But now that I have your attention, read on… mushrooms can purify water, consume toxins, destroy agricultural pests, improve your sex life and support the immune system against cancer, bacteria and viral diseases.
The amazing mushroom was the first organism to arrive on earth 1.3 billion years ago, and the whole planet was once covered in them. The largest mushroom fossil ever discovered was in North Africa, Prototaxytes looming 19 metres high. Mushrooms are the longest-lived organism on earth; a single fungus living under the forest in Oregon is 2,200 acres in size and estimated to be 2,000 years old.
Mushrooms don’t need light to grow, in fact most of their lives are spent underground as mycelium, a single cell-wall thick. They only break the surface when they’re ready to reproduce -- and are thought to have about 6,000 sexes. The mind boggles.
The mushroom, which any reasonable person might assume is a plant, was recently reclassified as an animal. There is some evidence that mushrooms are sentient (further complicating the diets of strict Buddhists). If you construct a maze in a Petri dish and place a corn flake at one end and inoculate the other end with mushroom mycelium, the organism will always take the shortest path to feed. Research at the University of Arizona indicates that mushrooms’ neural network allows interspecies communication between mycelium and plants. They also form beneficial relationships with plants, increasing the surface area for the plant to absorb water and nutrients and protecting it against pathogens. Think truffles.
A mushroom’s external stomach actually consumes its environment. And that dictates its mobility –- if a mushroom want to be somewhere else, it has to eat its way over to its destination. Because it can reconfigure its digestive enzymes very quickly, it’s able to adapt its metabolism to whatever potential food it encounters.
South African ethno-botanist Dale Millard takes a deep interest in fungi. “Mushrooms start the chain of life,” he explains. “They can consume rock and break down the structure of minerals, decompose organic materials to debris and build soil. They can also serve as a water filter. In the context of Bali, a bale of rice straw inoculated with oyster mushrooms will break down agricultural chemicals to their molecular components –- that means safe, sustainable management of toxins like DDT can be removed from irrigation water at very little expense.”
Oyster mushrooms are already used to clean up lands contaminated with chemicals, and will grow using petrochemicals as a food source while converting it back to its original form. Oyster mushrooms consume microbes and can reduce the coliform count of water by a factor of 10,000 in 48 hours. They can also sequester lead and other heavy metals and can accumulate cesium and other radioactive elements.
Here’s something that’s stranger than science fiction. Certain mushrooms act as insect-specific parasites. They inoculate plants with their spores and when an insect picks up the spore, it grows into the bug’s nervous system and changes its behaviour before destroying it, sometimes growing right out of the insect’s head. In the United States, certain mushrooms are used to control termites.
But by far the greatest gifts of this bizarre organism are its medical benefits to mankind.
Dale has worked for over 10 years in Brazil and South Africa with HIV/AIDS patients, where plant-based primary health care offers low-tech, affordable solutions. Most disease arises from an impaired immune system. In both developing and developed countries, lifestyle compromises the human immune system on a daily basis. Additives in food, air and water pollution and stress all contribute to poor immunity, which leaves us vulnerable to cancer and other diseases. A variety of mushroom has proven remarkably effective in strengthening the immune system.
“Western medicine waits until you get sick, then gives quite toxic medication to kill the organism -– often killing healthy cells as well,” Dale points out. “It takes a huge amount of money and about 10 years to research a single disease-specific drug, but a virus can mutate in 20 seconds. Most new diseases are drug resistant. In South Africa, there was just one strain of HIV in 1980. Now there are 22 drug-mutated strains in South Africa alone.” So it makes a lot more sense to avoid illness in the first place by enhancing the immune system.
Dale works with Ganoderma lucidum, also known as Reishi, Ling Zhi and the Divine Mushroom of Immortality. This mushroom has been used in traditional Japanese, Chinese and Mayan medicines for centuries to treat cancer and enhance resistance to and recovery from disease. Oh yes, and is anyone out there interested in a harmless extract that is anti-aging while increasing virility in older men and endurance in athletes?
Dale grows the Ganoderma fungus sustainably and organically on coconut logs outside of Ubud, extracting the active ingredients to create a standardized medicine. This extract has been clinically shown to have strong antibiotic and antiviral properties, to be cytotoxic to many cell lines of cancer without harming healthy cells, to reduce toxicity of chemotherapy and other medications and to reduce replication of HIV.
In view of the new diseases like avian flu and swine fever, novel antiviral compounds from fungi could prove effective in preventing epidemics. Unlike many other herbal remedies, Reishi has been very well studied and is not controversial. Having looked at Dale’s research on the prophylactic antiviral properties of Reishi, I’ll be taking a dose of his tincture every day from now on.
“Medicine should be safe, not toxic,” stresses Dale. “It should support the immune system to fight disease. Reishi is non-toxic even in large doses over long periods of time. The most toxic antiretrovirals reduce replication of cells in AIDS patients by 99%. Research done by the University of Glasgow found that harmless mushroom extracts reduced HIV replication by 98%.” Some of strongest antibiotics ever discovered are derived from the Agarikon mushroom discovered in old growth forest in Washington state. It’s being developed as one of most potent antibacterial and antiviral compound known.
Don’t try making mushroom medicine at home, by the way. Some mushrooms in the wild have small blue spots on them which are a potent liver toxin. And many fungi are not as harmless as they appear. As Dale reminds us, “All mushrooms are edible -- but some, only once.”
For Reishi extract or a consultation on other plant medicines, contact Dale at dale. millard@gmail.com. For more information on Reishi, see www.fungiperfecti.com and look under mycomedicinals.
’Dragons in the Bath’, a collection of Ibu Kat’s stories, is now available in paperback from
* Kuta : The Bali Advertiser office
* Seminyak : Ganesha at Biku
* Ubud : Ganesha Books, KAFE, Threads of Life, Eve Body Treatment Centres
* Sanur : Dijon
