← What's That Rash?
What's That Rash?
Can functional mushrooms really help treat cancer?
00:20:53
The use of mushrooms in medicine goes back centuries, but there’s still a lot to learn about the bioactive compounds in fungi. There are many claims surrounding 'functional mushrooms' – types of mushrooms thought to have medicinal properties beyond simple nutrition. These include lion’s mane, reishi, cordyceps, shiitake and turkey tail. Norman and Tegan forage through the evidence for using mushrooms against cancer, to boost the immune system and to amplify cognition. We're doing a live show! Catch What's That Rash? at the World Science Festival Brisbane on March 30th. References: Aboriginal use of fungi Medicinal Mushroom Supplements in Cancer: A Systematic Review of Clinical Studies Fungal beta-glucans as adjuvants for treating cancer patients – A systematic review of clinical trials A review of the effects of mushrooms on mood and neurocognitive health across the lifespan Mushrooms magnify memory by boosting nerve growth - University of Queensland
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- [00:01]
A
Listen. That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6E Tron. The sound of captivating electric performance, dynamic drive and the quiet confidence of ultra smooth handling. The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV. This is electric performance redefined. The fully electric Audi Q6E Tron.
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B
ABC. Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
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C
You grew up in Scotland, Norman?
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B
Yes, I did, reputedly, yep.
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C
Famously. Did you go foraging, like mushroom foraging as a kid? Is that a thing that people do there?
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B
Yes, people do, just like here. And because it's cold and damp, particular mushrooms grow. But you were always warned as a child not to do that because one of them might kill you. So. So we went foraging for blackberries.
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C
You know, safer juicier too. That's nice.
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B
That's right.
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C
Did you know the largest known organism on earth is a mushroom? Well, the mycelium, which is sort of the fibrous root like structure of a mushroom.
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B
It's the mummy of mushrooms.
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C
It's the mummy of the mushroom. It's a honey mushroom and it's in eastern Oregon. Take a guess at how big you think this is.3 metres long. Oh, come on, go. So much bigger than that.
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B
Oh, really?
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C
Yeah, yeah, Huge, huge, huge, huge.
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B
Kilometers.
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C
890 hectares and it's more than 2,000 years old.
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B
My goodness.
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C
So big. Shout out to Armillaria. I'm probably mispronouncing that. Osterj, which is the botanical name for it.
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B
So keep your feet off those hectares while it produces the honey mushroom.
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C
Exactly.
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B
And there's a very famous forager, Paul Stamets, who's supposedly one of the world's leading mycologists in this area, although I don't think he's got an academic position. And he's covered the forests of Oregon and so on, picking up mushrooms and identifying them. And in fact, Michael Pollan, in his book Changing youg Mind. I think that's the name of the book. I should remember the name of the book. I interviewed him at the Sydney Opera House. On it, he features Paul Stamets a lot. Because some mushrooms are mind bending and that's not what we're going to talk about today on what's that Rash? Where we answer the health questions that everyone's asking.
- [02:23]
C
Everyone. Specifically, Terry and Carolyn are asking about functional mushrooms, I. E. Mushrooms that do good for your health and are not psychedelic. So Terry says, I'm really curious to know the science behind the functional mushroom craze. I have come across a huge amount of information about how using fungi such as turkey tail, cordyceps and lion's mane can have huge health benefits, including improvements in brain function and performance. And Terry references awesome mycologist Paul Stamets, who's convinced that taking turkey tail as part of a treatment program saved his mother from cancer. Some proponents claim that using fungi is biohacking. But Terry wants science and research. What products available could actually work? And Carolyn also asking. I've been seeing a lot of content online advertising functional mushrooms as a health product to boost things from cognitive performance to the immune system and even energy and libido. Carolyn says, is there any evidence to support the health benefits offered by these products?
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B
Well, let's take on functional mushrooms this week.
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C
And yeah, I think from the very top, we need to be quite clear what we are and aren't talking about with functional mushrooms. On one hand, we're not talking about button mushrooms, the sort of thing that you'd buy from the supermarket that you would have with eggs on toast on a Saturday morning.
- [03:43]
B
Although they could have health effects.
- [03:45]
C
Sure, sure. But like, I think that's not what the main claims are around here. And we're also not talking about psilocybin, so called magic mushrooms and the psychedelic effect. It's this particular group of mushrooms that seems to have maybe there certainly claims that they have extra special health giving properties, but not psychedelic properties.
- [04:04]
B
And as we know, we're also not talking about the poisonous mushrooms, but the poisonous mushrooms illustrate that mushrooms, these fungi can produce very potent substances.
- [04:15]
C
Exactly. And I think that's a nice place to start because I feel like, Norman, especially on this show, you're kind of often starting from a place of a lot of skepticism when there's health claims being bandied about. But the thing with mushrooms specifically is that for thousands of years humans have been using them in medicine.
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B
Yeah. You know, history goes back to the Neolithic period. In fact, there's an iceman who was carrying around mushrooms.
- [04:39]
C
Oh, I mean Otzi the Iceman, who doesn't love an Otzi story. So that's the guy who was found, I think in a glacier some time ago now. He lived nearly 5300ish years ago and he carried two types of mushrooms that were tethered in a pouch. We wasn't just kind of like stuffing them in there. They were there intentionally. And there's lots of other ancient texts that refer to mushrooms. There's a Chinese book which is sort of the first book that's completely devoted to the description of herbs and their medicinal value. It's called the Shen Nong Ben Kao Jing from the Eastern Han Dynasty of China, supposedly written by someone called Shen Nong, which means the divine farmer. And they're sort of illustrated in this book as kind of a wild man. He's cloaked in leaves. He's holding like a sprig of berries. And one of the sections in the book is about several different mushrooms and their beneficial effects.
- [05:29]
B
And we should put this all in context, because while the tendency is to become skeptical about these things, how medicine developed and pharmaceuticals and the idea that you could take substances to help yourself derived from the natural world, and almost certainly you had hominids observing the animal life around them, what they were eating when they seemed to be sick. They were much more sensitive to the natural world. And they could also identify plants, presumably, that were toxic, that they should avoid. And some of these old Chinese texts are probably part of a reflection of the observation of the natural world and the breeding. So we bred grasses to become wheat and more edible carbohydrates. And we would have also bred botanicals that would have been good for us, or so we thought.
- [06:21]
C
Mm. And of course, we in Australia are the site of the oldest living continuous culture in the world. Of course, Indigenous Australians, and they have oral history, so it's a little harder to see the through line. But in different Aboriginal groups around Australia, the smoke from burning certain types of mushrooms was inhaled by people with sore throats. There's even one desert truffle like fungus that I was really curious to see. One of the uses of it, one of the many uses of it is it could be be rubbed into the armpits, and when rubbed into the hair, it prevents growth. So lots of uses for mushrooms and.
- [06:59]
B
For skeptics like me, where I'm kind of naturally skeptical about some of this stuff. I can't have it both ways. If I'm going to tell you. Got your bell ready?
- [07:10]
C
Does that answer your question?
- [07:11]
B
Of course.
- [07:12]
C
I think I can see where this is going.
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B
I can't say to people, you must eat the diet, Mediterranean diet. And by the way, for watch that rash listeners who are not podcasters of the Health Report, I recently did an interview on the Health Report where the interviewee, an eminent psychogeriatrician, brought his bell into the studio to illustrate the Mediterranean diet. Anyway, tell people, it's so good for you having these whole foods. Cause they've got natural compounds in them, bioactive compounds which reduce inflammation, reduce alternative stress, et cetera, et cetera. And then say, well, it's all bullshit about mushrooms because we are saying that the natural world has a lot to offer us and in fact that's what we rely on. So let's just suspend too much skepticism right at the beginning here.
- [07:56]
C
Yeah, so we're saying, okay, there's probably something here. So let's dig into these specific claims that the mushrooms that Carolyn and Terry were talking about, the ones that are being marketed as functional mushrooms, we're hearing claims around anti cancer immune system boosting cognition and possibly amorphous things like energy and libido. Let's talk through the evidence.
- [08:20]
B
The evidence is not great. Unfortunately at the moment it's poor studies published in second rate journals to be cruel about it. In a sense, not all by the way, but some. So it's hard to actually get a sense of where things are at. There are a few reviews of the evidence and it's clear that some of these mushrooms have compounds in them which have significant effects, for example on the immune system. Beta glucans are one example of these. And these are known to have immune effects on the signaling system and the immune system. And in theory that could have anticancer effects. There are also substances in mushrooms like other foods which are bioactive and reduce inflammation and oxidative stress like many other foods.
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C
When we're talking about anti cancer though, are we talking about preventing cancer from starting or fighting cancer? If you've already got it, Fighting cancer.
- [09:12]
B
When you've already got it, but not by itself. So the interesting research that's been done in is that either some of these mushrooms can reduce the toxicity of anti cancer drugs. Now when you reduce the toxicity of an anti cancer drug, you actually increase the effectiveness because it means either they can increase the dose or you have fewer periods where because of side effects you have to stop the drug. It's quite often on cancer chemotherapy that you have to have a rest from it because of the toxicity. And that rest period could be a time when the cancer cells return or you risk greater resistance to the drug itself. So if you can have continuous therapy that is better for you. Now if some of these mushrooms reduce the toxicity of these cancer drugs because of their anti inflammatory effect or even a direct effect on the mechanism that produces toxicity, then that's really good for you because it means that the cancer drug's more effective. The other idea here is that because of the effects on the immune system, you, you make the immune system more effective in working on the cancer itself. A lot of this is theoretical where the substances themselves are studied in the test tube or in animal models and they seem to have that effect. The question then is, do you get enough of it from the mushroom or do you actually have to have the synthetic compound? And there's a fascinating study from the Queensland Brain Institute recently. They've synthesized a compound from lion's mane mushrooms and found that in the lab and in preclinical studies in animals, it induces nerve growth and could be a way of treating, say, for example, dementia.
- [10:52]
C
Oh, that kind of speaks to the cognition claims.
- [10:55]
B
That's right. Remember, this is extracted from the mushroom. Now, when you extract it from the mushroom and you're giving it as a drug with potential side effects, you're unlikely to have side effects if you're taking the whole mushroom. And you may actually get more benefits here.
- [11:09]
C
Like you say, is it in high enough concentrations in the mushroom to give the benefit, or how much of the mushroom do you have to be eating to get the benefit?
- [11:15]
B
And the same goes for helping out in cancer. So people are studying these. The good thing these days is cancer researchers are less likely just to poo poo these things and throw them out. They're prepared to take on research into this, but it's hard to do and to fund them because you've not got a drug company involved. As soon as you synthesize it, which is what the Queensland Brain Institute is doing, you can actually patent it and develop a drug. You can't patent having lines mean mushrooms in your omelette.
- [11:41]
C
Mm. So we've talked about cancer. You sort of mentioned the immune system on the way through, and cognition. What about some of the other claims? Things like reducing stress, increasing energy, increasing libido.
- [11:54]
B
Those are attributes of a compound which have a very high placebo effect in that.
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C
Those are things that are easy to induce a placebo effect.
- [12:03]
B
Yeah, they're psychological. They're about a sense of wellbeing. And as soon as you've got that, rather than a physically measurable thing like a change in your immune system, those things are much harder to measure and generally considered more liable to be a placebo effect. Not necessarily a placebo effect, but very hard to separate from a placebo effect. So if you get it, that's terrific. But quite possibly you've been led to believe that you're going to get it. But it could be because when you take on these mushrooms, you're actually taking on a much healthier diet. And there's no question that a healthier diet. I'm trying to avoid the bell here.
- [12:39]
C
I'm gonna get it anyway.
- [12:41]
B
It's associated with a Greater sense of well being. This is the whole nutritional psychiatry thing about how actually what you eat can change your mental state, because it's quite possible these change the microbiome and therefore change your psychological state.
- [12:56]
C
So how is that different to any old mushroom that you eat? Like mushrooms are good for you, they're good sources of nutrients. How much, maybe are you just getting the benefit because you're eating shrooms and not eating, I don't know, lollies?
- [13:08]
B
Good question. And just as more mainstream medicine is very bad at measuring drugs head to head, you don't get many head to head studies of normal mushrooms versus functional mushrooms. So we don't know the answer to that question. But yeah, normal mushrooms are pretty good for you. It's the fiber, it's the polysaccharides and the other substances in foods which do change the microbiome because they give a different fuel for the bugs in our bowel. And it could be just any mushroom does, but it's possible that some functional mushrooms do it better than others.
- [13:41]
C
I am interested to talk about the method of delivery because a lot of the products that Carolyn mentioned there, I've seen them advertised as well and they're often found.
- [13:50]
B
So when you say method of delivery, are you talking about.
- [13:52]
C
I mean, it's all oral. I'm not talking about chucking a mushroom anywhere else. Norton, you can just calm right down there. No, no. I guess the format that the mushroom arrives in your body in, is it a powder that has become processed to a point where it's really shelf stable. But perhaps maybe those active compounds are concentrate versus a raw mushroom versus a cooked mushroom. Surely the way that the mushroom's processed is going to affect how it behaves in your body.
- [14:19]
B
Our research suggests that in fact the powdered form is how they get round.
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C
The placebo because you don't know what you're taking.
- [14:25]
B
You're taking one powder versus another. The problem with powder is, I keep on coming back to the same thing is who's made it? How standardized is it? Where are you getting it from? Does it have contaminants in it? There are all sorts of risks, but also benefits of the powder in that you're taking it in a concentration. But remember, as soon as you take it in a concentrated form, you take it as a drug with possible side effects rather than in the natural form with all the CO factors that go along with the whole food. The other answer we don't have is heated versus not. And it's likely that heating will change the nature of the chemistry of the food as well.
- [15:01]
C
So it feels like you've come to this with a lot less skepticism than maybe I expected. To come back to Terry and Carolyn's question as to whether the claims around functional mushrooms are borne out by the evidence, whether they're worth people maybe spending money on supplements. What do we say?
- [15:18]
B
Well, you can always find a study that will support your belief or what you want to believe about that mushroom. Some of these studies are really not very good. And when you take it in the hole, the science is not terrific. But we're not finding a big signal of harm here and we are finding interesting signals of benefit. It's possible that one day you will get drugs which are derived from mushrooms which have standardized doses and have proven effects. I just want to re emphasize what we said earlier about cancer. The cancer research in mushrooms has been using the mushrooms alongside cancer therapy to make the cancer therapy better or indeed induce some changes in the immune system which might make the cancer fight easier, but not as the sole treatment.
- [16:04]
C
Yeah. Proceed with caution. Big, big asterisks around this and the amount of research that's around to support.
- [16:11]
B
So be careful. We would not encourage in the Australian environment to go out foraging for mushrooms unless you really know what you're looking at. Probably safer buying the whole mushroom. In other words, you know what you're getting rather than necessarily a powder and you've got no idea what's in it and that the whole mushroom itself is unlikely to do you any harm and may well do you some good.
- [16:28]
C
Well, Terry and Carolyn, thank you both so much for sending in your question. If you have a question, you can send it to us. We have thatrashbc.net au and that email address is also where you can send your feedback on mouth taping. Lots of people wrote in to share their mouth taping stories and how nose breathing changed their lives. Norman, I actually have a piece of feedback for you because you simulated the snore of sleep apnea. And my husband listens to this show and dared to tell me that instead of sleeping like a beautiful princess that I sometimes snore like that. And now I'm worried I have sleep apnea.
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B
Just a. It's probably with you it'd be much more delicate than your husband's. It's probably much more like rather than. Don't you think?
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C
Yes, absolutely.
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B
Very gentle sort of thing.
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C
Very gentle, very beautiful, inspiring and actually quite seductive. Anyway, David says I have been using mouth taping for a couple of years and not as a result of social Media. He was doing mouth taping before. It was cool, Norman. No dry mouth, no snoring and a good night's sleep. And then he finishes to say sorry to hear about Norman's nose and to.
- [17:36]
B
Explain for those, the one or two of you who don't listen to. What's that rash regularly. I have a nasal septal deviation, which. Which is probably why it didn't work for me.
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C
Amelia says about the Buteyko method. As another 1960s Glasgow kid and as a childhood asthma sufferer, I remember being sent for weekly breathing lessons at the hospital, which I realised when listening to you must have been the Buteyko method or something like it. In through the nose, out through the mouth, counting, blowing up balloons and told to go swimming at the Woodside swimming Baths.
- [18:06]
B
That's great, Jimmy. You know, you can just imagine what it would be like in Glasgow to darling the butake of me. So breathe in. Yeah, yeah, hold it out. In through your nose and out through your mouth. No, no, not that way. You want to do it the other way. I can just imagine what it was like. It's great.
- [18:18]
C
Did you ever go swimming at the Woodside Swimming Baths, Norman?
- [18:21]
B
No, no, I went to Calder Street Baths.
- [18:23]
C
Calder being the operative word there.
- [18:24]
B
No, no. C, A, L, D, E, R. I knew you, but you had to queue outside for your 45 minutes inside and they blew a whistle and you went in and you went into a booth and changed. You went into the pool, which was hot and steamy and paddled around and then they blew a whistle and you had to get out and change and then the people who were waiting in the queue got in.
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C
I can hear your accent getting stronger as you're talking about that memory.
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B
Yeah, I know.
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C
And one more from Ralph, not his real name, has been diligently taping my mouth shut every night for the last 23 plus years. I started after my mother, who suffered from asthma, did a Buteyko breathing course. She thought it would be good for me because of my chronic sinus infections. Ralph says I'm going to use a made up name because my wife has always thought what I do is quite peculiar and although she accepts it helps me, it's always a bother that she can't talk to me anymore after I tape up. I usually have to do it after the lights are out and the last words have been spoken.
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B
I can imagine that causes a lot of tension.
- [19:22]
C
No, it's great. She could be able to talk without being interrupted. It sounds like a dream to me.
- [19:26]
B
Yeah, but usually you want an answer, don't you?
- [19:28]
C
Well, that's true. Well, send your feedback and your questions to that rash@abc.net au and we've got.
- [19:34]
B
Big news for you.
- [19:35]
C
We sure do.
- [19:36]
B
Tegan and I are going to be at the World Science Festival in Brisbane on March 30 at 10am at the Queensland Museum Theatre recording what's that rash?
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C
And you can be in the audience. We want to meet you in along and if you send in your question and you're going to be there in the audience, we might even answer it live.
- [19:52]
B
So even if you're not in Brisbane, fly in just for the event. I'm sure Qantas will look kindly on you.
- [19:58]
C
You do have to book tickets for this event. You can do that by going to the World Science Festival Brisbane website. And again we're on March 30th at 10am in the Queensland Museum Theatre.
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B
Come along. See you then. Meantime, we'll see you next week.
- [20:10]
C
See you.
- [20:19]
B
Sam.