Benefits of functional mushrooms: What the research shows

“The medicinal or functional benefits of mushrooms, promoted for thousands of years in the East, are gbmushrooms steadily gaining recognition in the United States and other parts of the world,” Akua Woolbright, who holds a Ph.D. in nutritional science and is the national nutrition program director for Whole Foods Market’s Whole Cities Foundation, tells TODAY.com.

Unlike many viral food fads that do nothing for health, Woolbright says this is one she can get behind. “While I don’t promote foods made with functional mushrooms as cure-alls, less-processed or refined products can be a part of a healthy lifestyle. The dietary choices that we make on a daily basis have a compounded effect. The positive changes we make, big or small, add up over time.”
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Woolbright points to a randomized, double-blinded, controlled study published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience in June 2020. Participants with mild Alzheimer’s disease showed a significant benefit in reducing cognitive decline after orally taking three capsules containing lion’s mane every day for 49 weeks when compared to the placebo group.

Another literature review looking at the medicinal properties of mushrooms (one aspect that makes them “functional”) published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences noted: “Many clinical investigations have shown very encouraging or promising results, thus underlining the great potential of mushrooms in therapeutic applications.”

However, the same review cautioned that a single species of functional mushroom can be sold in varying doses and preparations with different manufacturing practices and have different claims associated with it. (The U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t approve claims or labels on dietary supplements before they’re marketed and takes action on misbranded products only after they reach the market.)

“In the absence of standardization, significant differences can be found even in different batches from the same manufacturer,” the authors of the review wrote.

Friedman also cautions that studies that have found that higher mushroom intake can have protective effects on brain cognition in older adults don’t necessarily prove that mushrooms are the cause of better cognition, he says.

“Maybe people who had better cognition like mushrooms and eat more of them, or is it that mushroom-eating enhances cognition?” he explains. “That’s the problem with observational studies, and all of nutrition has that problem. And even if you try to control for all those factors, they’re mostly short-term studies that are a snapshot in time. So it’s impossible to know.”