[INTERVIEW]
Ronda Nelson:
If you have worked with patients for any amount of time, you know that their primary complaints are gonna be sleep, energy, gut, immune – all of the things. But what if all of those things – memory, digestive health, immune, sleep, stress, anxiety, cognition – what if all of those were connected? What if you could tie all of those symptoms together, wrap them up with a bow, and give one product that would address all of them?
What if there was such a thing? Well, there is. I’m gonna talk about it today on the podcast.
Well, hello – welcome back. As promised from last week, I have a very special guest joining me today. And as you know, it is none other than the infamous Lee Carroll, the genius in the room. I have known Lee for, gosh, probably close to 20 years – maybe 15 years – and he has always been a leader. He’s been inspirational. He is a teacher. Friend, I have so much respect and regard for him, and he is joining me today.
I’m gonna let you listen in on our conversation here in a second, and we are talking about a couple of new products from Real Mushrooms that are gonna be game changers for your perimenopause and menopausal patients. So let me introduce you to Lee Carroll. If you’re new to my world and you don’t know who this is, he is soon to be one of your favorites. So let’s open the door – we’re gonna peek in, and I’ll let you listen to my conversation with Lee Carroll.
Well, hey Lee, welcome back to the podcast! It’s been a while since you’ve been on with me.
Lee Carroll:
Yeah, thanks for having me back, Ronda. I’m really excited. Yeah, it’s good to see you again.
Ronda Nelson:
It’s so nice. You know, Lee and I go back a long way – like long, long, long way back – in the Standard Process days, teaching and seminars and all the things together. So it always feels a little bit like home when you get to come on and we get to chat.
So today we are talking about some cool new things going on with Real Mushrooms, and why don’t you – before we start and dive in – tell everybody a little bit more about your role, where you came from for people who don’t know you, and now what your work is with Real Mushrooms and how you got into the whole mushroom thing.
Lee Carroll:
I love this story. Well, it’s been 35 years now that I’ve been in the natural products industry – 30 of those years with MediHerb. I’ve done all the different jobs. I started off as production manager and ended up being an educator, Kerry Bone’s right-hand man, for all those years. That was really good training.
COVID happened. I changed gears. It was time to move on, and I was working with Justin at Duco and Third Planet. And I got the brief to design some mushroom products, and that got me interested in mushrooms. I’m like, gee – all 30 years I didn’t know anything about mushrooms. And then I met Jeff Chilton, and I’m like, oh my God, this mushroom thing is really fascinating. It’s just like herbs all over again – quality issues.
So when COVID happened, everything fell apart, and I’m like, what am I gonna do? How do I earn any money? So I started just focusing on becoming a mushroom expert. I developed an online course, I started promoting that. Making a living from online courses is not what I would recommend anybody do.
Ronda Nelson:
Rough?
Lee Carroll:
Yeah. It’s a tough gig. I started just putting my feelers out and doing things, and I met the people at Real Mushrooms. We had a courtship over the internet – meetings, various educational events that they were interested in. We met at the Psychedelic Science Conference in 2023 with Jeff and his son Adam, who is the head of brand at Real Mushrooms. We had a fantastic week. We hung out all day, every day – great discussions. And then at the end of that, Jeff was like, well, yeah, you are a really cool guy, we should get you on board.
So I started with Real Mushrooms in early 2024, and my current role is Chief Medical Herbalist. So I’m across all aspects of it – I’m like the Swiss Army knife of the company. I’m doing practitioner education, I’m developing products, I sit on the R&D meetings and help with marketing, et cetera. And I’m having, like in the twilight of my career, I’m feeling like I’m really doing really well. I’m firing on all cylinders. The engagement is still there. Mushrooms are just so fascinating as a topic – it’s endlessly interesting and exciting.
And you know, to your point – it’s something that those of us who have been in the Standard Process, MediHerb world just didn’t really know anything about. And they are equally as fascinating.
Ronda Nelson:
Yeah, and I love the early work that you did. I remember us having a conversation and you said how soulfully and deeply disappointed you were to learn about the alterations and the substitutions that were happening in the mushroom market – how people were being sold mushroom products that were not up to par. Can you talk a little more about that?
Lee Carroll:
Yeah. Well, it’s a big topic, and millions of people are being fooled every day. Mushrooms are hard to understand – they were only recently removed from the plant kingdom in the sixties. So we still think of mushrooms as if they’re plants. We don’t have a separate category for them in the food pyramid, for example.
So companies come along and make products based on how cheap and effective it is to produce them. They introduce novel ideas. With mushrooms, a fungal organism is made up of mycelium – the part we never see. It’s in the dead, decaying matter or the substrate it grows in, and that’s the main organism. It’s very hard to define – it’s this nebulous, threadlike thing. When conditions are right, it produces a mushroom – a fruiting body.
If you’re using evidence-based language – and you and I both appreciate that it’s the chemistry of natural products that drives their therapeutic effect – if you don’t honor the chemistry, what’s orange juice without the orange juice in it? It’s just water. It doesn’t have the benefit. So when you look at the products that get sold, the mushroom, the fruiting body, is where all of the traditional knowledge lives. That’s where we’ve got thousands of years of history of people eating it, extracting it, using it – and we know that works.
There is a more recent discovery that the mycelium – which was previously inaccessible because the techniques weren’t available – when you purify the mycelium, grow it in a liquid tank, it has some unique properties as well. The chemistry is quite different in some aspects. But then the mycelium-fermented-grain industry came along. Companies like Host Defense and others kind of led the way with this – growing that mycelium in brown rice or oats, and then selling it as if it’s a mushroom.
The problem with that is that yes, mycelium is okay, but the mycelium doesn’t transfer the same health benefits as the fruiting body. All of the evidence that’s been developed points to those mycelium-on-grain products having some minor immunological health benefits – but none of the main stuff. Like, lion’s mane is noted for cognitive function; there’s chemistry in there that does that. When you analyze those products, what you find is that there’s only about 10 to 15% mycelium at best in that brown rice or oats mixture. So the chemistry’s not there. You can’t identify the active constituents.
All of the packaging and labeling identifies that product as a mushroom, but when you turn it over and read the supplement facts, it tells you it’s a mycelium fermented biomass. People are basically being bait-and-switched into a product. And when we talk about lion’s mane specifically, those products occupy the lion’s share of the market.
And this is my fear – and where you and I interact on this topic – when quality is poor and people expect a benefit from what they take, if they don’t get that benefit, they’ll give up on it. You can’t be tricked forever. My fear is that people will say, oh, I did lion’s mane for years and it didn’t work. And then they won’t just give up on lion’s mane – they’ll give up on mushrooms in general. They’re not trialing the right thing, you know?
It’s hard to get these quality messages across. That’s why you have a skill and a preference for working with practitioners – because it’s hard to disseminate complex information. We have to filter it down so that practitioners get the training to deliver those messages to their clients, and help them choose the right products.
The same thing happens in the herbal market. You know how many people have said, oh, I tried ashwagandha and it didn’t work? And I say, well, what kind of ashwagandha are you using? Where did you get it? How has it been tested? It’s the same idea. And it’s unfortunate – in the herbal, medicinal mushrooms, supplement, wellness, health industry, it’s an industry. And they’re there to make money. Not everyone is genuinely trying to deliver the right result to the patient.
Ronda Nelson:
Yeah. And chronic history just keeps on repeating itself.
Lee Carroll:
Yeah, it does.
Ronda Nelson:
So let’s talk about the new products. Real Mushrooms has a couple of new things coming out, and when I was sent the information about them, I was so excited – because I love, first of all, the simplicity of the product. It makes it very, very easy to talk to a patient about. But these are super unique products, so I’m gonna let you talk about both of them and then I have a big list of questions. Go ahead.
Lee Carroll:
Yeah, so there are two products. We’ve got Lion’s Mane Calm and Lion’s Mane Focus, and they’re both designed around concentrated lion’s mane extracts.
The Focus product contains the equivalent of 3.3 grams of dried lion’s mane mushroom, and that meets all of the evidence hurdles for all of the cognitive clinical trial work that’s been done on lion’s mane. So the Focus product is pitched at all of the benefits you would expect to get from lion’s mane – cognition, gut health, peripheral nerve health, et cetera. I’ve combined it with Genius Pure Alpha GPC, which is a highly bioavailable form of choline. In the US, there’s a significant nutritional gap in choline. People don’t get enough.
I designed this product as an everyday product. It’s got enough choline in there to fill that nutritional gap. The idea is that people take it long term. I believe that lion’s mane is a brain nutrient. It’s a gut prebiotic. It’s a food. When we eat mushrooms regularly, we do better. So lion’s mane is that intersection of functional food and functional mushroom – you’re getting all of the things that your body needs. It really is the true essence of what a dietary supplement should be. We’re giving people what their bodies crave in this modern world, where there are all of these extra demands. I’ve also balanced it out with a little bit of cordyceps for vitality.
The Calm product has a little bit less lion’s mane – it’s 2.15 grams of dried mushroom equivalent – and that allows it to meet the evidence hurdle for the perimenopause and menopausal studies that have been done showing that lion’s mane supports women going through that natural change – to be less irritable, less moody, to perhaps sleep a little bit better, and have a calmer nervous system.
I’ve paired it with the green tea amino acid L-theanine. We’re using Alpha Wave L-Theanine, which has clinical trial data on it, which makes it quite unique. L-theanine is an amazing amino acid that supports a calm and alert state. It improves sleep quality, helps decrease stress responses. I’ve also paired it with a little bit of reishi for the balance that reishi provides and the sleep support.
Yeah, I’m pretty excited. These will be a great addition to practitioners’ toolboxes for sure.
Ronda Nelson:
So let’s talk a little bit about where we would use these clinically. What was fascinating to me when I was looking through the information was that I loved that it was for that perimenopause and menopausal state. I suppose it is good for anybody – we could certainly use it across the board – but it is such a big complaint in this population of women. The memory, the aging, they start to get that little bit of cognitive decline. And their biggest fear is always, do I have Alzheimer’s? Am I losing my mind? I can’t go anywhere without a notepad. I have to write everything down.
Clinically, what would you expect to see using these products with that type of woman – a patient in that 40 to 60, 70 range?
Lee Carroll:
Great question. So these products are suitable for a broad range of people, but this particular category is highly relevant for them. The Focus product is designed for long-term use. The research tells us that you need to take lion’s mane for about eight weeks to see the full benefits kick in, and then continue it for the long course.
With the choline in there – as I said, that addresses the nutritional gap. There is a clinical trial on choline at 315 milligrams, and this product has 200 milligrams of this Genius Pure Alpha GPC. A single dose at 300 milligrams was demonstrated to support and improve cognitive function.
So the Focus product for the perimenopausal or menopausal woman who’s having issues with concentration and brain fog – in that state, there’s less estrogen. The hippocampus, which is the main site for memory formation, is replete with estrogen receptors. So when androgen and estrogen levels drop a little bit, the hippocampus just doesn’t work as well as it should. The combination of lion’s mane and choline together is very significant in supporting the way that memory processes work in the brain.
Lion’s mane has beta glucans, it’s got ergothioneine, it’s got hericenones – and choline is the main source of raw material for acetylcholine. Its metabolite betaine is a main contributor to methylation processes, et cetera. So the Focus product for women experiencing brain fog – over a period of four to eight to twelve weeks – they would notice that fog kind of lifting, and they’d begin to notice that things are changing for the better.
I think an underrated aspect of the health of this type of patient is the gut. The microbial environment in the gut is a very significant player in the production of metabolites that interact with the brain. So lion’s mane is kind of like a targeted prebiotic where it preferentially upregulates certain bacteria. We don’t know which ones yet, but there are hints toward this in the research. Those bacteria produce short-chain fatty acids, and they may metabolize phytoestrogens from the diet. There’s a lot of controversy about soy, but you know, a non-GMO fermented soy like tempeh is delivering daidzein into the gut, which gets converted to equol, and equol is able to interact with estrogen receptors in a positive way.
So the gut aspect of lion’s mane is kind of underrated in this whole process, because we don’t know a huge amount yet.
The other side of the equation is that some of these women just don’t sleep well either, right? It’s not that the brain fog is the issue – it’s the irritability and the sleep. That’s where the Calm product comes in. A little bit less lion’s mane, but still doing all that same foundational work. The L-theanine is a really unique amino acid – it interacts with GABA receptors, modulates GABA behavior, and it’s neuromodulatory at dopamine and serotonin levels.
It also potentially antagonizes glutamate. When there’s too much glutamate, that can create an excitatory state in the brain – which becomes neuroinflammatory. L-theanine is thought to be a bit antagonistic at the glutamate receptor sites so that it can calm things down a little bit. L-theanine has great research on producing a calm alertness, just like meditation. And just like meditation – you can do a single bout of meditation and feel great afterwards, but if you did it every day for a month, you’d feel fantastic every day.
Theanine is a bit like that. Some people will notice it within an hour. But many people will palpably notice the difference after four weeks, and then when they continue it, it only ever gets better. It improves sleep onset, it improves the quality of deep sleep, it reduces the stress response. There have been reductions in salivary cortisol. It lowers heart rate, lowers blood pressure.
Two capsules of this product delivers the clinically relevant dose of L-theanine – that’s 200 milligrams. But in the research, you can go up to 400 milligrams with really good evidence. So from a practitioner point of view, the range is kind of two to four capsules with this product.
With the Focus product, from a practitioner point of view, two capsules a day long term is probably good enough. But if you wanted to turn the dial a bit more quickly in the first four to eight weeks, you could do three – you could even do four capsules. Lion’s mane is food. You can’t have too much of it.
Ronda Nelson:
Exactly. If you could go to a restaurant and order the lion’s mane steak, you’d eat a huge amount. We don’t have to be worried about overdoing it.
Are both of them designed to support that woman in that perimenopause, menopause state? Or are they distinctly separate?
Lee Carroll:
They both work for that category, but they have different emphases. The Focus product is really for cognition – memory, mental acuity, brain fog, all of that, with the incidental side benefit of gut health, et cetera. And then the Calm product is what you’d reach for when you’re thinking about irritability, sleep, and calming the nervous system down.
Ronda Nelson:
And that’s not just to perimenopause and menopause. I don’t want to pigeonhole these products into only that age range, because you look at women in their thirties now – the whole big new thing is to say everybody is in perimenopause. Young women are in perimenopause, and they put them in the perimenopause group so they can give them bioidentical hormones.
I recorded a podcast not long ago about this, and I just said – this is so wrong. They’re not in perimenopause. They’re tired, they’re stressed out, they’re picking food off their kids’ lunches, they’re not taking good care of themselves. Their memory is going and they’re showing up with this long list of symptoms, and their primary care providers are like, oh, you’re in perimenopause.
So I think I can see real value in using these products with that age group too – that 30-ish into the mid-40s world.
Lee Carroll:
Totally. Yeah. You could even go younger. There’s a clinical trial in adolescent boys with L-theanine and ADHD, and they performed better, slept better, and had better control over their mental state when they had L-theanine. So yeah, it’s useful across all of those categories for sure.
– SPONSOR BREAK –
Ronda Nelson:
All right, quick pause to thank the sponsor of today’s episode – Real Mushrooms.
Listen, if you are listening to this and you’re already thinking of patients who have brain fog, poor focus, irritability, or sleep issues, I want you to know they just released two brand-new formulas: Lion’s Mane Focus and Lion’s Mane Calm. Focus is the one to think about for cognition, memory, and brain fog. Calm is the one you want for irritability, stress response, and sleep support. And yes, both of them are especially relevant for perimenopausal and menopausal women – but they’re not limited to that population.
If you want to try them in practice, Real Mushrooms has a special offer for you since you’re listening. All you have to do is place a $150 order, use my name as your referral, and they will send you a free bottle of both products. I’ll put all the details in the show notes. Alright, let’s get back to the interview.
– END SPONSOR BREAK –
Ronda Nelson:
Is there anyone who would not benefit from these clinically? What do we need to watch for?
Lee Carroll:
There are no contraindications, so you couldn’t really get it wrong. If someone didn’t need calming – for example, they slept well, their stress response was good – there’d be no downside to giving them the Calm product. The effects just won’t be as palpable for that person. But at the baseline layers of how those processes work in the brain, they’ll just be more efficient and capable. There wouldn’t be anybody where we’d need to say, this probably isn’t a good fit for you.
Ronda Nelson:
What are the key talking points when practitioners are talking about this with a patient? I know there’s always the cost issue – the economic question of, what can they afford? How do we fit yet another thing into a protocol? So that’s how my brain is thinking. I love these products. But what would we trade? That’s a better way to ask it. What would we trade?
Lee Carroll:
Very good question, Ronda. I’ve got an equally good answer.
Humans are evolutionarily programmed – or designed, however you want to think about it – to need mushrooms on a regular basis. Humans, in balance, are less healthy when we don’t consume mushrooms. There’s a very long list of epidemiological associations that demonstrate that across all of the health categories. So we need to get mushrooms back on the plate, back in the diet. The more, the better.
So a product like the Calm, for example – the message is: look, you need to have a mushroom in your life, and you clearly need a bit of support to calm yourself down, make yourself more alert, have better control of your stress response, and sleep a little more deeply. We can do it all in one go with AlphaWave L-Theanine and the lion’s mane together. It’s kind of a natural partnership.
In that situation, what goes? If they’re already taking another lion’s mane product or another mushroom, I’d replace it with this one – this is the most clinically relevant option. And then with the Focus product, same story. We need mushrooms on a regular basis. We need choline. There’s a significant nutritional gap, particularly in women in the US. Dietary preferences mean people don’t eat eggs or organ meats. Who eats organ meats anymore? Yeah – I like chicken liver, but that’s about as far as I go. And the body needs that stuff. So many choline products in the market just don’t have adequate bioavailability. You need to take huge doses of them to get the equivalent of eating an egg yolk.
So this highly bioavailable form – the Genius Pure Alpha GPC – combined with lion’s mane, makes it like a dietary supplement that is catering for the fact that our bodies have all of these nutritional needs, but in a modern world, we don’t always meet them, and we don’t even understand them well enough to know that we should.
What needs to go? One of the other things that’s just not as relevant to long-term health. I think there are so many patients – at least in my world – where I use a lot of adaptogens because the stress response is so altered in so many people. And although these mushrooms are not adaptogens, it seems to me that there is some overlap there.
Ronda Nelson:
Totally. And the work that you did – I remember having a conversation with you about how soulfully disappointed you were about the substitutions in the mushroom market. I think the takeaway there is that we’re already thinking about food-based things, whether it’s Standard Process or another company. We’re thinking about herbs. We’re thinking about adaptogens. But I think we often forget that if we’re going to take this approach – and we’re going to say, a mushroom needs to be there – maybe that’s the clinical reframe we need. No matter what your protocol looks like, a mushroom needs to be in it.
Lee Carroll:
Yeah. Yeah. And you know who the first person was to come up with this idea in the US? Royal Lee. He put mushrooms in Cataplex when nobody even knew what a mushroom was. You’re so right. I wrote a blog about it – I went through the whole history of the development. I think he was observing the early research on ergothioneine. I couldn’t get anybody at Standard Process interested in that story. I thought it was a great story for them.
Standard Process is a bit stuck in the past – they’re very slow to pick up on new and novel things. It’s ironic, hey, that a genius of a man, before anybody knew anything about mushrooms, is like, I’m gonna put them in Cataplex. How do you ever come up with that idea? That is wild.
Ronda Nelson:
I never put that two and two together. I guess because we just – what makes you think that it was the ergothioneine specifically?
Lee Carroll:
Ergothioneine was discovered in 1909, and in the 1920s in France, it was being actively researched as an antioxidant. They found it in the blood of animals. There was quite a flurry of research around it – and that was when Royal Lee was really at his height of genius, just voracious in sucking up any bit of arcane information that came his way. It’s easy for us these days – we just open up a computer and the world is our oyster. But back then you had to work really hard to get information. There weren’t even fax machines.
I think he was reading that research and intuitively drew the dots together. I’m not putting myself in the same league as that great man, but I have hunches all the time. You play them out in clinic – I think you need this, I think you need that. And you fine-tune the way that creative process works. My hunch is very, very overwhelmingly strong around ergothioneine being a key ingredient in human health.
This is why lion’s mane is so important – the average dried lion’s mane has about 1.5 milligrams per dry gram of mushroom. To meet the nutritional deficiency gap, you probably need three or four milligrams a day to be healthy. We don’t know exactly what the number is – I’m using up to 60 milligrams in clinic – but just having a serving of lion’s mane every day is enough to overcome the weaknesses and deficiencies that happen when you don’t have any. Lion’s mane people – you’ve got to be having lion’s mane every day to optimize your health.
Ronda Nelson:
So would there be – you said obviously we can’t take too many, it becomes an economic trigger, and you’ll get a gut break if you take too many – but if you had someone who needed a little bit more, like I always call it the 911 approach – they’re acute, they’re not sleeping, or they’re panicking because they’re positive they have dementia – what would be an upper-level reasonable dose that you might want to use acutely for maybe four weeks?
Lee Carroll:
Well, these things don’t work acutely. Four capsules a day is probably all you need. And you just have to be patient. If you’re worried about getting Alzheimer’s or having your brain deteriorate on you – it doesn’t happen quickly. It happens slowly.
Ronda Nelson:
So calm down and have some of the Calm product while we’re solving the long-term problem!
Lee Carroll:
Exactly. And then with the Calm product, I think the same thing goes – more is not always better. As you escalate the dose of L-theanine, you don’t get increasing benefits in return. So I think four capsules of that is a reasonable upper limit for a practitioner to play with. Two to four is a good range to be in. And if you need more of something, maybe it’s something else – theanine goes well with GABA, for example. It goes well with ashwagandha. So rather than just pushing one thing, maybe there are other choices that can be added for balance.
Ronda Nelson:
Could you use Focus in the morning and Calm at night? Like two in the morning, two at night?
Lee Carroll:
Well, it’s got the name Focus, but it’s not fast-acting – so it’s not like a stimulant that needs to be taken in the morning. But if it helps the patient’s compliance and it helps them understand why they take it and gets them doing it long term – by all means. Two Focus in the morning and two Calm at night. I have got no problem with that. They’re still getting the lion’s mane at the end of the day, whether they take product A or product B. And getting a nice balance in terms of the other ingredients is not an issue.
Clinical trials are all about: how low can we go before we don’t get any effect? It’s not the other way around. The monks who were eating lion’s mane originally were probably eating 10, 20, 30 grams. That was the gastrointestinal dose. So then researchers are like, well, does five grams work? Does three? Does two? Where’s the cutoff? Lion’s mane is food. You can eat as much of it as you like, based on how healthy your digestive system is. Between three and five grams a day is a jolly good, efficacious dose – but it takes time.
Lion’s mane is not the quick fix. It’s not the stimulant. And L-theanine is calming but it’s not sedating. So you’ll have a good night’s sleep, but when you wake up in the morning, you’ll be fresh and feel good – bright as a bunny, ready to go and tackle the day. You won’t be like, oh, I want to go back to bed because I’m really tired. It doesn’t have that sedating effect that some other options might.
Ronda Nelson:
Well, I cannot wait to start using these. I cannot wait. I’m so excited. I feel like a kid in a candy shop. I am so glad you came on the podcast, Lee. I so appreciate you.
Lee Carroll:
My pleasure. Yeah, I’ve had fun. Thanks for having me, Ronda. It’s been great.
Ronda Nelson:
You’re welcome. Thank you. See you soon.
[CLOSING]
Ronda Nelson:
Okay – wasn’t that awesome? Lee is one of my favorite people to have on the podcast. I always love chatting with him. I learned so much. In fact, truth be told – after we were finished recording this, we chatted on for a long, long time about so many good cool things and a research paper and all kinds of things. I just love learning from him. I’m sure that you did too.
So here’s how you can get your Real Mushrooms products. If you place a $150 order – even if you already have an account with them – drop my name when you place the order as the referral person. That way they know you’re coming from the podcast, which is great for their marketing, right? But let them know you heard about it from me. And they will send you a gift of both the Calm and the Focus – a free bottle of each. So be sure you do that. That is well worth it.
Also, in the show notes I have listed Lee Carroll’s website. I highly recommend that you go there – it’s leecarrollherbalist.com. There you can read that blog he was talking about, all about Royal Lee and putting mushrooms in Cataplex, so be sure you go check that out. He also has his mushroom course on there, which is phenomenal. If you want to learn more about mushrooms, he really, really is a wealth of information. Highly, highly recommended.
So thanks for listening today. Don’t forget – place your order with Real Mushrooms at realmushrooms.com, and when you place your order – whether it’s a new order or an existing account – just a $150 order, drop my name, and you’ll get a free bottle of Calm and Focus with your order.
All right, my friends. Take care. Have an amazing week. I’ll see you soon.