is reported to improve exercise performance, act as an antidepressant and boost female libido. In none of these cases however, are such claims supported by well-designed clinical trials.
Under UK law, food labelling cannot “attribute to any foodstuff the property of preventing, treating or curing a human disease”. Such claims fall under medicines regulations and require marketing authorisation from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). A spokesperson for the MHRA said it had received no marketing applications for products containing lion’s mane, turkey tail, reishi, cordyceps, chaga or shiitake, and that a number of retailers had been warned about making health claims for mushroom products and use of the term “medicinal mushrooms”.
While medical drugs are based on specific purified compounds that have been comprehensively tested for safety and efficacy, medicinal mushroom supplements can contain hundreds of different chemicals. The levels of active compounds that the health effects might be based on can also vary depending on a number of factors, including the age of cultivation, what the mushroom are grown in and whether extracts are from mushrooms’ fruiting bodies or their root-like mycelia. It is also hard to know what doses are contained within many mushroom-based products. Tests have shown that sometimes the species of fungi advertised on labels are not even present in the products.
It seems the vast majority of health claims made for mushrooms are unsupported by good-quality human trials. Even sceptics acknowledge, however, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Many drugs derived from fungi – including the antibiotics penicillin and cephalosporins, and cholesterol-lowering lovastatin – are already in use. Advances in genome sequencing and techniques for mining
It seems the vast majority of health claims made for mushrooms are unsupported by goodquality human trials
genetic information have led to hope that more of the huge range of compounds fungi produce can be isolated, purified and used in specific doses to treat human disease.
Money says that some of the claims being made currently for medicinal mushrooms are “without scientific foundation and amount to little more than snake oil”. However, “fungi have rich chemical relationships with other organisms in their environments, and I’m sure they do contain many more useful compounds,” adds Money, whose book Molds, Mushrooms and Medicines will be published in March. “We need to see the use of advanced scientific methods to identify those that are genuinely beneficial for alleviating or treating human illnesses.”
back.”
Beyond the leftwing coalition, the veteran hardliner’s stance is even creating tensions within his own party, with at least two more moderate LFI MPs sharply criticising the definition of Hamas by one of their colleagues, Danièle Obono, as “a resistance movement”.
Jean Garrigues, a political historian, said Nupes was always a union of convenience, assembled to ensure the left won a fair share of parliamentary seats but made up of parties with major ideological differences over everything from the green transition to support for Ukraine and French secularism.
“LFI’s strategy of conflictualising and systematically obstructing everything in parliament has also really angered its partners,” Garrigues said. “It’s only logical that all this has led to rows over the Hamas massacres that reveal historical contradictions between irreconcilably different leftwing traditions.”
Partly, Garrigues wrote in Le Monde, LFI’s stance was aimed at boosting its appeal to Muslim voters. But it was “also in line with the whole history of far-left support for Palestine, rooted in blind anti-Zionism” – and directly opposed to the Socialist party’s tradition of seeking a point of balance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas has also given rise to political and diplomatic tensions in Spain, which currently holds the presidency of the EU council. The country’s acting prime minister, the socialist leader Pedro Sánchez, condemned Hamas’s attack on Israel as news of the atrocities emerged.
“We are following the terrorist attack with great concern and we stand with the victims and their families,” he said on the day of the Hamas attacks. “We vehemently condemn the terrorism and we call for an immediate end to the indiscriminate violence against the civilian population.”
But Israel’s embassy in Madrid later accused some members of Spain’s caretaker coalition government of aligning themselves “with Isis-style terrorism” after three acting ministers from Sánchez’s partners in the far-left Unidas Podemos alliance suggested Israel was breaking international law and committing genocide and war crimes in Gaza.
The embassy did not name the ministers concerned – Ione Belarra, the Podemos leader who serves as Spain’s social rights minister, her Podemos colleague, the acting equality minister Irene Montero, and the acting consumer affairs minister, Alberto Garzón of the United Left platform.
But it condemned their remarks as “absolutely immoral” and suggested they would endanger the safety of Jewish communities in Spain. Spain’s foreign ministry hit back with a blunt statement, accusing the embassy of “spreading falsehoods” and pointing out that Spanish political leaders were free to express their opinions.
Enrique Santiago, general secretary of the Spanish Communist party and an MP for the leftwing Sumar alliance, which last week reached an agreement with Sánchez aimed at winning support for a new coalition government, has refused to call Hamas terrorists and insisted on the right of occupied people to self-defence.
“There isn’t one international law for Ukraine and another for Palestine,” Santiago posted. “The right of illegally occupied people to defend themselves ends only when they achieve their independence. The international community should compel Israel to obey UN resolutions and respect Palestine.”
In Germany, however, with a broad cross-party political consensus around a strictly pro-Israel stance having developed in the postwar era, the conflict in the Middle East has proved less of a wedge issue for the left than in other European countries.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), was one of the first heads of government to visit Israel after the Hamas attacks. On his trip, he reasserted that the security and existence of the Israeli state was Germany’s Staatsräson or “reason of state”, literally tied to the foundation of modern Germany.
Vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, of the Green party, expressed his solidarity with Israel in an emotional video address. His party colleague Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, actively opposed calls for the European Union to join the UN’s call for a ceasefire at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg on Monday, insisting on the need to fight terrorism.
Europe’s agonising over how to respond played out at a European summit last week at which the 27 member states in the end unanimously called for “humanitarian corridors and pauses” to the shelling of Gaza to allow in food, water and medical supplies.
But the deal was only reached after concessions to Spain, which had wanted mention of a “ceasefire” in the final conclusions, and after serious internal rows among the EU’s top officials.
Earlier Ursula von der Leyen, the German president of the European Commission, had provoked furious responses from some EU officials for expressing unconditional support for Israel.
Under the Lisbon treaty, which came into force in 2009, the EU set itself new ambitions to become a force in foreign policy. But the latest events in the Middle East have tested its unity, and therefore its ability to deliver on that goal, to the limits.
It may be of little consolation to Keir Starmer, but it is not as if he and Labour are alone in struggling to find a united way forward on the escalating crisis in the Middle East.
It’s only logical that all this has led to rows over the Hamas massacres that reveal historic contradictions between irreconcilably different leftwing traditions
Jean Garrigues, political historian
launcher. Once put together at the station, the modules would later be detached as a single new space station prior to the ISS being de-orbited and sent to crash into the Pacific. The station would arise from the ashes of the old, in short.
“Each module is designed to last for 15 years or more, possibly 30 years, and we aim to increase capacity there considerably over the years,” added Baine.
“There are many biological and pharmacological products that can be made in space, as well as crystals, fibre optics and metallurgy. All have a strong potential revenue, and we are aiming to exploit that.”
Other private operations being backed by Nasa include US companies such as Orbital Reef and Starlab, with the former describing its planned space station as “a business park in space”.
“We see future space stations as being a combination of zero-gravity factories and research laboratories. That is the potential they offer,” added Baine.
A 1788 engraving that showed the layout of the slave ship Brookesslave ship Brookes, published widely in 1788 became instrumental to the abolitionist movement. As the clergyman and campaigner Thomas Clarkson noted at the time: “Print seemed to make an instantaneous impression of horror on all who saw it.” In 2020, it was a viral video of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer that rallied people globally around the Black Lives Matter movement, helping to reframe how many people think about racism. Social media, which raises fears of social decline, mental distress and disinformation, has also precipitated social revolutions, from #MeToo to the Arab Spring. “Fear can shatter communities,” says Peckham, “but also create new ones, around shared experiences.” The pandemic, for example, raised issues of inequality and “it is not, I think, coincidental that BLM and social justice movements happened around this time”.
Over the last century, in particular, fear has entered the industrial complex. Peckham nods to the first germ panic in the early 1900s – which even included a scare that library books could be a source of disease – and led to a new market for hygiene products. During the late Victorian period, feelings of anxiety about industrialisation and evolving gender roles led to the birth of “physical culture”, with fitness influencers, such as Eugen Sandow, selling workout courses to young men. From pharmaceutical drugs to cosmetics, and from supplements to ring cameras, consumer culture has expanded, turning individual fears and insecurities into sales opportunities. Products and services exist in an ever-escalating arms race to simultaneously conjure a fear and solve it. “We are caught up in fear that makes money,” says Peckham. “And the forces driving it have become more intimate.”
Encroachment into private spaces – targeted adverts and messaging on our phones – is why some believe it is a fearful time to be alive. Wellness culture, coaching and guides to happiness illustrate a very literal response to this.
It is impossible to talk of contemporary fears without addressing the impending climate catastrophe. Eco-anxiety has become an everyday state of being with even the joy of a sunny day now underpinned by unease. For Peckham, it raises a particular question about the role fear can play. “Can it help raise awareness? Or can we overplay fear and become apathetic?” Peckham’s own grandfather, the scientist and environmentalist Alexander King, was a co-founder of the Club of Rome, a thinktank, which in 1972 published a groundbreaking report, The Limits to Growth. It explored the future outcome of a world fixed on a path of exponential consumption (answer: not good). “Eco nuts,” is how some critics responded at the time.
The environmental movement still faces the same battle – how to provoke change when the scale of the problem is so unfathomable. Greta Thunberg, and many others, view panic as a rational response to impending doom: “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she said at the World Economic Forum in 2019. In How to Blow up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm argued that it is time for activists to escalate their tactics beyond peaceful protest and not just wield the threat of ecological disaster, but of eco-terrorism. Meanwhile, climate change deniers talk of “doomsday cultists”, harnessing different fears altogether to try to derail the movement.
Peckham is hopeful that people can become more attuned – and critical – to the role that fear plays in our behaviour. “If there is a self-help dimension to this book, it’s understanding that fear is cultural and it has a history. That’s one step towards empowerment; to understand that our agency is acted upon by these different forces.” Immersing himself in the history of fear has not extinguished the feeling that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. In the aftermath of the bombing in Jalalabad, he noted a particular feeling of clarity that followed. “Fear can have these very adverse effects, but it also can be this motivational force that focuses the mind on the issue at hand,” he says. “It turns out the history of fear is actually the history of hope.”
The more choice we have, the more anxious we become