[INTERVIEW]
Ronda Nelson: Well, hey, Lee. Welcome back to the podcast. I’m so glad you’re here.
Lee Carroll: Thanks, Ronda. It’s great to be back.
Ronda Nelson: Of course. We go back a long ways, and so I’m always super happy when I get to chat with you, and I always know that when we do get the opportunity to chat, there’s something new on the horizon that we need to be talking about. And of course, it has to do with Real Mushrooms. But I wanted to ask you some questions about the new mushroom product that you have, which is called Real Mycelium. So you are the formulator of that product. Is that correct?
Lee Carroll: Technically, it’s not a formulation. It’s just a single ingredient, so —
Ronda Nelson: Okay. So tell me a little bit about… I mean, I’m gonna be super honest. Like, before, for most of us here in the US anyway, you know, when you were around, we knew you in the MediHerb days and doing lots of traveling and speaking and all the things together. And when you started to get involved in mushrooms, one of the things that you talked about a lot was about the adulterations in the market, that a lot of the mushroom products weren’t quality mushroom products. And one of the things that you talked about extensively was the importance of getting mushroom products that use the fruiting body rather than the mycelium because of the way that it was grown on grains, et cetera. So now here comes this new mycelium product, and when I first heard about it, I was like, “Wait a minute. What? Time out. No, no. What? Why is Real Mushrooms jumping off the track into an adulterated marketplace or adulterated product, and why should I…” Now, what’s happening? So I hope that’s an okay question to ask, but I really would love to know why the deviation. Tell me what happened.
Lee Carroll: That is a genuinely good place to start, and it’s quite a story. But simply, the fungus, which is the organism that we use, if we’re comparing that to a plant, which we’re all familiar with using plants as medicine and plants as food, they’re very different organisms, and they’re quite difficult to wrap your head around, and they’re actually a lot more simple than a plant. So with a fungus, the ones that we use for medicine create a mycelium, and that is the main coordinating center of the organism. And if we’re using a plant analogy, that’s the whole apple tree is the mycelium. And then every now and then when conditions are right, the mycelium produces a fruiting body or a mushroom, and that’s the equivalent of the flower, or the apple from that apple tree. And then the mushroom produces spores, which are kind of analogous to seeds, and then you’ve got this very simple cycle that goes around and around.
So the tradition from which we rely on understanding how mushrooms get used as foods and medicines was always focused on the mushrooms and the fruiting body. And this is why Real Mushrooms has been very focused on honoring that tradition and providing the consumer and practitioners with good quality products that reflect that tradition, and honor the modern science around that.
So in the ’70s researchers were like, “These mushrooms are pretty cool. They’ve got lots of really interesting immune properties. What if we investigated the mycelium to see if that had any value?” And then that process was guided by the desire to create pharmaceutical products that could be used as drugs. The one that we know the most in our modern context is PSK, which is the polysaccharide Krestin from turkey tail. So within our system, within the Western world, we don’t have access to those preparations much. In China, there’s about 30 patents on that type of mycelium product, very focused on the beta-glucans and the polysaccharide chemistry, which almost invariably has a role as an adjunct in cancer therapy. So it’s a very narrow kind of focus on how to do that.
And then along comes some really bright spark influencer types that are entrepreneurial and want to make a huge amount of money, and they say, “Here’s the perfect opportunity for us to scam the population, to trick people into buying the wrong thing.” And they grow the mycelium on brown rice or sorghum or oats, and then they sell that as if it is the mycelium in its pure form, or they sell it as if it’s the mushroom. And that’s the thing that I have been rallying against. That’s the thing that Real Mushrooms has been rallying against. So those mycelium fermented grains probably have a role in a different category, like in a functional food category where they would sit on the aisle next to sauerkraut and tempeh and other fermented foods. But they’re totally novel. They don’t have a strong evidence base to support them. No one’s ever used them historically. So it’s a bit of a black box. And then there’s all the marketing tricks and gimmicks that those companies use.
Ronda Nelson: Right, right, which is really hard to sift through if you don’t have context. So I appreciate that you’re giving more of a broad picture about it because it helps us have context around it.
Lee Carroll: Yeah. So what — along comes a product like the real mycelium lion’s mane pure mycelium that’s grown in a tank in a liquid culture environment. The plug can get pulled out of the tank, the liquid nutrient broth can drain out, and you get left behind pure mycelium. This is a brand-new opportunity for the supplement industry to embrace another aspect of lion’s mane, just like we would embrace another aspect of a plant. You know, like the difference between dandelion leaves and dandelion roots is great. If you’re a herbalist, you never mix those two things up. They’re offering different aspects of the chemistry.
So with the mycelium of lion’s mane, the focus isn’t so much on the beta-glucan component, it’s on the secondary metabolites. So we have to enter the territory of the scientific nerdy names then. Fruiting bodies of lion’s mane have got secondary metabolites called hericenones, and they’re kind of one-third of the equation that makes lion’s mane mushroom work. And then the mycelium has got a different set of compounds called erinacines, and these have got significant biological capacity to influence nervous system health. And the pure mycelium is a real factory for producing that stuff. So if you get a pure mycelium, you’re able to use it in a clinical setting to help turn the dial on neurological function.
So what changed the game for Real Mushrooms was all of a sudden — ’cause Real Mushrooms has never been against mycelium, it’s just how you hear the message. Real Mushrooms has always been against the mycelium fermented grains. And when the average person hears mycelium fermented grain, they get left with the lasting memory of mycelium. So mycelium is bad, not mycelium fermented grain. So we’ve now got the technology to do it. We’ve only recently got the scientific methodologies to test for these things. It’s no good having a method where, “Oh, there’s good stuff in here, but trust me, there’s enough in there to turn the dial on your nervous system health.” And now we have a whole bunch of clinical trials which validate this in a clinical setting. So it’s kind of like a trifecta of influences that all collided that allowed Real Mushrooms, which is really a fungal company — it’s honoring the fungal tradition, it’s not just a mushroom organization — to bring to market a novel thing, which was the perfect opportunity to bring a new product that’s got great evidence and value, but also use it as an example to say, “Hey, look, we’ve been railing against the mycelium fermented grain industry for years. This is our answer to that.” If you’re using lion’s mane fermented brown rice or sorghum or oats, then you’re not using what was used in the clinical trials, and here’s the thing to back it up.
Ronda Nelson: So are you finding that lion’s mane then is a richer source of the mycelium, or the erinacine? Or is that how you say it? I always say it wrong.
Lee Carroll: Erinacine. I always put the accent wrong too.
Ronda Nelson: The erinacine, is that the best… It must be the richest source, so why lion’s mane to extract this and not a different mushroom?
Lee Carroll: Well, lion’s mane is the only mushroom that produces that type of chemistry. Just like an apple tree just produces apple flavors, an orange tree produces orange flavors — they don’t have the opportunity to switch around. They come to us from nature hardwired like that. And that plays into the old thinking. I think Rudolf Steiner was the one that kind of popularized the idea that for every condition that a human suffers or has to deal with on the planet, there’s a natural remedy that is part of the solution.
Ronda Nelson: Mm-hmm. And I believe that.
Lee Carroll: Yeah. So this discovery with the mycelium part of the lion’s mane being very synergistic with the fruiting body or the mushroom is a relatively recent discovery. I think they were first discovered in the ’90s. It’s taken since the early ’90s to now to bring all of the evidence and the capacity to actually sell it as a product.
Ronda Nelson: Wow. So do you feel like there’s opportunity with the other mushrooms to… Is there research or work going that direction to find other compounds that might have enough, or the same type of, or in another vein physiologically, that kind of effect in the body?
Lee Carroll: That will happen, but not on mass. So if we use the example of reishi, I think what makes reishi unique are the bitter triterpenes. Real Mushrooms reishi has got the most of those, honors the tradition the best. Those bitter molecules play a particular role in the fruiting body. The mycelium doesn’t need them. They don’t serve a purpose in the mycelium. So when you look at the mycelium, none of those molecules are there. So it wouldn’t make any sense to use reishi mycelium because what drives the health benefits of reishi is the triterpenes.
Ronda Nelson: Got it.
Lee Carroll: So the immune benefits of the mycelium probably aren’t that much greater, if at all, than using the ones from the mushroom. The mycelium of cordyceps is different. If you can get high levels of cordycepin, then cordycepin’s an interesting molecule. So there’s not a large number of opportunities, but lion’s mane is so profoundly beneficial for human health. I think throughout all of our stages of life, we should be eating mushrooms regularly. And that’s part of my clinical recommendation, two or three times a week. And then not everybody’s perfect with that regime, so they should be taking a mushroom every day. And Real Mushrooms Lion’s Mane one-to-one extract is a culinary mushroom that honors the food tradition. It’s boiled, it’s finely ground, it’s boiled, it’s dehydrated, and then it’s given back to the consumer in a form which mimics the way that we would eat it as a food. So lion’s mane throughout the course of your life, and then when you start to experience challenges in your brain, that’s when the mycelium and the erinacine A compounds come in. So there’s a lot of synergy between how the two parts of the fungus work together.
Ronda Nelson: Well, that was my next question is then how do we incorporate these together? So we use lion’s mane, and the last time I had you on the podcast, we were talking about the Lion’s Mane Focus and the Lion’s Mane Calm. Both of those are amazing and we talked about them specifically as it has to do with the menopause, perimenopausal woman, to kind of settle, calm that nervous system, but also to enhance brain function. Because those of us women that are of this age, this is what we worry about is cognitive decline because we can’t remember what we walked into the room for, for a period of time as the brain and the body start to manage the shifting hormones. But where then would this product fit into that? So we have lion’s mane, we’ve got the Lion’s Mane Calm, the Lion’s Mane Focus, and the Real Mycelium. How does this flow clinically?
Lee Carroll: The way that I see it — and this is based on reading the science plus extrapolating and interpreting the few clinical trials that we’ve got, and also going with the anecdotes and the case histories of people that have tried this mycelium product and then reported back what their experience is — so the first place to go with Real Mycelium is that it is for the aging brain that’s not functioning optimally, and the first signs of cognitive challenge are starting to kick in. So the first bit of research that was conducted on this raw material, and the one that Real Mushrooms uses, has been used in two of these clinical trials. So there’s kind of direct evidence on the material that the practitioner’s going to use.
So in a population of patients with early onset Alzheimer’s disease they took this preparation for 49 weeks and there was a significant improvement in cognitive function over that 49 weeks in the group that took five milligrams a day, and five milligrams is what’s in our product. So that’s the first place to go. When there’s signs, early signs of cognitive decline, dementia, that’s when you’d be like, “Okay, I gotta be focused on this,” and that’s when you’d bring out the big guns. So I would be using curcumin in a bioavailable form along with that in a clinical setting and all of the other things — it gets added into the protocol.
There’s another study at a higher dose, 10 milligrams, that shows that it influences age-related hearing decline. So people over 65 —
Ronda Nelson: That’s me. I’m 67.
Lee Carroll: Hearing’s not quite as good, so the higher frequencies aren’t as great. And then sometimes it’s harder to understand what people are saying. So if you’ve got a parent in that situation, you’ll often hear them say, “What did you say? What did you say?” It gets a bit annoying, every time you say something, you’ve got to repeat yourself. So at 10 milligrams a day over eight weeks, those two aspects improved slightly. So we’re talking about central nervous system effects in the brain, but we’re also talking about peripheral nervous system effects. And then extrapolating, people that are burned out or they’ve got stress-related issues with their brain — you’re a young parent, you’re sleep deprived ’cause your child is waking you up — you could use it in that situation to bring your brain back up to baseline. And then peripherally from a nervous system point of view, it’s quite likely to help repair nerves along with a sensible kind of repair program. And then there’s another clinical trial where people with — just healthy people with age-related cognitive decline, and that happens to us all, your brain’s just not as good. Even though you don’t have dementia, but you’re just not as good — it’s been shown to support the reduction of that decline as well.
So that positions the real mycelium. The challenge is, introducing a fantastic new product that works really well, the clinical feedback’s incredible, is that people will forget about the mushroom and then want to put all their eggs in the mycelium.
Ronda Nelson: In the mycelium.
Lee Carroll: Yeah. So it’s important to understand how they kind of work together.
Ronda Nelson: So then you would recommend doing like maybe a straight lion’s mane, and then adding in the real mycelium on top of that if there is signs of cognitive decline, early, slower processing in the elderly aging population. We’re not gonna call you and me elderly.
Lee Carroll: I’m not that far behind you, my friend. So we’re both in the same camp there.
Ronda Nelson: So are you thinking those two generally together? Because we think about lion’s mane as being a nootropic, but you’re talking more now about this kind of almost being a nervous system, a brain and nervous system type support, yes?
Lee Carroll: Yes. Lion’s mane’s never been a nootropic, and —
Ronda Nelson: Oh, I thought that it was.
Lee Carroll: No. We lose control of the narrative, you know. Influencers, companies promoting their products, using clever marketing tactics will just say whatever they think is the truth, or sometimes they even just make it up. So a nootropic is misunderstood. A nootropic is something that you can give a healthy brain, and then that healthy brain can perform better as a result of the ingestion of that, and it happens over a short period of time. Caffeine is the classic nootropic. You get the dose right, you have a couple of shots of caffeine and you’re good to go.
Ronda Nelson: Brains on fire. Working great.
Lee Carroll: Yeah. So rhodiola is kind of like a herbal nootropic. You can give it to a healthy person and they can perform better. Lion’s mane has always been slow in its action, and in the clinical trials looking at cognitive function, the measurable effects don’t kick in for eight weeks. There’s always sensitive people that will experience things a bit sooner. So I’ve started using the term neuroadaptogen, so I kinda made that up. It’s not yet a legitimate term that’s used in the literature, but everybody knows what an adaptogen is. So I’m joining the two things together to say a better way to think about lion’s mane, particularly the erinacine A component, is that it is an adaptogen for your nervous system. So particularly under stressful conditions it will help repair your nervous system. But unlike an adaptogen, if you give it to a healthy person, you’re not likely to notice any improvement because there’s nothing to improve because you’ve already got a healthy brain. So in this situation, the erinacine A supports the nervous system when it’s under stress or duress or some sort of challenge, whether that’s an injury, whether it’s a stress-related decline, whether it’s an age-related decline, or whether there’s some other process going on.
Ronda Nelson: And what would you then pair this with? So you mentioned like a curcuminoids or some kind of a turmeric product. What other kind of brain health would you pair this with, thinking about this herbally?
Lee Carroll: Yeah. Well — before I go herbally, there’s the mushroom world, is a synergistic partner with the brain health. And we all talk about the gut-brain axis but when we talk about that, the science behind it is not that great. So we’re starting to get some insights into how the gut and the brain communicate with each other, and how lion’s mane might help that process. So lion’s mane was never traditionally a neurological mushroom. It was always a gut mushroom, and it was used for people that were geriatric or convalescing, and it was used as a food. It was never used as a medicine. It was never decocted and given as a decoction or a pill or a tablet. So it was a legitimate functional food. So the cognitive stuff only happened in the ’90s. So when you combine the thinking together, lion’s mane’s a profound gut mushroom. It’s got a significant prebiotic activity. The fibers in the lion’s mane are totally unique compared to any other mushroom. They’re much more diverse. It’s got the widest diversity of different polysaccharides of any mushroom, and those polysaccharides act as prebiotics for the gut. So I think when we consume lion’s mane on a regular basis, we get great benefit in our gut, and those changes in our gut influence our brain.
And there was a study published recently by Gasperini, just earlier this year, and they took elderly mice, and they totally removed all of the bacteria from their gut with multiple different antibiotics. And then they were measuring their brain performance, and their brain performance improved, and they’re like, “Hmm, what’s going on there?” So they did their experimentations, and they found that there’s a chemokine being produced by eosinophils in the gastrointestinal tract that’s called Eotaxin 1, and it has the ability to pull the handbrake on the ability of the brain to regenerate itself at night during deep sleep. So when there’s a dysregulation in the gut dysbiosis — I could go on with that thread, but that’s kind of enough. When you give lion’s mane, you’re affecting the makeup of the bacteria in the gut, you’re reducing the inflammation in the gut. You’re very likely lowering the activation of the eosinophils, so they produce less of that Eotaxin 1, so that the brain has the ability to repair itself. When we’re thinking about using these preparations in a clinical setting, we get very railroaded into thinking in very narrow lanes. We’re not system thinking in this way. So that is one way how the gut-brain axis works. People typically will say, “Oh, well, we’re producing short-chain fatty acids, and that’s the answer.” But lots of fibers produce short-chain fatty acids without the same enormous outcomes that you get cognitively with lion’s mane. So it’s got to be something additional to that.
And then lion’s mane mushroom is very high in ergothioneine. So when you look at culinary mushrooms, if you eat one serve of mushrooms a week across 20 years of your life, it prevents age-related cognitive decline. So why is lion’s mane any different to just a regular cognitive mushroom? So the dietary consumption of mushrooms gives us ergothioneine, and then it’s the ergothioneine that helps protect the brain and keep the brain working. So lion’s mane is unique as a culinary mushroom because it’s got these very special beta-glucans. No other mushroom has them. It’s got high levels of ergothioneine, similar to shiitake and oyster mushrooms, which isn’t that unique, but it’s special in terms of the white button mushrooms that we mostly eat in Western society. And then it’s got these unique secondary metabolites called hericenones, which support the nervous system and improve brain function. So when you line up the epidemiology, when you consume mushrooms on a regular basis, you have less cancer, you live longer, you have less disease, period. You have less cardiovascular disease, you have better cognitive function. So we should be eating mushrooms on a regular basis. They’re only associations, but the evidence is mounting up. It’s pretty compelling. So lion’s mane is the thing to take every day on a regular basis to make sure that your nervous system and your brain is healthy.
Ronda Nelson: And your gut.
Lee Carroll: And your gut. And then when you get to old age, or when you, along your life journey, have a problem, that’s when you introduce the Erinacine A product. And then if you can afford it, ’cause this product’s a bit more expensive than your average mushroom product, just because of the technical nature of how it’s produced and the complexity of that — if you can afford it, do them both together. But if you can’t afford it, the erinacine A is the one that’s got the runs on the board from a research point of view.
Ronda Nelson: Yeah. So I was thinking as you were talking about the gut and the prebiotic fibers that, you know, how the mushroom is produced, in other words, you’re boiling it, and then you’re draining off the liquid, and what you’re left with is the cooked mushroom, and then that —
Lee Carroll: Yeah, but the liquid gets evaporated. It doesn’t get drained off.
Ronda Nelson: Okay. So evaporated off. But at the end of the day, the mushroom is still intact after the liquid is evaporated off?
Lee Carroll: Nothing is lost. Correct. So that means, and unlike a dietary culinary mushroom, it’s ground into a very, very fine particle size, which makes it much more prebiotic. So we don’t have any digestive capacity to break mushroom fibers down, so every bit of mushroom that you swallow whole is gonna get pooped out whole. It doesn’t get digested. So the finer the particle size, the more you chew, the more you grind it up, the more surface area there is, the more prebiotic action you get. And that Real Mushrooms Lion’s Mane product is unique from that point of view as well.
Ronda Nelson: Yeah, that was my line of thinking was, well, wow, if the whole mushroom is there by the end of the manufacturing process, then when we take the capsules, the lion’s mane capsules, we’re literally getting all of the fiber, we’re getting all of the other phytochemicals in there, but I was really interested in those prebiotic fibers. It’s not like it’s an extract where they’re being filtered out or…
Lee Carroll: Yeah. And people are still rusted onto this idea that insoluble fibers aren’t prebiotic, they’re just bulking fibers for the gut. But that just simply isn’t true.
Ronda Nelson: Not true, yeah.
Lee Carroll: They don’t get fully degraded, but the bacteria inhabit the surface of that small particle, and it’s not like a small ball. It’s an uneven fractured surface, and the bacteria inhabit all of the surfaces and munch on the sugars that are around it.
Ronda Nelson: Yeah. So you have always, well, from the beginning when you have been talking about mushrooms over the last several years, you’ve been talking about eating mushrooms daily. Earlier you said at least three times a week, right?
Lee Carroll: Yeah. Just to get the mushrooms in your diet.
Ronda Nelson: But I remember at one point you were talking about the importance of cooking them thoroughly or cooking them well, not just frying them up in a pan and eating a whole piece of mushroom. We chop it up and we eat it, or it’s part of a salad or something like that. Can you talk about that for a few minutes?
Lee Carroll: Yeah. Mushrooms need to be cooked because — first of all, white button mushrooms are growing in cow manure and that sort of environment, so you don’t wanna be eating that stuff raw. And then white button mushrooms have got a chemical in them called agaritine, which a certain percentage of the population is a bit sensitive to, so cooking denatures that, and makes it less gastrointestinally complicated for folks. But the beta-glucans that exist on the outer walls of the cell need to be loosened up so you can get access to them, and cooking does that. The chemistry of mushrooms are very robust, so you don’t have to be too concerned about how long you cook it. And the best production methodology is boiling in an aqueous environment for a couple of hours. So that’s how it was done traditionally. So lion’s mane was always prescribed as a soup, and there’s very limited research, very limited writing that you can look at to do the research. And it was often suggested to be cooked as a chicken soup, and then you would boil it up, and then you would eat that soup over the course of the next couple of weeks for your gastrointestinal health.
Ronda Nelson: Interesting. So you would get the benefits of the medicinal benefits in the broth of the soup, whatever the liquid is, but then you also still would get the fibers and retain the bulky matter of the mushroom as part of the soup as well as the meaty part of the soup?
Lee Carroll: Yes. And the — it’s good practice to cook them, but when you make it too hard, ’cause you’ve got to enjoy the food that you eat, so I like to eat fried mushrooms, and they only get fried for 10 minutes, at around 10, 15 minutes, they’re beautiful to eat. So I might not be getting the full medicinal value, but it builds a structure into your lifestyle where mushrooms become like an integral part of how we live our lives. And because mushrooms aren’t plants or animals, they’re a different kingdom of life, they’re giving us different nutrients that we don’t get. So humans in the Western world are less healthy because we don’t do that. So that’s why the use of — and lion’s mane is my favorite thing in this case because it mimics the culinary tradition. It therefore allows you to tap into all of the rich epidemiological research that we’ve got that associates all sorts of good health with regular mushroom consumption. And if you do, as a part of a base protocol for a patient, if you do one gram of dried whole lion’s mane every day, like real mushroom cells, then that’s the equivalent of 70 grams a week of fresh mushroom which gets you into the ballpark of all of those healthy benefits. And then when you’re doing the two to three times a week as part of your regular diet, then that’s the additional complement that you need to get you into the super healthy category. And then on top of that, you’re using supplements to deal with specific issues. So the two capsules of lion’s mane every day is kind of like a foundation. And then the culinary stuff on top. And then we can talk about, well, what if I’m menopausal, and my brain’s a bit foggy? Well, then we’ve got lion’s mane focus with the choline. And choline — there’s an epidemic of choline deficiency. Um, and when choline is low, you don’t make phosphatidylcholine. The brain doesn’t get the architectural support that it needs, and then all the menopausal stuff goes really downhill. So the sensible choice is to use a lion’s mane and add choline into your diet, either egg yolks or eat lamb’s fry or beef liver. People don’t like to do that these days, and not everybody eats eggs. You gotta have at least one egg a day to give yourself the choline. And then in that case, maybe during the worst of that menopausal transition, you could use the lion’s — the Real Mycelium with the erinacine A as support for your brain during that time. And then as we talked about earlier, if you get older, that’s when you would add in the Real Mycelium to protect your brain against that age-related challenge.
Ronda Nelson: I’m kind of on the train of like, you know, once you hit menopause, I’m thinking that the Real Mycelium should just be for a lifer at that point. Like, we just need to get on it and stay on it for life. Because as– then when you hit menopause, you’re in the aging category.
Lee Carroll: Yeah, well there’s nothing wrong with that approach, particularly if the patient can afford it. And the erinacine molecules are quite unique ’cause they’re small, they get across the lipid membranes of the blood-brain barrier. They get into the brain, and we don’t fully understand what they’re doing, but there’s a long list of bench top experiments and animal studies that very strongly demonstrate that there’s trophic capacity with those compounds. So they’re interacting with astrocytes for example. They interact with receptors on an astrocyte that causes the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or that causes the release of nerve growth factor, which interact with TrkB and TrkA receptors, which are the primary kind of regulators of housekeeping and neuroplasticity in the brain. So we’re quite a long way from fully understanding exactly what’s going on. But when you match up the profound clinical benefits that you can observe in a trial with the bench top experiments and the animal studies, there’s very significant neurotrophic potential in that particular set of chemistry. And erinacine A is just one of the erinacines. There’s a bunch of other ones that kind of come along for the ride as well.
Ronda Nelson: Well, this is just so fascinating, and I have had a bottle. I got an early shipment, and been taking it, and my husband and I both have been taking it, and I’ve actually really liked it. You know, I don’t know if it’s true — you said, well, not if it’s true, I’m not saying you’re lying, but that it takes a little bit of time to be able to see the results. My own experience with it was that I took two lion’s mane, and I took two erinacine, or the real mycelium, and I thought, “I’m just gonna do this for a week. I just wanna see.” And I wasn’t — I don’t know what I was expecting, honest. I’ve taken lion’s mane, but I just didn’t know what to expect. And the very next, or maybe it was the next day or it was two days later, very short, within that week I was gonna give it, I had to batch record some podcasts like this one. And so I sat down and had all my notes, and I was ready to go. I sat down, and I clipped through those podcasts so fast. My brain was sharp. It was on. It was clear. It was noticeable difference. And I don’t think it was blood sugar. My blood sugar’s pretty stable. I wasn’t under high stress, no stress. I’d gotten a good night’s sleep. The only thing I can attribute it to was that, and I don’t know if that could happen that fast or not, but that was my own experience and really the only baseline that I had to judge from. So I just keep checking in.
Lee Carroll: Yeah, well, I think that’s entirely possible. I’ve talked to people in the organization that have produced this raw material, and their experience with it is that the earliest anybody says they notice anything is typically two to three weeks. So relatively healthy people just say things like you’ve just said. And then the earliest that people with cognitive issues tend to report any findings is about eight weeks. And then there’s a large body of people that take it from a cognitive point of view that say it’s from three to six months, there’s noticeable improvements and changes. So everybody’s a bit different in the way that they respond to things. The brain is certainly not responsive to repair quickly. So what you just described, a healthy brain that’s a little bit experiencing a little bit of stress maybe, the fine-tuning knobs to get you back into optimal capacity, aren’t big shifts that are needed. But if you’ve got cognitive decline and you have synaptic loss, your nerves are structurally just not doing what they need to do — that’s not a quick fix. If you break your arm, you’re a fool to think you can go back and do whatever you were doing two weeks later. It takes time to fix things. So it’s like that with your brain as well. So when there’s more deficit in the brain, and this is where it will most likely get used the most, that three to six-month window is where you would see kind of like the magic happening.
So we, as practitioners, we need to hear that message because it informs and guides, you know, at what point do you give up on this. The patient is saying, like two months out, “Oh, I haven’t noticed any difference yet.” You’re like, “Well, let’s just give it another month or two because it’s a bit early to make a decision.” So having the confidence to say that is the trick. So I don’t have that direct experience with it yet myself ’cause I’ve only just got my hands on it as well. But when you talk to people that have been doing it for a while, it gives you a lot of confidence to know that it is a really sensible strategy. And I think that it’s gonna have a significant place in cognitive protocols across the practitioner landscape. And I love that the dose is low. You can just keep that dose really low, which is gonna help mitigate some of the cost, by just taking two a day. So it’s not like —
Ronda Nelson: It’s not a big lift.
Lee Carroll: Yeah, and that dose is clinically proven. You don’t need more. In fact, the healthy people that saw benefits, the dose that they got was only 3.4 milligrams, so it was even a bit less.
Ronda Nelson: Oh, wow.
Lee Carroll: So it might be that just two and a half milligrams works for people that don’t need the full-on effects. Maybe you can do the two capsules a day for a month or two, and then drop it back to one capsule a day, so your example of, “I’m a menopausal woman, I wanna do this for the rest of my life,” well, maybe you don’t need the five milligrams.
Ronda Nelson: Correct.
Lee Carroll: Maybe you just need the two and a half milligrams. And regular lion’s mane and all of the other nutrients that you need. And I think with menopause, a really big factor of the challenges that we see is the bowel flora.
Ronda Nelson: Yes.
Lee Carroll: And the — every generation there’s a dilution in the quality of the bowel flora from mother to child. So lion’s mane is, of all of the natural fibrous things that we’ve got access to, one of the profound ones for restoring a beneficial gut environment. So I think lion’s mane plays an important role there.
Ronda Nelson: For the gut. Well, Lee, this has been so fascinating. You always, sometimes I have to go back and listen to when we talk again, and like I always have ’cause you teach me. I’m like, “What is that word? Tract? What is that? What are you talking about?” So then I gotta go research it. So I always appreciate that you bring so much to the table when we have a conversation. You’re always just so rich and willing to give of the things that you know. And thank you so much for being such a champion for bringing, really bringing the quality conversation to light with these mushrooms, but then as well being a champion for innovation and bringing new things into the market, and your collaboration with Real Mushrooms. I’m super grateful. And I always love having you as my friend too, so there’s that.
Lee Carroll: Thanks very much, Ronda. I always enjoy having a chat with you on these podcasts. It’s fantastic. Thank you.
Ronda Nelson: Well, thanks for joining me. And for those of you that are listening, if you want to go order, you absolutely can go do that. Go to RealMushrooms.com, set up your practitioner account if you do not have one, and get that order placed. So I’m sure they’ll be super happy to hear from you, but your patients are gonna be even happier when you can get their brain, and maybe your brain, working a little bit better. So Lee, thank you so much for joining me.
Lee Carroll: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks, Ronda. See you next time.
[CLOSING]
Ronda Nelson: All right, listen friend, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. And of course, Lee, as a return guest, I’m so happy to have him. When you go order this product, know that you are getting a real mycelium product. You are not getting one of the fake ones on the market. So when you call, set up your wholesale account if you don’t have one already, and let them know that you heard it here because it helps them track their marketing. They know what is working, what’s not, and it helps them let us have Lee back again on the podcast. So go place your order for Real Mycelium. They recently were out of stock, so don’t miss out. Be sure you go get that done. And I’ve been taking it, and as I said, I have noticed just a huge difference. The link to order is in the description below this video on YouTube. It’s also in the show notes if you are listening or looking at it online elsewhere. So thanks for joining me on the podcast. I appreciate it. I love having Lee on. I hope that it was informative for you just as it was for me. I’ll see you next week on the podcast.
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