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    Shiitake: The Healing Mushroom
    Shiitake: The Healing Mushroom
    Shiitake: The Healing Mushroom
    Ebook174 pages1 hour

    Shiitake: The Healing Mushroom

    By Kenneth Jones

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    About this ebook

    The shiitake is one of the most highly prized foods in Oriental cuisine, lending its rich, caramel-like flavor to seasonings, sauces, soups, even carbonated drinks and candies. Yet few aficionados of this gourmet delicacy are aware of its high nutritional value or of its important role in traditional Chinese medicine and in the modern search for botanical remedies. Traditionally classified as a food that activates the blood, shiitake has been used as a folk treatment for colds, measles, and bronchial inflammations. Shiitake: The Healing Mushroom takes the reader on a lively tour of the healing properties of one of the world's most delicious foods.

    In the past few years, its growing popularity in the West has made shiitake, after the common table mushroom, the most-cultivated mushroom worldwide. Recent studies indicate its usefulness in lowering blood cholesterol levels and preventing heart disease. Research suggests that shiitake is valuable in immunotherapy, bolstering the immune system and increasing the body's ability to ward off cancerous tumors, viral infections, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

    The N.I.H. is testing shiitake in their AIDS research program.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInner Traditions/Bear & Company
    Release dateNov 1, 1994
    ISBN9781620551868
    Shiitake: The Healing Mushroom
    Author

    Kenneth Jones

    Kenneth Jones is a medical writer specializing in medicinal plants. He has served as a consultant to herbal product manufacturers for product development, and has been interviewed on radio and in several health publications. He lives near Vancouver, B.C.

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      Book preview

      Shiitake - Kenneth Jones

      Shiitake

      The Healing Mushroom

      KENNETH JONES

      Contents

      PREFACE

      1     A FOOD FROM THE FOREST

      Nutritional Value

      Cultivation

      Shiitake Recipes

      2     SHIITAKE IN FOLK MEDICINE

      The Mushroom and the Flu

      Diabetes and Liver Ailments

      Safety

      Preparation

      3     SHIITAKE AND CHOLESTEROL

      The Secret of Sludge

      Mushrooms and the Heart

      Studies in Japan

      Clinical Research

      4     CANCER RESEARCH

      Lentinan

      Lentinan in Action

      Therapies on the Horizon

      5     CANCER PREVENTION

      TCA: A Nitrite Scavenger

      Vitamin D

      Food for the Immune System

      Medicinal Mycelium

      Proof in People

      6     WARRING WITH VIRUSES

      HIV Meets the Mycelium

      Hepatitis and Herpes

      7     CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME

      The Stress of CFS

      Suspects in the Syndrome

      Treatments for CFS

      Schizophyllan

      ENDNOTES

      ALSO BY KENNETH JONES

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      ABOUT INNER TRADITIONS

      COPYRIGHT

      Preface

      I was five years into a jungle of studies on South American herbs and the immune system when the name Lentinus edodes, the Latin handle for a mushroom called shiitake (she-tah-key), began raising its head. The literature on botanical sources of immunostimulants was heavily infected with this fungus, and I didn’t even know what it was. When finally I looked, it turned out to be a mushroom and an edible one at that. I was delighted to find that it had a flavor renowned all over the world, but most North Americans were in the dark about it. Now ten years later, and with the enormous demand for ethnic foods, the situation has changed. Articles on the mushroom have appeared in all the major health magazines, and the name shiitake is heard everywhere from sitcoms to the daily news.

      When I began to see the wealth of research that had already been done on shiitake in Japan, more than for many medicinal plants, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This great-tasting mushroom had shown considerable pharmacologic activity. Anyone who will take the time to look will see that shiitake demonstrates a fertile ground for the continual research of medicinal mushrooms worldwide. In fact, a surprising number of mushrooms used in folk medicine have demonstrated significant activity against disease. But once again, we Westerners have been the last ones to learn.

      Bob Harris

      Completely overrun with shiitake mycelium, a sawdust log brings forth a harvest of fruit-bodies.

      ONE

      A Food from the Forest

      In the Oriental marketplace, whether here or across the Pacific, the shiitake mushroom is one of the most cherished of foods. In Japan, where for centuries the best products were reserved for royalty, shiitake has been called the king or monarch of the mushrooms, thereby denoting a food of superior taste and quality. Shiitake is a Japanese name deriving from take, mushroom, and shii, a kind of chestnut tree (Castanopsis cuspidata) that the mushroom was commonly found growing on in Japan.¹ As a forest mushroom, shiitake will grow on many kinds of trees, including alder, chestnut, maple, oak, walnut, and ebony.² When fresh, it has the coloration of a young fawn, complete with those lighter-colored spots. When dried, the cap becomes cracked, taking on the appearance of old leather.

      The legacy of shiitake as a highly regarded food plant was furthered by the British botanist Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803–1889). He made certain that people would eventually notice its delights when he named it Lentinus edodes, the Latin edodes meaning edible.³ Recently, shiitake’s Latin name was changed to Lentinula edodes (Berkeley) Pegler, but that did nothing to affect its appeal. Next to the common table mushroom (Agaricus bisporus), shiitake is the most popular and most cultivated of all exotic mushrooms worldwide.⁴ Fresh or dried, in seasonings, sauces, soup mixes, noodle stocks, carbonated health drinks, food supplements, and candies, shiitake has about as many uses in the Oriental diet as tomatoes have in the West. One Japanese product uses the mushroom to produce a potassium-rich yogurt drink.⁵ In North America, shiitake’s versatility and caramel-like flavor have not gone unnoticed: shiitake dishes are turning up in premier restaurants and fine cuisine magazines.⁶ But flavor is not the only reason this mushroom has come to be praised.

      NUTRITIONAL VALUE

      Shiitake’s food value alone makes the mushroom a welcomed contribution to our increasingly diet-conscious world. Shiitake is a good source of protein, potassium, and, including the stems, zinc, an important element for immune competence. It is also a rich source of complex carbohydrates called polysaccharides and contains more than one that is known to potentiate the immune system, a subject we will take up in later chapters.

      If all these factors seem a lot for one mushroom, that is not surprising; mushrooms are a neglected source of human nutrition. The director of the Research Centre for Food Protein at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Professor S. T. Chang, states, When one considers that they can be produced on waste materials—converting products of little or no market value into food for an over-populated world—then there is no doubt that mushrooms represent one of the world’s greatest untapped resources of nutritious and palatable food for the future.⁷

      How many know, for instance, that the proteins in mushrooms hold all the essential amino acids needed in our diet? Or that they contain generous amounts of leucine and lysine, essential amino acids found wanting in the majority of our cereals? Mushrooms are higher in essential amino acids than soybeans, kidney beans, peanuts, or corn. They place almost as high as milk.⁸ Amino acids make up close to 14 percent of the dry shiitake mushroom,⁹ and essential amino acids make up more than 40 percent of the amino acid content of shiitake’s protein.¹⁰ A study of Japanese adult males who ate 40 grams of the mushroom per day as part of a prescribed diet found a very high digestibility (85.5 ± 23.8 percent) of shiitake’s protein.¹¹ Apart from shiitake, fresh mushrooms generally have about double the protein of vegetables and are low in calories. They are good sources of vitamins B1 (thiamine) and B2 (riboflavin), niacin, iron, and phosphorus. And when it comes to nucleic acids, the average in mushrooms (7.1 percent) is more than cereals (1.1–4 percent) or meats (2.2–5.7 percent).¹²

      Bob Harris

      Japanese indoor culture of shiitake with a floor of logs ready to fruit.

      Ergosterol, a solid plant alcohol, is found in considerable quantities in dried shiitake.¹³ If the mushroom receives adequate sunlight or irradiation with ultraviolet light, the ergosterol is convertible to vitamin D. The vitamin D in shiitake increased 2.5 times after only three hours of exposure to sunlight. In fact, shiitake is already higher in vitamin D than most foods. Some samples contain 56 international units (IU) per mushroom.¹⁴ If shiitake is irradiated with sunlight, then as few as four or five dried mushrooms would equal the U.S. daily recommended allowance of 400 IU.¹⁵ This is especially pertinent to vegetarians, since a number of studies have found them to be deficient in vitamin D.¹⁶

      CULTIVATION

      In China, shiitake is called hsiang ku, which means fragrant mushroom, a fitting name in light of its caramel-like odor. In North America, shiitake, Chinese black mushroom, and Chinese forest mushroom are the names most commonly used. In the forests of China and Japan, shiitake still grows in the wild. With a name like forest mushrooms, some people expect that they can be gathered only in the woods. But, in fact, systems of cultivation were known in China as far back as the twelfth century,¹⁷ and now reliable growing methods are available to anyone who wishes to grow them at home or commercially.¹⁸

      Shiitake cultivation employs the enriched sawdust of hardwoods or the more traditional slower method of inoculating hardwood logs. Until this century, inoculation methods were largely reliant on luck. Basically, they consisted of smearing shiitake into cuts made in logs. As a student of agriculture at Kyoto University during the 1940s, Kisaku Mori witnessed the economic ruin of shiitake farmers who commonly called upon the help of Buddhist priests to make prayers, literally calling the mushrooms to grow. One day in Kyushu, he encountered a group of farmers who were faced with abandoning their village if the prayers of the priest failed. Moved by their plight, he determined to develop a reliable growing method,¹⁹ and he did.

      TABLE 1

      NUTRITIONAL FACTORS

      Wood plugs colonized with shiitake mycelium—a stringy white vegetative matter that develops to become cap and stem—are fitted into holes drilled in the logs. The holes are then covered with wax, and the logs are hammered or vibrated from time to time to stimulate mycelial growth,²⁹, ³⁰ a practice known since at least the fourteenth century, when logs were beaten with a club to wake up the mushroom.³¹ Under the right conditions of moisture and temperature, the mushrooms crop up from the mycelium, producing their stems and caps. After one to two years, the logs, now permeated with the mycelium, will send forth the harvest each year in the fall and spring for another three and sometimes five years.³² Another method uses synthetic logs made of sawdust, millet, and wheat bran. They can yield four times the harvest of natural logs in a tenth of the time.³³

      As food supplements, various shiitake products are now widely available in health food stores.

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