A Guide to Functional Mushrooms and Adaptogens

What Does Adaptogen Mean?

Adaptogen is a category, not an outcome. It describes how a plant or fungus has traditionally been classified, and it tells you nothing on its own about what any particular extract contains. Functional mushrooms are the fungi that fall under that heading: lion's mane, cordyceps, reishi, chaga and turkey tail.

What is worth reading is one level down, in the compounds. Four classes account for almost everything a certificate of analysis will report, and each is drawn out of the mushroom a different way.

The Four Compound Classes

Fruiting Body or Mycelium

The single most useful thing to check on a label. A whole fruiting body extract is made from the mushroom. A mycelium grown on grain product is made from the fungal root network cultured on rice or oats, and the grain comes along with it. Grain is starch, starch is alpha-glucan, and a large polysaccharide figure can be mostly that.

See how a laboratory tells the two apart, and how we choose what goes in the jar. Every Alchemy Dose extract is made from the whole fruiting body, never mycelium grown on grain, with its compound figure disclosed per batch.

Where the Word Came From

Reishi appears in the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing roughly two thousand years ago. Keeda Jadi is recorded in Tibetan practice. Lion's mane is Yamabushitake in Japan, named for the mountain ascetics. We describe these traditions as history and culture, not as health claims, and we publish the compound figure from each batch so you can read the mushroom rather than the marketing.

NOT FOR MEDICINAL USE. These are foods and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Marketed and sold by Nutradose Private Limited under FSSAI License No. 13326999000107.