Jeff Chilton, a mushroom expert, discusses the importance of mushrooms for health and the misleading labeling of mushroom supplements. He emphasizes the difference between mycelium and fruiting bodies, the active constituents in mushrooms, and the benefits they offer.
Highlights:
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justinhealth. com. We have all of our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics ranging from thyroid to hormones, ketogenic diets, and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with myself, Dr.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: J, and or our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really want to get to the root cause on. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free and share the information with friends or family. Hey guys, Dr. Justin Marchegiani here. I'm here with Jeff Chilton today, the mushroom expert.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really excited to have Jeff on the podcast. We're gonna be going into psychedelic mushrooms, giving people the mushroom 101 background and just kind of all of the benefits and kind of what's happening under the hood and why mushrooms are a key tool in our functional medicine toolbox. Hey Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How you doing? Dr.
Jeff Chilton: Justin, thank you so much for having me here. It's great to be back and see you again.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Same here. Well, let's just kind of dive in and just do a mushrooms 101, right? You've been in the mushroom industry. You've been growing harvesting mushrooms. This is kind of your forte. Just kind of just give the listeners kind of a mushroom 101.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Why mushrooms are important? Why should it be on our radar if we're trying to improve our health and such?
Jeff Chilton: Sure. Sure. Well, well, first of all, you know, just in terms of what a mushroom is, you know, and part of it for me is, is I studied my college at university, but then in 1973, I started working on an actual very, very large commercial mushroom farm.
Jeff Chilton: So, you know, it's kind of interesting, Justin, because how do you actually grow mushrooms? Mushrooms don't have any seeds. So what are you going to do?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Jeff Chilton: Well, well mushrooms have spores and, and so the point is is that these spores float out on the air currents, they land on the ground, they land in on a, on wood or something.
Jeff Chilton: And when conditions are right, those mushroom spores will they will germinate into a very fine filament called a hypha. And when multiple of those hypha come together, they'll form What's called mycelium mycelium. A lot of people probably heard of that. It is the actual body of this organism So the mycelium is generally something that we never see So for example, you're walking along you're walking along a path that you walk on daily and all of a sudden you go Oh my god There's a mushroom.
Jeff Chilton: Where did that come from? Well, you know, you're kind of like, there's no tree there so that you can see the apple or something like that. No, the mushrooms came up. Well, the mycelium is underneath and that's the body of this organism. So it's, it's basically decomposing all sorts of organic matter, building up as reserve.
Jeff Chilton: Up comes a mushroom here in the Pacific Northwest. That would be in fall, the rains come, the humidity goes up, the temperature lowers a bit. Mushrooms need moist conditions to grow. Up comes the mushroom, it goes through different stages, ultimately it matures on the underside of that mushroom or gills.
Jeff Chilton: Spores are produced on those gills. Now we have a completion of the life cycle of this organism. Now what's important for everybody to understand is when you're dealing with supplements, you have to tell, Oh, I had put on the label. What is the plant part? What is the fungal part here? You know, with a plant, it might be the root, it might be the fruit, the flower.
Jeff Chilton: It, so, you have to put that on there. So, if you're actually looking for a mushroom supplement or want to use mushrooms as a supplement, you need to be able to know whether or not you're getting, The mycelium, which some people sell the actual mushroom or even in China, they, they sell products that are nothing but the spores.
Jeff Chilton: It's really pretty amazing. And just to be clear, the, the spores are kind of what spreads from the mushroom that goes into the ground. Then the mycelium is kind of underneath. That's like the root, correct? That's right. It's much like a body and the body is what we see on top. That's right. That's absolutely right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. So, and so the key here is just when you're looking for a supplement look very closely because there are companies that would actually grow that mycelium on Crane and I think we talked about this last time and so and that Grain will never be separated from the mycelium. So Those products end up being mostly grain starch and, and it could be hidden completely.
Jeff Chilton: Some companies will, will actually state in the other ingredients that this is myceliated rice or oats or something like this. And, and, but the worst part about it is some companies actually sell these products and call them mushroom. And people. Don't even know that they're actually getting mostly starch.
Jeff Chilton: So a lot, a lot of what we're trying to do is educate people about this very fact that a lot of what is out there on the shelves being called mushrooms are nothing but grain starch. So you have to be very, very careful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So just to make sure I understand, we have our. What we want to look for in the back of the label, that's the mycelium fruiting bodies.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: These are the mycelium, the underneath part that are like connected with or grown on some kind of an oat or rice based kind of starch. And then when they go to extract it, there's a whole bunch of starch with it. So they're not really just getting the concentrated. Mycelium or mushroom extract are getting a lot of the starch along with
Jeff Chilton: the fact of the matter is that they're not even extracting it They're just they're just taking the whole thing
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If here's the mushroom growing on they're not like trying to separate it off They're just grabbing the whole thing grinding it up and encapsulating it.
Jeff Chilton: Well, the point is they're not even growing mushrooms on it No, it is nothing but a jar of Sterilized. So it's the mycelium with the mycelium on the roots
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: just the roots
Jeff Chilton: just the roots and they'll pour it out You They'll dry it and they'll grind it to a powder. And it turns out to be 30 to 60 percent grain starch with very little fungal tissue.
Jeff Chilton: And this is the key, the dominant ingredient in there is the grain starch. So that's what you have to be looking for. One of the things that we do. First of all, we simply sell a hundred percent mushrooms. We extract them, which helps to break down the cell walls to, to basically make it more bioavailable, especially the beta glucans, which make up 50 percent of the cell walls.
Jeff Chilton: We also analyze our products for beta glucans and it will say on the label X amount of greater than a certain amount of beta glucans. So, you know, you've got the beta glucans in there and beta glucans are the compound in mushrooms that have the immunological activity. These other products, it's just, it's just mostly starch.
Jeff Chilton: They don't have beta glucans, a very small amount of beta glucans from the small amount of mycelium and mushrooms. Here's the beauty. Mushrooms have no starch. Starch is for class. Cellulose is from plants. Mushrooms have a glycogen as a storage carbohydrate, much like we do. Really interesting. Mushrooms do not have cellulose, either.
Jeff Chilton: They have these beta glucans as their essential fiber and carbohydrate plus something like mannitol, which is a very, very slow acting carb. It's not like a starch, which up you go and down you go. I mean, you know, the amount of starch out there that people. Eat Justin is unbelievable. I mean, you know, it's a world.
Jeff Chilton: Sure. Yeah. So, so anyway, yeah, a lot of differences. So it's the mushroom that you want if you're looking for a supplement and boy, do you have to be careful when you're looking at all those products on the shelves? Because I'll tell you right now, 50 percent of the products will be. Nothing but grain starch.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So let me make sure I understand. So when we look on the back of the label, if it says my mycelium fruiting bodies, is that mycelium and the mushroom on top or just the mycelium root?
Jeff Chilton: Well, look, that's, that's something that a lot of companies will do to confuse. Yes, I say that a lot. Yeah. They'll say, Oh, our mushroom contains fruiting body, mycelium.
Jeff Chilton: Well, How Canada mushroom is a fruiting body. So the mushroom can't contain a fruiting body. It is the fruiting body. So that term fruiting body is just there to confuse people. They're selling you mycelium on grain and that's the big issue is that they don't separate out the grain and look, We grow all our mushrooms in China.
Jeff Chilton: China also grows thousands of tons. I'm serious here of pure mycelium, nothing wrong with mycelium as a supplement product. I mean, it still has some of the active compounds, not anywhere close. To what a mushroom has, but it's still viable, but they don't sell mycelium. They sell grain and that grain is starch.
Jeff Chilton: And that's the real issue here. And the mislabeling issue. And I think I talked to you about the fact that we just filed what's called a citizen petition with the FDA. And what we're asking the FDA is to enforce. What they've got already as compliance documents. FDA has a document that says you cannot call a product that contains Mycelium you can't call that mushroom.
Jeff Chilton: You just can't that's what they say You cannot do that because you're confusing people as to what you've got in there It's not mushroom so you can't put out a mycelium product and then say oh, this is mushroom
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. And so just to be clear we have the fruiting body or the body of the mushroom.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's what we see above You Right? The mycelium is the
Jeff Chilton: root. Well, look. The mushroom is the fruiting body. Just remember that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The
Jeff Chilton: whole
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: mushroom is. Is that whole
Jeff Chilton: mushroom is the fruiting body. Right. The mycelium is what's called the vegetative body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's underneath. That's more the root structure.
Jeff Chilton: That's right. So, you have the vegetative body The fruiting body, but that is mushroom and that's mycelium, and these are totally separate. So, you know, the mushroom doesn't contain a fruiting body. It is the fruiting body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It is the fruiting body. Okay, I understand. And so we have to be careful if you're gluten sensitive or getting any of the rice or oat in there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There could be some gluten sensitivity. Oh,
Jeff Chilton: absolutely right. You never know, do you?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now, that makes sense. Now, let's talk about the active constituents. So we have this like, the 1, 3 beta glucan is one of the big ones that you see that have a lot of the active constituents. This is a, a carbohydrate product or what is the, the, the, the beta glucan?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is that Well, the beta
Jeff Chilton: glucan is, is a what's, what's considered a polysaccharide, okay? So it is a A sugar, long chain sugar, that's a certain configuration, and this is a 1316 beta glucan, which means the chain is, is 13 linked, but then there's a 16 branch. That links off of it. And that's very, very important.
Jeff Chilton: The branching of this is super important because there are other beta glucans out there. Oats have beta glucans, but they're beta 1, 3, 1, 4. Oats are, that beta glucan is considered Very good fiber, but it's doesn't have the immunological potentiation that the mushroom brings with it, with the beta 1, 3, 1 6, and that's very important.
Jeff Chilton: Not all beta glucans are the same. The beta glucan, again, the one in mushrooms makes up 50% of the cell wall of most mushrooms, and mushrooms are very high. Fiber. So, you know, if you're eating mushrooms, a lot of that fiber in the mushroom is basically feeding your microbiome. So, so mushrooms in, in that sense, there's such a great food, Justin.
Jeff Chilton: I mean, man, they're have a good level of protein, 20 to 40%, mostly carbohydrates, but slow acting carbohydrates. They're not starchy carbohydrates. It's mannitol trehalose. So slow acting and that's what's really important. And then they have a low in fat, a low calories, you know, when I was first into growing mushrooms traditional nutritionists said mushrooms have no food value.
Jeff Chilton: Because it was low calorie.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Jeff Chilton: So you're not getting calories. Ah, what are you, what are you doing here? It's just something for the taste good. That's kind of the way they looked at it. So low in calories and and ultimately a high in potassium, high in phosphorus, and high in B vitamins. B1, B2, and
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: B3.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani That seems really good. Now with the beta 1316 glucans, are these the active constituents? I know triterpenes kind of fall into this category that have, you know, major impact on deactivating viruses and helping the immune system. What other compounds are there and is it within the glucans that these things arise?
Jeff Chilton: Dr. David Jockers No, actually, actually, you know, you're talking about the triterpenes and these triterpenoids which occur in reishi, they occur in turkey And there's also triterpenoids in Chaga and these compounds, especially in Reishi, have a very strong effect on the liver in terms of liver function.
Jeff Chilton: They really help with liver function. They've also been shown to be actually killing in certain instances, cancer cells. Yes. They're really interesting compounds and look, the terpenes are in a lot of different ways. products out there and terpenes, you can think of them too. It's like, okay, that's a sap that comes out of a tree and is used in many ways.
Jeff Chilton: So the triterpenoids in reishi are, are important. There's a lot of them anywhere from four to 12 percent of triterpenoids in a reishi mushroom. There's next to no triterpenoids in, in mushroom mycelium. Absolutely. Next to no triterpenoids there. Turkey tail, again, has these triterpenoids. And, and what's really interesting is because we do so much analysis, we can look at these different species and say, for example, reishi and turkey tail have the highest amount of beta glucans in them.
Jeff Chilton: And we've, we've discovered that through our testing of the beta glucans. It's really interesting when you figure that. Those two mushrooms are considered some of the top mushrooms in terms of immunological potentiation. They turn out to be the highest in beta glucans. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So these are the ones you want to use for immune, immune deficiencies or cancers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know Reishi and some of the oriental data shows it's like almost like a first line therapy in some of these countries when there's any type of cancer. So you have your Reishi, you mentioned the turkey tail, I think you said Chaga. These are the big three that you would use for supporting the immune system?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr.
Jeff Chilton: Well, you know what all of what I would call the top 10 functional mushroom species have beta glucans shiitake is good, maitake has shown some really strong immunological potentiation in all the studies they've done on it. So it's not just those three. In fact, I would say maitake or shiitake even before chaga, Chaga, I like to think of as something that's better for our digestive system.
Jeff Chilton: So that's been used traditionally for digestive issues or alimentary canal issues. They will use chaga. So I wouldn't put it up there as one of the tops, although it is considered a folk remedy for cancer as well. So it has been. It's been used in that way, but you know, I mean, we're not supposed to speak about cancer.
Jeff Chilton: And sometimes whenever I say that word out at a podcast or something like, Oh my God, I really shouldn't say that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We're not talking about treating any disease. We're just talking about supporting the body with some of these immune boosting compounds. So. Yup. That's right. This is, this is not medical advice.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We're just trying to provide some good education out there. We're just two guys talking on the internet. Do your own research. So, I wanted to go back to Mushrooms 101 because you talked about what to look for on the label. So, mycelium fruiting body, stay away from that. Since I talked to you a few years back, I've been looking at more of the hot water extracts.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: One, I just deal with a lot of patients that are autoimmune that have gluten sensitivity. So, we're trying to do the hot extract to have avoid all the oats and the rice. What's your thoughts on that? And then what other types do you like? And we'll put the sites down below. You have your RealMushrooms.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: com and your, your Namek site. We'll put the links down below if you guys want to take a look at those resources. But what's your thoughts on the hot water extracts and what other types do you like? Dr.
Jeff Chilton: Tom Bilella Well, you know, look, every one of our products goes through a hot water extraction. That's very important.
Jeff Chilton: Mushrooms, their cell walls are in fact, mushrooms are, are not the easiest thing to digest. So when you break them down with the hot water, that will liberate some of the compounds in the cell walls, like, like the beta glucan. So when we are first what I'd say are, we have, we have two different product categories.
Jeff Chilton: One is what we call one to one extract. We take one kilo of, of mushroom, hot water extraction, one kilo comes out of that and we keep the fiber with it. So that's one kilo in one kilo out has still has the fiber. Then we also produce extracts where we're removing the fiber. And that's because we've got eight kilos of dried mushrooms going into one kilo of final extract.
Jeff Chilton: So you can't put eight kilos into one. So We will remove the fiber, but we will, we will basically put that through a two time, two to three time hot water extract, or maybe one of those extractions will be a final extraction with alcohol which will remove out the final compounds. Like, for example, triterpenoids.
Jeff Chilton: They're, they will come out with a water extract, but some We'll be difficult. So that's what we'll use the alcohol for. So certain of our mushroom species, we will use a water alcohol extraction and others, we will use just a straight water extraction. But when we're dealing with a concentrate, we'll extract them two to three times to make sure before we throw the fiber away, That we have taken out all of the compounds in there that we're interested in.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you're essentially buying these mushrooms. You're getting them from like, like kind of like your typical, like kind of farming type of system. They're, they're in the soil. People come out, they pull them out or they're harvested and then you grab them and then you're extracting them with your processes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is that the general way that you're, you're pulling it versus the free? Well,
Jeff Chilton: well, look here, here's what's going on. We contract with dozens or at least a dozen different farms. Got it. Been working with these same farms for 20 years, producing mushrooms for us. And then my production partner in China will take those dried mushrooms and he will do the extraction.
Jeff Chilton: And, you know, All of these farms are way back in the mountains. They're far away from the
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: lot of the pollution that can happen that would go up and then fall back in the soil. So you're trying to stay away from the pollution element.
Jeff Chilton: Yeah, exactly. Well, look, you're in Texas. You know what it's like on the Gulf coast in terms of all of those factories down
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, well, refineries and such.
Jeff Chilton: Oh, yeah. The last thing you'd want to do is eat vegetables that come out of the ground near one of those. Right. Yeah. And look, the, the, let's face it in the U S I think we probably pour More chemicals on our food crops than anybody in the world. I mean, it's just laden with chemicals.
Jeff Chilton: So people say to me, Oh, China, I wouldn't, I'm like, look, we test every single batch. We, we test it for heavy metals or pesticides. We do microbiological testing before it leaves. And then once it arrives in. North America, we will test it again. So we, we test it. We can't sell unless it meets certain standards.
Jeff Chilton: And our products have been organically certified since 1996. That's when I took an organic certifier to China and we had the first organic certification workshop for mushrooms in China. 1996.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow. So then they were able to certify based on the farming practices. You're keeping it far enough away where you're not having a lot of the toxins in the air.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's great. Excellent. Absolutely.
Jeff Chilton: Yeah. And look, we we certify them over there with right now we're using French certifiers. I mean, the German certifier. So these, these are not like Oh, yeah, who's certifying chinese certifier something? No, we've got european certifiers that there that are are that can do this and and I've been working with my chinese partners for 25 years I mean they china produces 85 of the world's mushrooms Think about that 85 and the issue is You cannot grow mushrooms for supplement use in the United States.
Jeff Chilton: It doesn't work. The economics are not there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. No, I understand. That makes sense. So these are harvested. You get them shipped over here and then you work on all your processing happened here. Or does it happen there?
Jeff Chilton: Happens there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It all happens there. The beautiful thing
Jeff Chilton: about it is that everything in China is brand new.
Jeff Chilton: I'm telling you look the factory that is being extracted in right now is three years old brand new Beautiful equipment they have they have they have freeways over there Justin that just make you go. That's better than what we have they I ride around on bullet trains that go 300 kilometers an hour and they're brand new.
Jeff Chilton: They're smooth and You know, it's a very modern Modern Very high quality society over there and what's interesting is you have that but when you go out to the farms They're still out there growing things in a very natural way whereas here in north america We'd have warehouses with climate control of temperature humidity Airflow, it would be all machinery and and all the rest over there.
Jeff Chilton: No It's very natural. The farms are shade cloth covered greenhouses. No air conditioning or anything like that. It's just basically grown during the particular season. Every year we have to tell them how many tons of dried mushrooms we need. Last year, Justin, we actually produced 320 tons of our mushroom extracts, 320 tons of our, every single lot that we manufacture is one ton of that particular extract.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So a ton is 2000 pounds, right? So that's 600, 000 pounds.
Jeff Chilton: Yeah. Well, these are metric tons too, 2200 pounds because it's like, you know, a thousand kilos. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, no. One, It's a very large scale kind of operation, but we're dealing with a lot of small farms and that's the beauty of it. We love our farmers that they're just wonderful and they're so efficient at what they do.
Jeff Chilton: Not over here where everything is machines.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that makes sense. So that's totally I can wrap my head around that. Now, what should people be looking for on the label? Like, okay, you know, we're going to put some links down below some good resources, but what should someone be looking for? If they're looking on the back of the label, kind of break down how they should be looking at that label.
Jeff Chilton: Well, the label is, it should be like supplement facts. Yeah. And the first panel will tell you what. Is actually in this product. Okay, mushroom 500 milligrams and maybe to say reishi mushroom, 500 milligrams. Maybe they give the Latin name on it. Or maybe they say mycelium X number of milligrams.
Jeff Chilton: In that particular part of the panel, that tells you what the main ingredient is. Now if that is mushroom, it should be okay. Reishi mushroom extract, 500 milligrams or mycelium, Reishi mycelium, 500 milligrams. And then in the other ingredients, that's where people will say, okay, I mean a lot of capsules.
Jeff Chilton: They'll have different things they add to make. the capsules, the product flow into capsules and things like that. But sometimes they'll put other ingredients in there. Like, okay, what are the small ingredients that they might say? If you look in there and in the other ingredients, it says, my ciliated rice, my ciliated oats or something like this, well beware.
Jeff Chilton: And if it says, Oh up there, fruiting body, mushroom, or fruiting body, mycelium something else like that, beware, because what they're, what they're doing basically is they're trying to obscure the fact that they're actually mostly. Grain starch.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. Now would it say hot water extract or alcohol extract on it if these were the ways it was processed?
Jeff Chilton: Well, it depends. I mean, I think we've done that before on ours, but it's not something that is is That you have to have on there in terms of the type of extract. That's the kind of stuff that in a lot of cases goes on the website or on any information about the product. But you know, a label only has so much territory on it.
Jeff Chilton: And when you look at the regulations that you have to look at. In terms of that label, man, they're, they're so strict to write down to the size of the font in certain cases. So, there's only so much real estate there in terms of putting things on, whether it's hot water or some other kind of extract, you just normally should go to the site and there they should have that kind of information for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But in general, you want to avoid the mycelium extract.
Jeff Chilton: It's not even an extract. It's just a myceliated grain. It's not an extract.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And would it say myceliated grain? Is that what's going to say in the back of the label?
Jeff Chilton: It would say that in the other ingredients.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. Okay. Look at, look at,
Jeff Chilton: look at, you know what that is?
Jeff Chilton: Just, just picture this for a second. Do you know what tempeh is?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mm hmm. It's
Jeff Chilton: a soy. Okay. Do you know how it's manufactured? It's a fermented soy. Okay. What do they ferment it with? I don't know. They ferment it with a fungus. They ferment it with a fungus. So that, that is mycelium on that soybean. It's mycelium that ferments that soybean.
Jeff Chilton: So when you're eating tempeh, You're eating mycelium, fungal mycelium. That's what these people are producing, but they're drying it out, grinding it to a powder and saying it's mushroom.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Okay. Now, people have to worry about taking mushroom, it's a fungus, it's a medicinal mushroom.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is that correlated with the same kind of fungus that we see like with candida overgrowth or fungal overgrowth in our intestinal tracts? Is there a correlation with that?
Jeff Chilton: No, absolutely none. And there's no, there's absolutely no scientific papers out there that have made any real experiments or references to that.
Jeff Chilton: I know herbalists that use mushrooms for Candida infections. You know, it's kind of like the whole doctrine of signatures somehow like like produces like, or something like this. It's a very, you know, it, a lot of people talked about that in the nineties, but it's been totally debunked.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. And then what about, what about, so you were talking about the, what about mold though?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cause obviously mushrooms, you know, need that high moisture environment. Is there any worry about Mushrooms being moldy in general.
Jeff Chilton: Well, look, if you, if you're buying fresh mushrooms and you see them on the shelf and you look at them and they look kind of ragged, or sometimes maybe there's a light fluff coming off them.
Jeff Chilton: Maybe at times there might be a mold on them. That would be unusual mold. Generally, what you have to consider is that it is producing spores and it's those spores that breathe in. They breathe in those spores, and that's what creates this allergic reaction. Now, mycotoxin comes from, for example, you get a mold onto grain in the silos, and then that mold can produce aflatoxins.
Jeff Chilton: Yeah. And that's something that grain producers are very aware of, and they're checking all the time. In fact, they run tests. Same test that we run, which is ergosterol, because molds they are a fungus, so, and that mold is basically mycelium, that's what the mold is, it's just mycelium, a mold does not produce a mushroom, a mold is just a classification of a fungus.
Jeff Chilton: mycelium organism, but that mycelium organism can in fact produce toxins. And so boy, grain producers in their silos and stuff in storage, they're really have to be careful because if there's any moisture in there, this, these molds could begin to grow. But look, I think what has to be very clear here is that what we breathe is an absolute soup.
Jeff Chilton: Of bacteria. Yeah of of mold spores of mushroom spores of all sorts of Microorganisms we breathe those all the time. The key issue is Don't be in an environment where there's a heavy amount of some particular spore because that you can easily react to that. And one example of that is in a mushroom house and you have a mushroom like an oyster mushroom that hat is opens up and the gills are exposed.
Jeff Chilton: And in that house, they will be all of these spores in there. And if you're in there harvesting those spores for hours at a time, you're going to be breathing a lot of them. In fact, there's something that's called Mushroom worker's lung, which is all about breathing spores. And that's where, you know, most mold issues come from.
Jeff Chilton: Maybe you got a damp part in your bedroom or somewhere in your house because the air circulation, the heat doesn't get back there. It takes moisture, the mold grows, it sporulates, just like on a piece of bread and you see this, this sometimes you'll start and you'll see this little white mycelium and the next thing you know, it turns green or black.
Jeff Chilton: Well, that's the spores that it's producing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, that makes sense. And so when the mushrooms are harvested, they transport it to like a low humidity type of storage container to, so they don't get moldy.
Jeff Chilton: It goes right into a, a walk in cooler.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I imagine you, you need this kind of moist environment, but if that moist environment were to stay after these mushrooms grow, that would eventually cause the mushrooms to get moldy.
Jeff Chilton: That's right. It would change the environment. Absolutely. And look, when you're in a walk in cooler, it's like a refrigerator. Refrigerators is actually a freeze dryer, a very slow freeze dryer, but that's what it is. You know, you put something in the fridge, you want to dry something out. It's kind of interesting.
Jeff Chilton: Put something in there. Well, you've probably seen it before you put something in. It's not covered up. Next thing you know, it's starting to dry out a little bit. Dr. Justin
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Marchegiani Okay. All right. Cool. Well, I'd like to kind of frame this thought. I'd like to go over your top five mushrooms and just kind of a bullet point or two for like, you know, Hey, this mushroom is great for this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Rishi, awesome for this. Boom, boom, boom. Go to the top five. And then I'd love to end with kind of The psychedelic mushrooms that you are working on now, you're actually growing, harvesting some of these. I'd like to talk about your take on these and some of the benefits and where you see they're really useful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sound good?
Jeff Chilton: Sure. Absolutely. Well, look, everybody in the world knows about lion's mane now, most popular mushroom in North America.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I got patients asking me for it. Very good for cognitive benefits. Why don't we start with lion's mane? Go ahead.
Jeff Chilton: Yeah, we will. Well, you know, lion's mane actually has a compound in it that stimulates what's called nerve growth factory and that.
Jeff Chilton: What's that compound? Do you
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: know what the compound is?
Jeff Chilton: Well, nerve growth factor the specific compound there, that's, they just call it NGF. I don't know exactly, you know, what the compound name is. That's in the
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: mushroom? That's in,
Jeff Chilton: in, in the mushroom. Well, no, sorry. Sorry. No, it's not in the mushroom. The mushroom has compounds.
Jeff Chilton: That
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: stimulate
Jeff Chilton: that and that in turn will work with the organization and sometimes even with the promotion of neurons and their growth. And so that ultimately can help our cognitive function. Sometimes some people are working with it and hope and show some effects on early onset dementia.
Jeff Chilton: Things like that. Well, look, you know in terms of nootropics, that's kind of where it fits in and that's why all of a sudden it has become such a Hot mushroom out there. I mean look just in eight years ago. I sold about a hundred kilos of of our lion's mane. I think last year we sold at least 10 tons of it.
Jeff Chilton: That's, it's, it's our, it's our top seller right now. I mean, you can imagine. Okay. So what's
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: the active compound in the lion's mane that's driving that nerve growth? Is it a triterpene or is it a, a, a one, three bit beta glucan compound? Is it within that? What is it?
Jeff Chilton: No, actually they're compounds called There are carissa knowns and there's also compounds called arena scenes or in a scenes are a nitro paranoid.
Jeff Chilton: The Harrison owns are, I'm not sure exactly what category they fit into, but they're the ones that are in the mushroom. The interesting part about it is that there's not a lot of them. They occur in very small amounts. So you really would have to take a reasonable amount. And that's something that I just want your, your listeners to understand.
Jeff Chilton: Yeah. You know, I know the label says take two capsules a day, but you know, that's only because that bottle of 60 capsules gives you a month's supply. And they say, take two of these. And normally look, it's not enough. Oftentimes. So, so think about that when you're taking a supplement. The other one cordyceps is one that is used for fatigue and energy.
Jeff Chilton: And it was usually prescribed to people when it comes to traditional Chinese medicine, people who have had a long illness. They can't quite get over the last hump with that and they're still kind of energy less and fatigued. They would prescribe cordyceps. Now over here, what do we do with that? Okay, we give it to athletes or something and hope for athletic performance.
Jeff Chilton: But if you're, if you're fatigued or feel like you have, lower energy level. Cordyceps is certainly a mushroom that you could, that could be used as a compound in there called cordycepin, which is also a anti cancer compound as well. It's kind of interesting compound. Dr. Justin Marchegiani It
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: bumps DHEA as well, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: People we use it a lot in kind of functional medicine with adrenal issues, or you mentioned kind of that lung illness. There's a DHEA improvement, which is a Okay. Okay. Jockers
Jeff Chilton: Oh, okay. Great. Yeah. I haven't really focused much on that or read much about that. But you know, I'm not a practitioner. You guys are using the things on the front lines and have understandings, just like I'm not a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, but I do look at that in terms of what they're using these for.
Jeff Chilton: So that's, that's what's important. That's how we identify which ones are the important functional mushrooms. We look at traditional Chinese medicine and say, okay, they're using, Reishi, for example, I had a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner at a Reishi conference in China in the nineties say to me, Reishi was his number one herb for the liver.
Jeff Chilton: And look, he, he gave 30 dried grams of mushrooms which is a lot. That's a lot. That's a very high dose. And that's what he's. And I, I'm thinking, well, you know what, over there, they want to see something happen. They're not going to give small amounts. They want to see some effect. I knew somebody that was in the extraction business in the United States and he was producing liquid extracts.
Jeff Chilton: And he would always say, look, I want people to feel something. So his extracts were not a clear liquid. They were cloudy with all sorts of dissolved solids and stuff in there. So they were really strong. strong extracts. So Reishi I guess let's see, we've got cordyceps, Reishi, and then just
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: real quick on the doses, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Usually it's about 500 milligrams of mushroom extract, but per capsule, is it about like one to three grams, a good general recommendation? Well,
Jeff Chilton: you know what my, what I would say, and this is something that was published by a MD Who also was raised in in hong kong do a lot about tcm He looked at all the literature and he said two to five dried grams Or extract equivalent.
Jeff Chilton: So let's just say you go high and you go five grams Well, if you have a ten to one extract, that's 500 milligrams of that mushroom extract So I go by that two to five dried grams of that mushroom ore and extract equivalent, and the two grams I would say is absolute minimum.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So when you do a hot water extract, right, is that going to be a one to one, or is that going to be more concentrated typically?
Jeff Chilton: Well, we do both. Again, with our one to one, one of the things about the one to one is that what we've done is we've taken a mushroom powder. We've taken that fiber, we've broken it down with the extract, and we pulled everything out of it to make it more bioavailable. That's again, we would say two grams is the dose of that one to one.
Jeff Chilton: So we're at the lower level with that one because we do sell the one to one and that's a product that we sell to other companies as well, so. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Very cool. Excellent.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I'll let you continue to go. So you hit I think we, you did the cordyceps was Number one, what else did we cordyceps,
Jeff Chilton: reishi,
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: lion's mane.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: When it comes to
Jeff Chilton: like other immune potentiators, I, I like shiitake and maitake, I think both of those. I mean, shiitake's got such a long body of research. They actually pulled a polysaccharide out of shiitake and called it lentinin, and it was a absolutely pure polysaccharide pure beta glucan, and they sold it as a drug in Japan.
Jeff Chilton: Because you know again like over the United States, something has to be pure before they would actually go ahead and allow it to be sold as a drug. Unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, so, so it's interesting, you know, they've actually taken and produced drugs from various Mushrooms, but again a drug product is different because a drug product they're refining it down to one particular compound We don't do that.
Jeff Chilton: We want to have a extract that's got as close to pos as possible to the Profile of the dried mushroom itself. That's what we're looking for We're not when we extract we don't try to build something up and throw other stuff away That's not what we're trying to do We're trying to keep the profile because look There are all sorts of things in these herbal products that can be part of the activity.
Jeff Chilton: Dr.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Justin Marchegiani Totally. That makes sense. Anything else? Anything else from the medicinal mushroom side you want to highlight? So we hit reishi, we hit cordyceps, we hit lion's mane, we hit shiitake and maitake. Anything else? Dave
Jeff Chilton: Well I mean, turkey tail certainly we can throw in there as another.
Jeff Chilton: Mushroom that has a lot of immunological potentiation activity. In, in, in Japan and China, they took turkey tail and they turned it into turkey tail is Trimedes versicolor. They turned it into in, in Japan, they turned turkey tail. Into a drug product they call it PSK and it had a lot of clinical research on it, which showed that it had activity for people taking, having cancer treatment.
Jeff Chilton: So what they use is use an adjuvant for people undergoing chemo radiation, whatever. So they used it alongside of that and they found that that ultimately it added five or 77 percent on to your lifespan. After, you know, getting into this program. So, that was
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: five to 7 percent
Jeff Chilton: extra. Wow. That's great.
Jeff Chilton: And then
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: what's the mushroom extract they use on like the, the cold sores and such. It's like, I'm not sure.
Jeff Chilton: I haven't
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: heard a lot about that. They use it. I think it's on the cold sores or on the HPV. They have it in the big supplement form. It's kind of like an abbreviation, kind of like PSK. I can,
Jeff Chilton: well, you know, there's a, there's a number of those types of products that they make in Japan that are what I would call process driven PSK PSP process driven products where they're, they're growing out.
Jeff Chilton: The mushroom or pure my seed and then they're extracting it through a different process sometimes proprietary and they come up with a product and that can be targeted to a specific ailment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. I'll pull it up here and I'll, I'll bring it up here in a second. Yeah. That's the, the versicolor is the turkey tail.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Anything else you wanted to highlight on the, on this medicinal mushroom side?
Jeff Chilton: No, not really. I think we've covered a lot of territory here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it. Excellent. Now, let's talk about some of the psychedelics, by the way. I know you've kind of gotten to that. You've gotten the license, taking you a couple years to get the license.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now, you're growing that. Talk a little bit more about that process. How is it, is it different than your typical medicinal mushroom process? Same with the extracts. And then, what are the benefits of that?
Jeff Chilton: Well, well, look, you know, one of the things about, about, um, psilocybin mushrooms you've got many different species within one particular species of psilocybin mushroom, you can have that particular species grow harvested from different locations geographically.
Jeff Chilton: Now, the issue becomes each one of those geographical separated mushrooms, we would call a strain. So you have, let's say, Psilocybe cubensis, and then you have a strain from Psilocybe the Gulf Coast of Florida. You have a strain from Mexico. Each one of those will have a different profile of the active compound.
Jeff Chilton: So when you have that, how do you dose somebody? You can say, okay, yeah, we're going to give them two grams of this particular mushroom. Guess what? Two grams from these different varieties or strains It's going to have different amounts of the active compounds in there. And you know, the interesting thing about that, Justin, is that there's research on lion's mane, where they took 20 different lion's mane strains or cultivars, but most of these were wild lion's mane.
Jeff Chilton: And they measured them all for these active compounds. It went from one to 10%. Now think about that for a minute. So that, that means that the lion's mane, even that's being cultivated, depending on the particular strain, we'll have more or less of the active compounds. And that's one of the things we have to focus on especially for our functional mushrooms is making sure that our cultivar, and the one thing about cultivation that's so important is it's very much standardized.
Jeff Chilton: And so any herbal product you get, I mean, whatever herb it is, depending on where it's grown and the conditions and the particular let's just say cultivar of it. If it's being cultivated, it can vary a lot. And that's, that's why it's so important to be able to measure and to be able to do analysis of these.
Jeff Chilton: So in our, Psilocybin project and again, it took us a year and a half to get our license so we are licensed to possess a controlled substance and what we're doing is we cultivate these different species. If you have these things in their wild, the amount of the active compounds in there vary significantly.
Jeff Chilton: If, if, if a researcher is doing research with a Psilocybin mushroom that comes from one place and he does that research and oh, yeah I've got some great data on it. You've got data on that one particular mushroom from that one location Not you can't generalize from that So this is one of the issues that's going on in terms of the psilocybin mushroom world And even if you're gonna take Psilocybin unless somebody says, oh, yeah, I took two grams and I had a really strong Experience unless somebody does that if you're just buying it from somewhere and it's okay and then you go Oh, yeah, the normal dose is two grams.
Jeff Chilton: You take two grams. Oh, I didn't feel anything. Well, that's possible or oh my god it was just a Full on full blown, what they call hero dose and I had this experience where I just had to lay down and close my eyes and you know I laid there for the next four hours So so the you know, that's what's so important what we're doing is we're not dealing with the main psilocybin mushroom that everybody works with, which is psilocybin cubensis.
Jeff Chilton: We're looking at other major species, a lot of which, for example, in Mexico, they've been using down there in their shamanic healing practices. They've been using these species down there for hundreds, thousands of years. And then we're wanting to build a profile of those and we do it by gathering these different strains from Around the world and then we grow them out we analyze them and then we come up with a cultivar That is stable and can produce a stable Mushroom of that species now at that point in time a researcher can come to us and say hey I'm really interested in doing research on this species Okay, we can say okay great.
Jeff Chilton: We've got it here Here's some material of it and here is the analytical profile of this species God Justin nothing Annoys me more than reading research on functional mushrooms and you look at okay. What were you using? Oh, yeah, we used we did a ganoderma or reishi extract here and and you're like that tells me nothing at all because Like I was mentioning, the Reishi mushroom can have 1 10 percent triterpenoids.
Jeff Chilton: That can have a major effect on the outcome of what they're doing. Dr.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Justin Marchegiani Totally. That makes sense. Now, I wanna just back up a little bit. It's the AHCC. The active hexo. Evan Brand Yeah. Dr. Justin Marchegiani it's the active hexo's correlated compound. I think that comes from a shiitake extract.
Jeff Chilton: It does. And then it's a process. It comes from a shiitake. What they do is they grow out the shiitake mycelium on, sometimes it's on sugarcane bagasse or something like this. Then they grow it out to a certain point. Then they'll extract it and they'll maybe put it through a couple of extractions before they come up with the final product.
Jeff Chilton: So that's what I call a process driven product. I mean, you can almost look at it like, okay, if I grow a mushroom out of a certain type of substrate and then I give it certain conditions, so it's going to grow in a certain manner. That's kind of how those products work. It's the process itself. It's not just shiitake mushroom.
Jeff Chilton: It's not just shiitake mycelium. No, it's, it's taking it through a number of steps like PSK, like PSP to, to come up with the final product.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the steps are, is it going through an extract and they're doing it multiple times? It
Jeff Chilton: is absolutely going through an extraction process. And, you know, look, They have a process and they don't normally reveal it.
Jeff Chilton: They will, they will just say, Oh, in kind of general terms, how it's made, but they have a process for that. And that's why, again, it's a process driven product, much like PSK or PSP, which is a turkey tail product that was manufactured in China.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani That makes sense. Now, also that's good for HPV.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, the human papilloma Oh,
Jeff Chilton: okay. Interesting. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, there's a lot
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: of good data on that. So, you know, there's a lot of good things that you can do to bump up your immune system using medicinal mushrooms. So, that's Dr. David Jockers Well, and shiitake,
Jeff Chilton: shiitake is a great mushroom. And, and, and, by the way, if you're gonna eat any one mushroom, eat shiitake.
Jeff Chilton: Fabulous. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Love it. That's excellent. And you can get the same benefit just by eating the mushrooms. They don't have to be in an extract per se.
Jeff Chilton: Well, you know what? You can get the same benefits. And look, when you're eating, you probably need more though, right? Well, when you're eating a mushroom, you're not just going to eat two dried grams or something because that would be like, you know, one shiitake mushroom might, a fresh mushroom might weigh 10 to 20 grams, right?
Jeff Chilton: And that's that's not very much when you're eating, you know, I would throw a hundred grams into a Fry pan. Yeah, it's
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: only a little over three ounces. Not a lot.
Jeff Chilton: Yeah Yeah, so really that's what you you want to do when you're eating mushrooms. You're eating more and more because you're not digesting them They're not pre digested.
Jeff Chilton: You're having to digest them and they're a little bit difficult So that's where the supplements sort of come in but eating mushrooms. You're gonna get benefits. Absolutely
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's great. Now talk about, talk a little bit more about the benefits of psychedelic mushrooms. How are you dosing them? Now you talked about kind of the hero's dose earlier, and what are some of the big benefits that you see out of the gate, whether it's processing trauma or enlightenment, creativity, anything that you see specifically, maybe your own personal experience?
Jeff Chilton: Well, look I was growing them back in the seventies. So, you know, we definitely have a lot of experience with them as well as being in Mexico and eating them down in Mexico and the late sixties, early seventies. And that was kind of the period, right? Where psilocybin mushrooms or LSD or those kinds of things were available.
Jeff Chilton: And we use them. I think ultimately what's happening with the psychoactives and I think probably the most positive thing is they seem to work. very well for addiction. People seem to be able to break their addiction with one or two major experiences with psilocybin. I think that is, you know, can you imagine you've got people that just can't Get away from their addiction no matter what they try.
Jeff Chilton: It's a very very difficult So so I think that's one of the major places where this is going to have a a strong effect The other thing they're talking about too is they're talking about a depression so certain mental health issues So I think that will be, and that's kind of, look, that's the focus right now, they're looking at it medically, that's the focus, but personally I think there's also, you know, there's nothing wrong with using these recreationally.
Jeff Chilton: If you do it properly and know what you're doing and not do it, you know without thinking And the other part of the experience. Have you ever had psilocybin mushrooms? I'm not okay Well, look, one of the things that you also experience is is ecstasy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hmm.
Jeff Chilton: I Mean look I'm serious. It's ecstasy. Like you've never experienced it before, you know, maybe, maybe a hundred times the, the most, the highest experience you've ever had.
Jeff Chilton: And that ecstasy, that ecstasy, look, that ecstasy is something that I think is tremendously healing because every cell in your body. Is in an ecstatic state that has to be very powerful healing modality. So that's something that you can experience on it. You, you obviously want to be kind of laying down and enjoying it.
Jeff Chilton: And, and Relaxed. So it's really important, but that's the other side of it. Most people don't talk about that so much because they're, you know, look, our society is based around, as you know medical Oh, it's gotta be something we can use in, in medicine somewhere. So, and you know, the thing I got a disease or
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: it's more, we're not going to patent it and it's, Oh yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You know, and
Jeff Chilton: that's the thing I'm, I'm. A little bit uncertain about this going on out there is there's just kind of this rush to monetize the whole thing You're seeing these these places arc are all of a sudden coming up out of nowhere that oh, yeah, we're going to give This you can pay us thousands of dollars and you can come to our retreat We'll give you a session or two.
Jeff Chilton: We've got people there that can help you through it You, you better be careful with something like that because who, who actually, this is one of the things that in Oregon, they, they've sort of doing it now and okay, we're going to license people to be able to facilitate. What does that take? Oh, maybe you have to take a year long course.
Jeff Chilton: Well, I don't know. It's that at the same time I'm going, you know, I don't want this to turn into psychiatry either because that's where it's going as well. psychiatry or some kind of psychologists and things like that. So I don't know, this is, this is going into the classic medical model in North America.
Jeff Chilton: There may be some positivity out of there, maybe not. It's just, it's going to be taken over ultimately by the pharma industry. They're going to want to take these things. There's, there's some talk about it, believe it or not, where they want to take the psychoactive, you know, Out of these things, just like, you know, how they want to take the, the psychoactive side of cannabis out, right?
Jeff Chilton: So you could have this you know, and CBD, I guess it's sort of like that, but it's like, you want to take the psychoactive out of it. That's why it has the benefits. It's the psychoactive end of it. It has the benefits, but you want to take it out of there and have create some other molecule that's That gives you a similar experience.
Jeff Chilton: It's just really unfortunate that that's the way the society is organized when it comes to the whole medical area.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh no, I totally, totally get that. That makes sense. Now, how does someone procure high quality mushrooms like this. And then what's the legality around? I know you're up in Canada. How does that work from a legal standpoint?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then talk about dosing. I know people talk about micro dosing, really small doses, maybe in a tincture, and then being able to, to kind of titrate up slowly with, with a liquid increment versus, you know, eating a piece. What's the best way to dose? What's a good starting dose and then let's talk about the legality and procuring.
Jeff Chilton: Well, you know, look, first of all with my license and I'm not selling it to anybody, if I, if I sell it, it has to be to somebody else that has a license, it's a, it's a controlled substance and we're not, we're not, We're not looking at it as a business, so to speak.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So who are the people that have the licenses and are they selling it to the mainstream public?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Does it require a prescription? How does that look like? Well,
Jeff Chilton: nobody, nobody with a license is selling it to the public. What you can do is you can sell it to a practitioner if the practitioner has a license because he can then utilize it with his patients. So there are some companies out there that are, that are doing that.
Jeff Chilton: We, we are not part of that. The funny thing is, is that in Vancouver, British Columbia, there's stores that will sell it right there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, wow. So you don't have to be a psychiatrist or a psychologist to get that license. Just regular run of the mill commercial. No, no, no. They're
Jeff Chilton: doing it. They're doing it illegally, but they're, they're, it's a store.
Jeff Chilton: It's a store. Look, there are states like Oregon where they have legalized it to some degree. And if you get the license from them to sell it or to, to use it in a practice, okay, Oregon sort of there, I was just at a psychedelic conference, psychedelic science conference in Denver, Colorado, they've legalized mushroom there and at this conference, they had a trade show.
Jeff Chilton: There were people, you know, who had booze and they, Had bags with substrate and these psych, these still Simon mushrooms growing out of the bags. You could buy one of those right there and take it home with you. Wow. So, so there are areas, but I think Oakland has something like that going on too. So, you know, but, but look, it's going to be a slow process.
Jeff Chilton: And it's not, you know, there are certain states that are leading the way much like What happened with cannabis is
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: there a way to get legally here in the States? Can you see a practitioner of some sport some sort who would be the best way to get it legally?
Jeff Chilton: Well, you know what? Yeah, you'd have to go through a practitioner in but but maybe not maybe in Oregon I don't know what maybe in in Denver, maybe you can just buy it from somebody depends on the
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: States So it's really
Jeff Chilton: depends on the state.
Jeff Chilton: It is otherwise Illegal in the U. S. It's illegal in Canada. But you know, look there's always people pushing The limit and that's, that's how things change. Dr. Justin
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Marchegiani Okay. And then talk about the dosing. So do you recommend starting off with kind of a micro dose and a tincture form and then kind of going up?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How do you recommend starting that? If someone hypothetically were to do it, let's say based on your experience that you've done specifically, I know you're not talking about treating people or this is just kind of your experience.
Jeff Chilton: I do not treat people or make any claims. Correct. But, but look there's, there's a whole thing about microdosing going on out there where people are taking very small amounts of it and like maybe a hundred milligrams of mushroom powder.
Jeff Chilton: That's way below threshold. The idea is that if you take that on a regular basis, that somehow it will help with what's considered to be neurogenesis, where it will help to, to stimulate regeneration of nerve cells and so on and, and maybe create some ongoing positive effects for you in your life, whether it does or not nobody really knows right now.
Jeff Chilton: Any studies that they've done are nothing more than sending out questionnaires to people and it doesn't have anything to do with, you know a standardized dose that people are getting or where they're getting it. It's just their, their experiences. And so some people say, Oh yeah, they're getting benefits.
Jeff Chilton: Other people say, no, I don't really feel much of anything in terms of other dosing, like to get more of the actual experience, you're probably going to have to take. At least a gram of dried psilocybe cubensis, which is the standard mushroom that's out there in commerce. There's, you know, you can get it anywhere if you know the right people.
Jeff Chilton: I mean, it's being, there there's thousands of tons of that mushroom being produced in the world today. I mean, it's everywhere. So, so if you, if you really want to get it, you can probably find it and, you know, really better off talking to friends who know it. And then, then, you know, it's like, Like I was saying, you never know exactly how strong it is unless somebody that, you know, says, Hey, I took it.
Jeff Chilton: And this is how much was really strong or not strong or something. But you'd be taking one gram of dried mushroom would be kind of like the minimum that you would probably take to have some type of effect from it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, cool. And this is going out worldwide. So every. different area, different states, different regions, territories are going to have different laws.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So follow your laws. I don't want to tell anyone to break the law. We're just trying to inform and educate the public here. Anything else, Jeff, you want to leave the listeners with in regards to information on, on the psychedelic mushroom portion of the show?
Jeff Chilton: Well, well, you know, I guess I would say that I think that The end of prohibition if that's what's happening is very important and it's a very positive step just like the end of Cannabis prohibition cannabis is now legal in Canada it's legal in certain states, of the united states I mean look I used to smoke cannabis years ago, especially in the 60s 70s and 80s.
Jeff Chilton: I used to smoke it all the time it was prohibited You I was breaking the law now that it's legal. I haven't smoked for quite a while So it's kind of like that doesn't help me a whole lot All right, but i'm happy that prohibition is over because it's destroyed a lot of lives It sent a lot of people to jail.
Jeff Chilton: It never should have been prohibited in the first place. It was just a backlash against the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s the fact that now they're loosening up the regulations around psilocybin mushrooms. I think that's a wonderful thing. I hope it carries forward. What we really need is just education, education on how to use these things.
Jeff Chilton: And, and we'll get that a lot of people out there. Are speaking about it and they're talking about it and, and they're talking about set and setting, which are very important when you take these things and you know, you have to treat them with respect. That's, that's the key. Just, just respect them and, and ultimately you can have a positive experience with them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, Jeff, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I mean, I love the fact that you're on the cutting edge bringing medicinal mushrooms and their benefits to the forefront. They've been around forever, but people in the functional medicine, natural medicine field. I've had these in their toolbox for a while.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So I love the general public's getting onto it. Just your experience with the lion's mane, the amount that you used to sell versus how much you sell. It's crazy. And then, you know, there's, I think there's some really interesting benefits with some of these psychedelic mushrooms, especially with addictions.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And especially with like processing various trauma. So I think there's some really good tools that these things could hold, you know, especially if you have the right practitioner and the right training and you're customizing these doses to that person and you have good observation. I think there's some good healing that these things can tap into.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anything else you want to leave the listener with?
Jeff Chilton: I guess the only other thing I'd say is look, eat mushrooms, put mushrooms into your diet. They're really the forgotten food and the missing dietary link. Mushrooms are great food. People who eat a lot of mushrooms live longer. So, put mushrooms into
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: your diet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Great. Well, I'll leave Jeff's sites in the description here. Namex, N A M M E X dot com. And then we have realmushrooms. com. We'll put the links in the description. So, if you're driving or working out, feel free to click on those later. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Jeff Wolfson Thanks a
Jeff Chilton: lot for having me. I really had a great talking to you as always. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Thanks so much, Jeff. You take care. Dr. Jeff Wolfson You too. See ya.
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