|
What's
Up with the Fungi?
by Jill
Nussinow
Press Democrat: Healthtime
Page 1 2 3 4
Mushrooms are a great addition to soups, stews, stir-fries,
side dishes and veggie burgers and loaves. They taste great,
too. All the mushroom experts that I spoke with recommend
fully cooking your mushrooms to help make them more digestible.
Dr. Camarata suggests that mushrooms' main components are
water soluble and the nutrients are most available in soups,
stews and dishes that use liquid and that you consume.
"I recommend that people eat shiitake, oyster or maitake mushrooms three times
a week. They are an A+++ food and we're just beginning to discover what they
do," says Dr. Camarata.
The reason that mushrooms can now be recommended for their
medicinal benefits is that more than 20 species are currently
being produced commercially so that they are available on
a consistent basis. They are still expensive because the
mushrooms are not always easy to grow. You can grow the part
that doesn't fruit in a much shorter time and use that part
medicinally but some, including Lareau, prefer the actual
mushroom. This means for his maitake mushrooms he must wait
five months for the fruiting body versus three and a half
weeks for the mycelium. And some mushrooms, like Cordyceps
(caterpillar fungus), either needs to be gathered from 13,000
feet up in the Himalayas and found growing out of a caterpillar.
(Yes, it sounds strange but it's true.), or the spawn can
be made into a tincture. According to Lareau, the main chemical
component, cordycepin, is in the mycelium.
To stay healthy in the winter Lareau drinks reishi tea three
or four times a week and finds that he rarely gets sick.
In fact, some studies in Japan have shown that mushroom producers
are healthier than the average worker. Perhaps just being
around the fungi has a positive health effect.
One of my Santa Rosa Junior College students, Noriko Shoji,
told me that in her native Japan people eat mushrooms as
food and don't really think of them as medicine. "We like
shiitake, shimeji (a type of oyster mushroom) and enoki.
We eat them because they taste good." And maybe that's reason
enough for you to eat them, too.
Page 1 2 3 4
Related
Information
Fresh
Shiitake Stir-Fry
Nutrition
Information
Mushroom
Varieties
Resources
top
|
