Choose Organic Medicinal Mushrooms
Consumer standards of what foods and supplements we are putting into our bodies are becoming an increasing issue, including with regards to organic functional mushrooms. Non-organic farming practices need lots of ugly chemicals in order to maintain consistent harvests. Not only do these non-organic farms use ugly chemicals; more often, farming practices are damaging the soil in many ways.
Organic farmers eschew the use of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fungicides. But they still need ways to keep pests at bay and keep crops growing.
This falls in the domain of permaculture: the practice of designing farming ecosystems that are resilient and self-sustaining. Organic farming is not just free from chemicals, the practice is far more environmentally sound and sustainable.
It is another step in saying that we care about our planet, our bodies, and our health.
Learn more: How to tell if mushrooms are bad
Farming Organic Medicinal Mushrooms?
Mushroom farming is quite different from vegetable farming, and it is a new field in the U.S. First, it is largely done indoors, in a far more controlled environment. But regardless of the type of farm, it is good to know where the food is coming from.
Organic standards are as important with mushrooms as with vegetable crops, and they are often intertwined. Unlike plants, mushrooms do not produce their own food. They metabolize it, their enzymes have an amazing ability to break down an enormous number of compounds down to simpler nutrients. Most mushrooms depend on farm waste as their food source, so it is essential for these plants to grow in environmentally-friendly, chemical-free, Certified Organic environments. By buying organic mushrooms, you are supporting an excellent organic agriculture system, which also permeates into organic vegetable farms.
To get certified organic, traceability is incredibly important. It is essential that you can track down every ingredient that goes into growing an organic mushroom, and this includes even cleaning agents used to mop your floors or clean your dishes! Every ingredient should come with a certificate of analysis (CoA) which serves as a verification that the lab, third party, has tested those ingredients for chemicals, biological contaminants, and has even DNA sequenced them, making sure that they are what you said they were.
While mushrooms typically have the ability to decompose chemicals through their enzymatic abilities, there is still a strong chance toxic chemicals will be infected in mushrooms that you are growing. Heavy metals such as aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, and lead are at their most basic elemental state, so they cannot be broken further. If the mushroom is digesting a substrate that contains these metals, then these metals are going to be absorbed and accumulate super-highly within the mushrooms that will ultimately grow, leading to potentially toxic levels of heavy metals, should those mushrooms be later extracted and concentrated for use as an active extract.
Learn more: 7 common backyard mushrooms
Recap
Support organic certified vegetable/fungi farming in order to limit the toxic chemicals in our soil, water, humans, and protect life’s biodiversity. You want to ensure a company uses transparency and traceability to keep an eye on what is going into every batch of your Organic Mushroom Extract. No toxic chemicals, bio-products, or heavy metals ever make it into your system! Create resilient systems that will enable the human race for a bright, clean, healthy future!
At Health By Mushrooms, we strive to promote only the highest quality, certified organically grown mushroom products, grown in-house whenever possible (some of our ingredients, such as Chaga, can be responsibly gathered only from the wild, in a clean environment, which is in our case, Siberia).
In addition to our farming standards, we also do our best to ensure the companies that we partner with and promote feature mushrooms that are regularly tested for heavy metals, biological contaminants, chemical contaminants, and tested for key compounds such as alpha-glucan, beta-glucan, cordycepin, adenosine, ganoderic acid, etc.
We want to raise the standard to ensure that the general public is getting only the best possible products from medicinal and functional mushrooms, while also ensuring the Earth has benefited.
