Lone Star Mushrooms FAQ
FAQ about our extracts
Below are some of the common questions folks have prior to using our extracts. I hope this answers any questions you may have and if not, let us know!
How do I take it?
Our extracts and be taking directly or simply add it to your water, smoothie, coffee, tea, etc. It won't hurt it to put it in something hot or cold.
How Much to take?
Our droppers are marked so you know exactly how much 1 mL is. We recommend taking 1 mL two times per day. We have a lot of people that offer these to their children to help with ADHD and as a Ritalin replacement. If this is the case for you, I recommend starting out with 1/2 mL two times a day for children. As always, please consult your Doctor prior to giving these to your children.
Can I take too much?
There was a study done that fed an extremely high dose of lions mane to mice that showed no notable affects. On the other hand, reishi has been known to lower blood pressure so if you already have low BP, be mindful of this benefit. As for turkey tail, I have not read or heard of anyone taking too much that it caused an issue.
Are these made with Fruiting Bodies or Mycelium?
We use fruiting bodies only (first picture below). Some companies such as host defense and Om use the mycelium (second picture) (the roots of the mushroom). The problem is that in order to get the mycelium you must grow it in a starch such as brown rice, milo, or millet. Since you cannot separate the two out, those extracts contain mostly the starch. I believe that the mycelium is beneficial but when studies show that 70% is everything but the mushrooms, its hard to believe that 30% is better than 100% of the fruiting body. To know for sure if other extracts contain fillers, check the other ingredients for words like brown rice or millet.
Where do the mushrooms come from?
Reishi and lions mane we grow at our farm in Tomball, TX. Turkey Tail comes from a trusted forager in Oregon. We do some foraging ourselves at times as it is found just about anywhere in the United States.
Annoying fact: Mushroom blocks can be shipped into the country from China and a lot are. Farmers will fruit the mushroom in the United States from the substrate that they came in. But since it is "grown" here, farmers can legally consider the mushrooms "grown in the USA."
How do we make it?
Step 1- Alcohol extraction. This is an important step as it pulls out alcohol soluble compounds called triterpenes. We dry the mushrooms, grind them up so they have more points of contact with the alcohol, and soak them in 75% alcohol for at least a month.
Step 2. Hot water extraction. Without going too deep into the science behind this, mushroom's beneficial compounds are trapped in a shell called chitin. These compounds that we want are called polysaccharides. In fruits and vegetables, these polysaccharides are an alfa-glucan. Which is good because our stomach acids can break down alfa-glucans and absorb it into your body but it cannot break down beta-glucans. Beta-glucans are the type of polysaccharides that are in mushrooms. This means you have to heat up (cook) mushrooms to be able to absorb their beneficial compounds. So eating raw mushrooms allows to to obtain 5-10% of the beneficial compounds available. We simmer our extracts in hot water for 2 days and drain the water several times to pull out as much as we can. From there, we boil down the extracts to just a few cups of water to make it extremely condensed.
Step 3. Blending the hot water extraction and the alcohol. Now we want to get all the benefits that the mushrooms have to offer together. We do this by adding the alcohol into the water extraction. Even though the alcohol is at 75% in the mushroom extraction, we finish around 20%.
I hope that made sense. I have been doing some research that one study showed using a pressure cooker for the hot water extraction had better results. We are looking at buying a testing unit that will let us know the percent of polysaccharides in the liquid to compare and contrast. Unfortunately, they are not cheap but I believe it is worth it in order to have the highest quality and most powerful product out there.
Differences between our extracts and others
Fruiting body verses mycelium which we already spoke about
Dual extracted. You want to make sure you're getting the best of both worlds. Some companies simply dry the mushrooms and place them in capsules without any extractions.
All our mushrooms are from the United States.
Our entire process is done in house so we can confirm with confidence that what the label says is what is in the bottle. A study that was done in 2017 purchased 19 reishi extracts online and only 5 of them were in accordance with what was on the label. WTH!
Transparency- When we started years ago, I tried reaching out to other companies to see how their process went so we can learn ourselves. Not a single company responded with even the most general steps of how they make it. I found this very concerning. I even reached out to companies overseas thinking it would be different but had no luck
Potency vs volume - We truly do our best to make our mushroom extracts at potent as possible. If you look at just the color of our extract verses other companies you will see a noticable difference alone. We were approached by 2 different companies to make their extracts. Both didn't care if we used the mushrooms, they simply wanted the cheapest product possible asking us to use the mycelium and not to bother extracting it. I declined both companies business as I did not want to work with someone selling snake oil.
Would if we have more questions?
Simply reach out to info@lonestarmushrooms.com!
Mush love,
Michael Frederick