Recently, the world has started recognizing the benefits of mushrooms not only for hormonal health but also for immune health! So I sat down with Mimi Lindquist to learn about her vast knowledge of the benefits of mushrooms and was blown away!

Before I spoke to Mimi, I had only taken Reishi and Lion’s Mane, mostly in my Organo King Coffee and I was so excited to hear Mimi share about AHCC and how it helps with Lyme disease and HPV and autoimmune issues, which we will get into further down in this post.

Mimi is the host and producer of TheMedicin podcast as well as an AHCC educator. Originally a dental hygienist, Mimi’s favorite part of the job was presenting information in an educational way that made the patient feel empowered to take ownership of their health and that’s what she does now by sharing the power and benefits of mushrooms!

After going through a divorce, Mimi found herself struggling with a combination of stress, emotional trauma, and orthorexic tendencies including hyper-”clean” eating and excessive exercise. All of which wreaked havoc on her overall health, but particularly on her hormonal health. She ended up with basically nonexistent estrogen levels, her hair was falling out, her skin was covered in acne and an unidentifiable rash, and doctors didn’t have an explanation.

Finally, she decided to take a year and focus on herself. She moved back to her hometown, started eating intuitively, listening to her body’s hunger cues, replaced weight lifting with slow walks and gentle yoga, and listened to worship music, all with the goal of getting her body into a parasympathetic state. Throughout this process, she was finally able to get out of the constant flight or fight state that she’d been experiencing for years. And while nursing herself back to health, she discovered the amazing benefits of medicinal mushrooms!

When I first heard Mimi talking on her podcast, I heard in her the same “people NEED to know about this” mentality that I feel in my own work. I remember calling my mom and saying, “Have you heard of this mushroom? It can do this, this, and this.” And she was like, “There’s no way, we would know about it by now.”

That’s where Mimi comes in.

The Basics of Mushrooms

There are generally three categories that mushrooms fall into:

1) Culinary - the kind you would find in a stir fry

2) Medicinal

3) Functional

There is some overlap, like Chateaugay and Lion's Mane are both culinary mushrooms, but they're also very powerful functional and medicinal mushrooms. We also have the category of psychedelic mushrooms as well as poisonous ones that we won’t be covering here.

DISCLAIMER: Do not eat mushrooms that you find out in the wild. If you want to forage, get an expert on board. This is in no way foraging advice or information. We are not talking about mushrooms that you’re going to pick in the forest. We’re going to stay within that category of medicinal and functional mushrooms.

There are over 300 types of mushrooms used in the medicinal category these days. We can’t cover them all here but Mimi started us off with the Beyonce of Mushrooms — the Reishi mushroom. Reishi mushrooms have the longest list of benefits out of all the mushrooms. This is a great mushroom to get started with as it can improve function in many systems including cognitive, respiratory, hormone, endocrine, circulatory, immune function, and so on. This is a great one to get in your body and a great place to start. Hot tip - Reishi is one of the most bitter things on this planet so if you’re just starting out with mushrooms, you may want to try Reishi in capsule form.

Other mushrooms have more specific benefits. For example, Lion’s Mane is known to support cognitive function and neural protection properties. Researchers have found it to help prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s. Lion’s Mane and Tremella mushrooms are also really supportive for your skin. Tremella mushrooms can hold 500 times their weight in water so it does that for your skin cells as well. And it produces an antioxidant called superoxide dismutase which is a really powerful antioxidant for your skin.

Lion’s Mane is a very common ingredient in popular mushroom coffees. It’s such an easy thing to add to coffee, tea, smoothies, or even oatmeal! This is a great example of a mushroom that hits every system in the body.

AHCC is another rightfully famous variety you’re going to run into. If you’re new to mushrooms, the National Institutes of Health describes AHCC (active hexose correlated compound) as “a nutritional supplement produced from the mycelia of shiitake mushrooms, containing a mixture of polysaccharides, amino acids, and minerals.” We’re going to dive deeper into this one a little further down in this post.

Those are just a few of the most famous ones. There are a lot of other mushroom varieties out there such as Cordyceps, Chaga, Turkey Tail, and Maitake and all of them have their own specific benefits. The cool thing about mushrooms is that they’re adaptogenic, which as Mimi put it, is like having a team of little doctors going around your body to figure out what you need and where.

How to get benefits of mushrooms — not fillers

The good news is, you don’t need to eat pounds and pounds of mushrooms every day to get the benefits. You can find capsules, sprays, coffees, and powders among many other mediums. It's less about the delivery and more about the sourcing and the ingredients of that medicinal mushroom product.

The bad news is that all medicinal mushroom products are absolutely NOT created equally. There is so much garbage out there because this is not a regulated industry. Just like supplements are not regulated. So just like anything else, we want to consume mushrooms in a really mindful and intentional way. Knowing exactly what's going into your body is always recommended.

Luckily, we have Mimi to explain to us exactly what to look for. There are a few different ways that you can tell if your mushroom products are genuine. And what we mean by genuine is that they are not full of fillers. Mushrooms are grown in mass quantities, usually on some type of grain like oats or rice. The mushroom cap that we picture when we hear the word mushroom, is the fruit. This is the end stage of a mushroom’s lifecycle.

The “roots” that the fruit grows from are the mycelium. And mycelium is great, Mimi’s AHCC product is mycelium based. But sometimes, growers don’t even let the mushroom get to the fruiting stage before they harvest it. So at that point you’re not even really getting mushrooms in the product, you’re getting mostly rice or oats along with some mycelium. And while mycelium is great and oats are great, you don’t need to be paying $40 for it when you think you’re buying these nutrient-dense mushrooms.

So what if you already have a mushroom product and you want to know if it’s a legit product? Mimi shared an amazing trick to figure it out. Dab a little on your finger and then put it on your tongue. If it tastes at all sweet, like crackers or bread or crushed-up cereal it's definitely not mushrooms. Mushrooms have a very earthy taste or can sometimes even taste a little fishy.

Another way to see if you’re getting a mushroom-heavy product is to look at the array of products from a single company. If they sell a variety of mushrooms, that grow in a variety of colors, but all of their products are the same generic beige, then you know you’re getting mostly filler.

Country of origin is also a huge factor in how much actual mushroom you’ll get in your product. Mimi explained that in the US, it’s very expensive to grow, package, and sell mushroom products so products made in the US are likely to be mostly mycelial biomass as described above. Luckily you’ll be able to see this right on the label so you can steer clear of it.

Full Spectrum is another ingredient to look out for on the label. This sounds great, like you don’t want half spectrum, right? But that’s all marketing, it’s just another misleading way to list their mycelial biomass. And if there's any type of organic oats on the label it's probably mostly organic oats.

So you always want to make sure that you’re checking the label, researching the company, and finding out as much as you can BEFORE you spend your hard-earned money.

AHCC - The Unicorn of Mushrooms

AHCC isn't a type of mushroom, but it comes from mushrooms. It's actually a cultured mycelial product from the mycelium or the roots of shiitake mushrooms.

Mimi has such a brilliant description of what AHCC is doing and why it’s so important. She says, “AHCC is bringing more immune intelligence to your body. It's not boosting the immune system. It's not suppressing the immune system. It is bringing more intelligence, meaning that your body whether it needs to be boosted or suppressed.” AHCC helps the body see what needs to be done where and helps increase communication between those cells.

Mimi described it as the Immune Army, which I love so much. So AHCC increases the army’s intelligence and increases communication through chemical messengers like cytokines that the cells use to communicate within the body and know what every part of the body and immune system is up to.

So that's why it works for such a wide variety of conditions in the body, something like stage four cancer all the way to Lyme disease, or epilepsy, or HPV, or herpes, or hydrogenated suppurativa, or acne. It's really supporting the entire physiology of the body, head to toe. This is why Mimi lumps it in with Reishi because they both hit so many systems in the body by increasing that immune intelligence.

AHCC also decreases stress hormones in the body, like cortisol and norepinephrine, which for a lot of people are out of whack or really high all the time. It also decreases systemic inflammation by decreasing C-Reactive Protein, which is basically the blood marker that your doctor looks at to assess how much inflammation you have in your body. If your CRP is really high, then we can assume that you have a lot of inflammation in your body.

So there isn’t just one condition or disease that AHCC helps with since it can help with the entire immune system, inflammation, and stress which affects so many different ailments. It really touches a lot of different problems in the body. This info was the pivotal moment for Mimi and what led her to now sharing the benefits of mushrooms with as many people as possible!

So I love all this information, understanding how AHCC works in the body and what it’s doing. But I wanted to hear about her real-life clients’ experiences with it. How did people respond when actually using it? Mimi of course started off with the disclaimer that we can’t make guarantees upfront. Everyone responds differently so there’s no one guaranteed outcome. But that said, she described an amazing reaction from those that she’s worked with:

“A lot of people will start taking AHCC for its immune benefits, say something like HPV or autoimmune, a lot of people with Lyme. And what I hear back from them is, ‘Oh my gosh, it's helping this XYZ, what I started taking it for, but I'm also noticing like side benefits of my digestion is better. My pooping is on point. I'm sleeping better. I feel more balanced. My hormones are balanced for the first time. My skin is clearer than I've ever had it in my adult life.’”

Then Mimi teared up as she started her next story:

“One person, he had stage four prostate cancer. His daughter follows me on Instagram and she purchased AHCC for him. And in six months, he was in remission. That's the only thing that they were doing. They didn't do chemo, they didn't do radiation. They didn't do surgery. It was inoperable. The only other thing that he was doing was hormone shots.

His daughter texted me one random day and was like, ‘Hey, I just thought you would like to know that my family and I are out celebrating with my dad because he has been on AHCC for six months and he just got news back from his oncologist that he's in remission.’ And, those stories are life-changing. That’s why I do what I do.”

Exactly. This is why we need people like Mimi out here to teach us all about these amazing natural resources we have for healing and supporting our bodies!

Clinical Research

AHCC has a mountain of clinical research behind it — 34 years of clinical research! It is the most clinically researched functional food in the world. One study found that after two months of a low-dose, 100% of the experimental group said that their symptoms were either partially or 100% ameliorated. You can find out more about the clinical findings and research from the AHCC Association’s website here.

Is there such a thing as too many mushrooms?

Of course, we had to ask, is there a risk of taking too many mushroom supplements? And Mimi assured us that medically, you aren’t going to get sick or overdose on mushrooms. But at a certain point, you may just be wasting these expensive products if you’re consuming them in huge amounts.

Some people may experience some detoxing side effects like anxiousness, brain fog, fatigue, or other flu-like symptoms as the mushrooms start to remove some of the built-up toxins in your system. Mimi was sure to say it’s a very small percentage of people who experience this, but it could happen. If this happens to you, know that it should only last about a week, it won’t be there forever. You can just scale back on the amount of mushrooms you’re using and slowly work up to the amount you want.

Mimi goes into this more in-depth in her podcast episode, How to Use Mushrooms Like a Pro so be sure to check that out!

Amazing Mushroom Brands

Real Mushrooms - Mimi uses this brand exclusively for mushroom extracts and they have powders that are great for adding to coffee or smoothies. They use real mushroom fruiting bodies and the founder, Jeff Chilton, is one of the original people who popularized mushrooms in the North American market.

Medicinal mushrooms weren't a thing in the US in the 80s and 90s. So Jeff Chilton was the one that started going to conventions and bringing a Reishi mushroom with him and talking to people about the benefits. Traditional Chinese medicine has been using mushrooms for literally thousands of years but this was all new to the US back then. Now he has over 45 years of growing experience.

Immune Intel AHCC® - This is Mimi’s personal label of AHCC. When looking for AHCC, it’s important to know that there is a patent on the manufacturing process of AHCC, so if you don’t see the registered trademark symbol on the packaging you probably aren’t getting the real thing.

Ready to Learn More?

If you couldn’t tell, there is SO much to know about mushrooms! Getting the initial low-down from Mimi was wonderful but there’s no way I could cover it all in this one post. So now that you’ve got a base knowledge, be sure to check out Mimi’s website and Instagram to learn more about the benefits of mushrooms!

The recommendations presented in this blog are not a substitute for medical advice from a qualified doctor. Before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle, please consult with your health care provider.

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