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- Could chaga treat oral cancers?
Hi there 🍄
This week’s highlights include:
chaga’s potential anti-cancer properties 😲
our top mushroom book recommendations 📚
Maine’s mushroom boom with guest author Matt Greaney 💥
and Madge Evers, an artist who captures mushrooms through cyanoprints and spore prints. 📸
Life-changing chaga 🍄 According to researchers from Dankook University, South Korea, chaga mushroom extract could potentially combat oral cancer.
Over 54,000 people are diagnosed with oral cancers each year in the U.S., and the disease claims 11,000 lives annually. Traditional cancer treatments like surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy are often successful, especially if the cancer is caught early.
However, these methods might also bring severe side effects and health complications, such as tissue damage, trouble speaking or swallowing, and a reduced quality of life.
What is chaga? 🌲 Chaga mushrooms don’t have a cap and stem. Instead, they grow out of dead or dying trees as solid masses of tightly woven mycelium called conks. Chaga is not usually eaten like other gourmet and medicinal mushrooms — powder and liquid extracts are best.
Wide range of benefits 👍 Chaga mushrooms are rich in antioxidants and possess anti-inflammatory, immune-boosting, and anti-tumor properties.
Got the goods 🛡 Chaga contains several other compounds with anti-cancer properties: syringic acid, protocatechuic acid, and 2-hydroxy-3,4-dimethoxybenzoic acid.
Chaga’s effect on cancer 🧫 Researchers prepared a concentrated chaga extract to test its impact on cancer cells. The chaga reduced the number of cancer cells while also stopping their development — literally preventing the cancerous cells from multiplying.
No energy = cell death ⚡ In the experiments, chaga also suppressed glycolysis — the process cancer cells use to break down glucose for energy. Without this crucial energy, the cancer could not continue to advance.
Additional research is necessary to explore these anti-cancer properties and optimize chaga’s potential as a supplemental therapy. Yet the results of Dankook University’s study are a groundbreaking, optimistic step in the fight against oral cancer.
Need some fun summer reading? Say no more 😎 Nature writing inspires each of us here at shroomer. This week, we’re highlighting six of the best mushroom reads for new shroomers and expert fungi fans alike — works of mycological excellence that continually deliver new perspectives on our relationship with nature.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 💸 Through a series of in-depth essays, Tsing explores globalization as represented by the matsutake mushroom. Look forward to topics as diverse as Japanese gourmet food and culture, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, and the massive scale of human destruction in the modern age.
All That the Rain Promises and More: A Pocket Field Guide to Mushrooms by David Arora 🔍 If you’re looking for a mushroom field guide filled with identification info, humor, and wit, this book is all that and more. Think of it as a tiny taste of David Arora’s more exhaustive work, Mushrooms Demystified.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer 🌿 In this masterpiece, Kimmerer unravels Westernized understandings of plant medicine by probing the intersections of myth, history, science, and kindness.
MycoMedicinals: An Informational Treatise on Mushrooms by Paul Stamets 🧔 As one would expect from Paul Stamets, this book offers unparalleled insights into the health benefits, history, and cultural context behind 17 unique medicinal mushroom species.
Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora 📕 Here it is — the ultimate tried-and-true resource for fungal fact-checking. Mushrooms Demystified belongs on the shelves of beginners and experts alike thanks to its thorough taxonomic detail and bright spots of humor.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake 🧠 Like Tsing, Sheldrake connects the mushroom world to the modern age, daily life, and the future of human wellness. If you want to dive headfirst into the wondrous side of mushrooms, Entangled Life is a mighty fine place to start!
Maine brings mycology to the masses 🌳 When I moved to Maine in 2015 the state’s beautiful shoreline, food, beer, and agricultural scene had won me over. I got my ag. growing chops in Vermont but the ocean ultimately won out, and I chose the Gulf of Maine over the Green Mountains of Vermont partially because it felt like what was happening in Maine aligned more closely with the salty attitude I had grown to love.
Mushrooms were mostly frowned upon growing up as a harbinger of decay, darkness, mystery, and at worst, poison — probably best to just stay away. On one fortuitous day in 2010 however, I went into the woods with a couple friends and found a handful of morels. I was psyched to add mushrooms to the list of foraged treasures that I could identify along with roadside elderberries, autumn olives, and ramps.
I was soon gifted a copy of Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets from a friend in Vermont, and my interest was further piqued…
Ecological preservation meets art 🖼 Madge Evers preserves the fungi-filled woods of Massachusetts through cyanoprints and spore prints. Her art visualizes the decomposition and regeneration processes of nature that often go unnoticed and unappreciated by human eyes.
shroomer’s Vivian Kanchian sat down with Madge to chat about nature, art, rediscovering passions, and the relationship between plants and fungi. I heartily recommend reading through the full chat with Madge Evers, and here are just a few reasons why…
Organic art forms 🌏 “When I started making art again [after a long hiatus] it just happened organically. I was gardening, which I think is a creative process. And when I began spore printing, it kind of blew my mind. All these connections from the past just began firing away. So, I pursued it. It was like the mycelium re-ignited that creativity that had been lying dormant.”
Spore printing process 🍄 “The spore print is a really straightforward process, which is as simple as putting mushrooms on top of black paper over a period of about 6-10 hours, and then the mushrooms release their spores. And I just kind of catch them onto the paper. It’s really not hard. So, you may do this at home for sure.”
Sunlight prints ☀ “Cyanotypes [are] an alternative photographic process where you coat paper with a light-sensitive solution, and then expose it to ultraviolet light. I like to expose it to sunlight, and I can do it in the window during winter. It just makes the process longer.”
Bioluminescent spores 🎃 “I have some mushrooms that I really love to collaborate with, and that seem to want to express something. Jack-’o-lantern mushrooms are amazing. They’re a little harder to come by where I live … they’re very prolific with spore production, and the spores are bioluminescent. Not that that really shows up in the work, but it lends the work a special quality so I love them. They just end up being really textural and thick and wonderful.”
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Thank you for reading!
shroom on,
Shannon Ratliff & Patrick Calderale
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