Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner, biochemist, author and mushroom expert Martin Powell discusses all things mushrooms, from how extracts are produced, to the secondary metabolites of various species, to how mushrooms produce vitamin D and why you should always cook your mushrooms. Do different parts of the mushroom have different components? What secondary metabolites do we need to be interested in? Andrew: This is FX Medicine. I'm Andrew Whitfield-Cook. Joining us on the line today, all the way from the UK, is Martin Powell. He's a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, a biochemist, and the author of Medicinal Mushrooms: The Essential Guide and Medicinal Mushrooms: A Clinical Guide. He was a lecturer at the University of Westminster for 13 years, during which time he helped set up the Master of Science programme in Chinese Herbal Medicine. And has also taught in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Today, as well as helping patients, writing, and lecturing, he works as a consultant to leading companies in the natural products industry, with growers and manufacturers, to improve the quality of raw materials in the supply chain, and with leading integrative health clinics on improved treatments for cancer and other chronic health conditions.

I warmly welcome you to FX Medicine. How are you, Martin? Martin: Hi there, Andrew. Yes, I'm good, thank you. If you have any thoughts concerning where by and how to use manufacturer of shiitake mushroom extract powder as Raw Material for food, you can call us at the webpage. Yeah, all well. A little bit cold over here, but we're coping. Andrew: Yeah. Now, you've got a Bachelor of Science with honours in biochem. So it's a bit of a jump from biochemistry to mycology. Tell us a little bit about your history, and what first got you interested in mycology and medicinal mushrooms? Martin: Well, mushrooms have been something which has really sought me out, if you like, in my life. I suddenly wake up one morning and decided that this is what I wanted to specialise in or focus in. Almost quite the opposite, but like a lot of people growing up in the UK and in other English-speaking countries, we tend to have an innate mycophobia. We have an innate wariness of mushrooms. Martin: Yeah. Because we didn't nearly think about them as something which could be beneficial.

We were much more aware and conscious of the potential toxic nature of some of the species. So growing up, I think myself and a lot of people here have an innate wariness, if you like, of mushrooms. So it was actually quite a surprise and revelation for me when I started studying Chinese medicine. And of course, in Chinese medicine, mushrooms have been a major component of the materia medica for as long as it's been developing, well over 2,000 years. And if you look at the earliest extant materia medica, Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, that already lists a number of mushroom species and lists most of them in the superior category of herbs. So rather than being toxic, it's those herbs which can safely be consumed for long periods of time and of which it is said that long-term will lighten the body and confer longevity. So it's a radically different approach, a radically different attitude, if you like, to that which I grew up with.

Martin: That's what really got me started, made me interested. Yeah, it's different. Certainly, particularly in more rural areas, particularly in the farming community, there was an awareness. And if you talked to people of our parent's generation and those who grew up on farms did, in many cases, have an awareness of which mushrooms are good to eat and which weren't. But if you look at the majority of the population, certainly, those in the towns and the cities, there wasn't that same level of awareness. Andrew: Of course. Right. Martin: That these are quite strange and potentially toxic. So, yes, the contrast with the Chinese approach, that actually, these are just only not toxic, in many cases, they're incredibly beneficial for our health and well-being. Andrew: What about the history of medicinal fungi? We know traditional Chinese medicine has used them as medicines. Other cultures use them in more religious or enlightening type rituals.