Words of the Week: Mushrooms and Immunity from the Washington Post
(Continued from full article)
“Over the years, these frustrating experiences have prompted me to take a closer look at nutrition and herbal research. Take that soup: Unlike standard pharmaceutical cold preparations, which study after study has shown do little to block symptoms or speed up recovery, ginger and mushrooms have the potential to help, and with virtually no ill effects. Indeed, a phalanx of lab-coated scientists have finally convinced me of something that generations of traditional Chinese and Japanese healers, and my great-grandmother, already knew to be true: Ginger is an excellent decongestant, and mushrooms boost your immune system.
Some of the most compelling mushroom research has been done by Keith Martin, a nutritionist at Arizona State University and author of more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Martin and his colleagues have tested a variety of common mushrooms, such as white buttons and shiitakes, and found that in the presence of viruses such as those that cause cold and flu symptoms, all of them can raise the levels of the immune system’s proteins to three to five times normal.
Although mushroom extracts and supplements have gained popularity on store shelves, with promises that they can stop the spread of cancer and help manage infections, Martin cautions that no one has been able to definitively pinpoint the substances that give fungi the immune-boosting qualities he has identified. “Nutrition researchers have gotten themselves in trouble before when they tried to find the magic bullet in foods,” he says, referring to studies where high-dose nutrient extracts given to reduce a cancer paradoxically caused a cancer spike in the study participants.”
- Daphne Miller for the Washington Post
