We’ve been hearing (and talking) more and more about mushrooms lately, as they related to our beauty, health and well-being. To learn more, we chatted with the team at MoodScience, which is striving to make one particularly potent mushroom (that has been used for centuries to tackle stress and fatigue) easily accessible to consumers. —Noa Nichol
What are medicinal mushrooms, and why all the hype around them now?
Medicinal superfood mushrooms like cordyceps, lion’s mane, and reishi have been used for thousands of years in Eastern traditional medicine. Over the last few years, they have gained popularity in the Western world, making their way to tinctures, coffee mixes, capsules, powders, as superfoods nutritional supplements. Medicinal mushrooms are often also referred to as adaptogenic mushrooms. Adaptogens increase your body’s resistance to stress, help promote normal functioning during times of stress, and can help protect against stress-related damage. They essentially help your body adapt physically, biologically, and chemically to stress, hence the name. It’s important to note that “medicinal” and “adaptogenic” aren’t the same thing. Many mushrooms have medicinal effects, i.e. anti-inflammatory and immune-stimulating properties. The term adaptogenic, however, refers specifically to how a substance may affect your body’s response to stress. In the past couple years, headlines have revolved around health. There’s been a cultural shift in the way we think about health… More and more people seek to boost their mood and stabilize their day-to-day wellbeing, instead of tolerating malaise or waiting to fall seriously ill. Supplementation can help with this journey, and natural solutions like medicinal mushrooms seem more and more enticing. We believe that Mother Nature has always known best. Our products were made with the best ingredients she has to offer and have been scientifically enhanced and refined to deliver state-of-the-art solutions for today’s wellness challenges. Some popular medicinal adaptogenic mushrooms, include:
- Cordyceps can help your body utilize oxygen more efficiently and enhance blood flow. It is known to help boost energy, increase stamina and athletic performance, boost libido, and assist in muscle recovery.
- Lion’s mane can help you get rid of a bad case of brain fog. This mushroom is packed with antioxidants and can help strengthen your immune system while supporting enhanced cognition, memory, and concentration.
- Reishi is celebrated for its calming properties — all thanks to a compound called triterpene, which reishi has a fair share of. Triterpene is known to help alleviate anxiety and encourage higher quality sleep and can also sharpen focus.
- Turkey tail contains a compound called polysaccharide-K (PSK), known to be effective at stimulating your immune system. PSK is so effective that it’s an approved anticancer prescription drug in Japan. Turkey tail has been shown to help improve immune health thanks to its impressive antioxidant properties.
- Chaga is an antioxidant powerhouse. It is known to help combat oxidative stress (linked to skin aging) and has been found to lower low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the “bad” cholesterol.
When and why was MoodScience launched? What niche was/is it aiming to fill?
MoodScience focuses on the healing compounds from mushrooms and has partnered with Strange Love Cafe to release consumer-ready products. This partnership is about taking something novel (the vast world of medicinal mushrooms) and combining it with something familiar and accessible to create a healing ritual (tinctures, coffee, wellness gummies, and supplements). Strange Love (powered by MoodScience) already has four products available in Canada and the U.S. Our line of wellness tinctures and gummies address today’s wellness needs: better focus, increased energy, better sleep, and stress reduction.
Seems like everyone is talking about psychedelic mushrooms and how they can help manage mental health challenges (by the way, how can they do that?).
Often, there is a misconception that when we’re talking about medicinal mushrooms we’re talking about “shrooms”, or “magic mushrooms” like psilocybin. Medicinal mushrooms, however, do not always mean psychedelic mushrooms. Though psychedelic mushrooms are gaining recognition in the psychiatric world for their therapeutic promise for those who are dealing with depression or battling addiction, they only make up a small branch of the medicinal mushroom world. The world of medicinal superfood mushrooms is immense. There are fungi that create penicillin and other antibiotics, culinary mushrooms like shiitake, oyster, maitake, and lion’s mane, and thousands of other fungi with properties that can benefit your health. Simply put, there is a world of superfood mushrooms and it’s very different from psychedelic mushrooms. Mushrooms are psychedelic when they contain compounds that are psychoactive, including psilocybin, psilocin, and baeocystin.
Please give us more insight into the one potent mushroom that has been used for centuries to tackle stress and fatigue that very few are talking about or are even aware of, and the new scientific breakthrough from MoodScience that is now making the rarest strain of this mushroom easily accessible to consumers.
There are more than 680 species of the cordyceps mushroom and the two species of cordyceps most widely used and valued are C.sinensis and C.militaris.
- C.sinensis, also known as Caterpillar Fungus, grows naturally in the wild in high altitude mountainous regions of Nepal, India, Bhutan, and Tibet. It has a centuries-long history of being used as top Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) by Emperors.
- C.militaris is the most successful commercially cultivated cordyceps species in an artificial environment, but does not offer the powerful healing and medicinal benefits of C.sinensis.
- Although C.sinensis may be the most famous and expensive fungus (fetching anywhere between USD $20,000 and $50,000 per kilogram), it is extremely rare and could not be easily grown, until now.
MoodScience recently launched Cordycell, a proprietary 98 per cent pure full-spectrum cordyceps sinensis. Discovered by Penn State in the 1950’s, this strain of C. sinensis has been DNA verified to be from the same Himalayan region as the highly prized wild cordyceps that only grow in harsh high altitude conditions. This groundbreaking rare mushroom is being grown in our facility in the U.S. for the first time and is free of grain fillers, heavy metals, or toxins. The mushroom is grown in a vat with the ideal growing conditions, using a nutrient rich liquid growing medium that can be drained to separate the delicate and highly potent molecular mushroom. This way, MoodScience can create ideal conditions for this energy enhancing and stress balancing natural mushroom to grow. The growing method allows for two outcomes:
- It makes the impressive wellness benefits of a rare mushroom far more easily accessible to consumers.
- Our third-party lab analysis of Cordycell shows that it is 15 times more potent and advanced than leading brands available right now.
Identified as Himalayan Gold, cordyceps sinensis is often cultivated in the plateaus of the Himalayas. There are more than 1,000 published studies with clinical evidence supporting cordyceps sinensis positive effects on: cognitive function, mood, and mental health; immune health; and athletic performance. As populations battle increased anxiety, mood, and mental health challenges, people are looking for natural solutions. A non-hallucinogenic medicinal mushroom compound like Cordycell offers a particularly seductive notion, because it allows for natural medicines to be self-administered. This gives Cordycell a massive leg up on the much-discussed psilocybin. If you undergo a psilocybin therapy session, you have to go to the doctor to prepare yourself for it, then be in the medical setting for at least eight hours, and then go back for some follow-up. Cordycell has been formulated so that those seeking a natural solution for stress, anxiety, and mental wellbeing can easily add it to their wellness regimen.
What are the benefits of Cordycell? Who is it for, how does it work?
Cordycell is for anyone looking to:
- Increase energy naturally
- Boost cognitive function
- Support their immune health
- Increase their overall vitality
- Balance stress
- Boost their mood
What makes Cordycell truly unique is that it is genetically more potent than anything on the market and our GMP cultivation method makes it safe and concentrated with therapeutic compounds. These two differentiating factors allow for us to formulate clinically dosed products that help consumers with focus, energy, better sleep, and supporting stress. The backbone of the development work is supported with an $8 million dollar analytical lab that is purpose-built to look for major and minor therapeutic compounds in natural products like mushrooms. In the case of Cordycell, genetic work had to be done to compare many cordyceps strains—there are thousands of them, but not all of them are able to produce high levels of therapeutic compounds. The one that ended up winning during our research was a strain discovered by Penn State that has DNA verified lineage with the highly prized cordyceps sinensis with Himalayan origins. This is now exclusive to the development of MoodScience’s Cordycell. We believe consumers care most about the effectiveness of products and the sustainability practice of the companies they support. Our focus has been to lead with science to validate the products we formulate with Cordycell to allow someone to feel more focused, energized, or help with sleep and stress support.
Why is the availability of this type of treatment (for mental health and otherwise) particularly important now?
In 2015, a chemist named Tu Youyou won the Nobel Peace Prize in Physiology or Medicine. After screening over 200,000 compounds and hitting a wall; she turned to ancient Chinese medical textbooks from 400 AD and found a traditional cure for malaria, ultimately extracting a compound, artemisinin, that has saved millions of lives. When she isolated the ingredient she believed would work, she volunteered to be the first human subject. It took two decades after its discovery, but finally the WHO recommended artemisinin combination therapy as the first line of defense against malaria. The Lasker Foundation, which awarded Tu its Clinical Medical Research Award in 2011, called the discovery of artemisinin “arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century.” We believe in the intelligence of Mother Nature and this story is proof that natural health products can be extremely effective and life changing. Over the past decade, more and more natural, holistic, integrative, and eastern practices of medicine have popularized. To make these remedies more approachable to a western audience, it takes the right scientific research to ensure the most potent compounds. It takes care and precision when it comes to manufacturing clean products that contain zero fillers and are free of any harmful ingredients. Scientifically verified natural health products like Cordycell are important because it not only provides consumers with a trusted solution to help manage wellness challenges, it also raises the bar in the loosely regulated health food industry in North America. We are thinking about our health differently and about how we want our bodies to move through this world as a result of the pandemic. Whereas a majority of people were managing wellness reactively, we are now looking to proactively feel better, move better, think better, sleep better, etc. Many of us are dealing with increased feelings of anxiety, stress, and poor sleep as a result of living through chaotic times and many of us are looking for natural solutions to increase overall health and vitality.
Finally, can you tell us about any personal experiences you’ve had with this or with these types of treatments?
David Tran, co-founder, MoodScience: Covid was an extremely challenging time, my sleepless nights turned into days missing meals and it spiraled my body out of control with stress and inflammation. Then I met Dr. James Yoon, who is now the naturopathic doctor in residence at Strange Love. He provided me with some tools and strategies to manage my stress and bring my body back into balance. Each time you are stressed, your body first puts you on alert and then, shortly after, releases cortisol as a sort of healing response (it’s an anti-inflammatory). But if this happens too often, your cortisol system breaks down. Thus, too much stress can lead to inflammation and pain. The way to fix my body was to restart its healing engine and he suggested using adaptogenic herbs and mushrooms to modulate my stress, energy, and immunity. I started to ask questions around where and how mushrooms were grown, how to select them for their healing potential and learned about how challenged the industry was – most of the mushrooms being supplied are cultivated for kilogram yield—not for potency. So we decided we should do something to advance the standards.
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