Mushrooms as Medicine with Paul Stamets at Exponential Medicine

Well, it's my honor to be here and my hat is my favorite hat. I think it makes me look quite handsome. This hat is made from a mushroom called Amad. Amadu is a birch polypore and Amadu is a hardwood shell. And this mushroom. It is responsible for human survival not long ago there is no doubt that we all came from Africa we went to the north we discovered something new called winter Oops this mushroom allowed the portability of fire plus you can hollow out this mushroom, put fire embers inside and transport the fire for days and the keeper of our clans' fire thousands of years ago were absolutely critical to the survival of the clan.

Well, this mushroom has other properties and when boiled, it delaminates and turns into melio, a cloth, which is why some ladies in Transylvania have preserved it. This tradition is alive, so this thread of knowledge has been maintained for thousands of years and many threads of knowledge have been interrupted due to famine and war. Well, this fungus was first described by Hippocrates in 450 BC. C. also as an anti-inflammatory. As for abrasive wounds, another mushroom I brought, a mushroom friend of mine, is also a polypour wood cone and this one is aaran. Aaron is the longest living mushroom in the world.

It arose exclusively in the ancient forest now known only from northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia and one or two sky islands in Central Europe, Dioscorides described it in the first Materia Meda as elerium ad longum vum, the elixir of long life, and was suggested thousands of years ago as a treatment against consumption that would later be known as um. like tuberculosis, so I'm going to take you on a journey and I'm going to take a radical left turn in the middle of this talk and I'm going to present some data that has never been shown to anyone outside of my research team, so it's my honor to represent triple, since on June 9 of this year I was awarded as Ambassador of Inventions.

This is cool this is like the first audience to know what triple is so I don't have to explain it but it's a great honor um and I grew up in a small town in Ohio and my brother John um was my got me into science and he went to Yale my brother Bill went to Cornell and we had this amazing lab in the basement that they didn't let me have access to, but they went off to college and suddenly I had this fully equipped lab that included the radio from the Intrepid aircraft carrier that my father was using and after World War II he got the radio, so he was listening.

All kinds of things behind the Iron Curtain. I was having a great time, so my dream was always to live in the country, be a scientist and have my own scientific laboratory. Well, on June 9th I got that award. My brother John, we were competitive. and you know, as brothers, you love them 80% of the time and 20% of the time they piss you off, so John never really respected, you know, my interest in mology, what is this thing about

mushrooms

, but When did it triple? For me, this award was highly scrutinized. I said, Wow, you know, I can, I can, this is exciting.

Now I can tell my older brother John that I got this award so I called him and he didn't answer and then I sent him an email and that was the The day they discovered his body, John died of cardiac arrest standing alone I want to tell all of you who have brothers and sisters who bother you. You know, think about the good times and how life is so precious and so short, so this talk is. dedicated to my brother John, who was the first to introduce me to science, so my main topic is biodiversity, it is biosecurity, this is what we live in.

I live in Washington state, in the southern regions of the PED, it sounds um and I want to point out the largest body in the world. It is a mat of myelium that is 2,200 acres in size and is more than 2,000 years old and has a thick cell wall surrounded by hundreds of millions of microbes per gram of soil. We have several layers of skin that protect us from infection. The melium has a and yet it reaches the greatest mass of any organism in the world, how is that possible? Well, it is possible because it is involved in its own microbiome, it selects beneficial bacteria that it works in conjunction with and the melium is based on a network-like design, the melium is digested.

Nutrients Externally we share more common ancestry with fungi than with any other kingdom 650 million years ago we split from fungi and now a new super kingdom called Pisant has been published which unites Animalia and fungi together we exhale carbon dioxide when we inhale The oxygen and fungi can transmit the nuclei to their tips and due to epigenesis and the ability to adapt to change, this is one of the few organisms that actually benefits from disruption and therefore when these are disrupted, bifurcation epigenesis occurs. it reproduces rearrangement nuclei at the end, spikes, encodes new genes for new enzymes, acids to capture new foods and then the information is channeled back CH into the melal network, so I think using the epigenic properties of melium is a way of the future Of

medicine

.

Melium is much more ubiquitous than most people realize - virtually 90% of all plants have micro-risal fungi. It has now been determined that these micro race networks and the melum communicate across landscapes between plants and, in fact, all plants are F fungi, so any research into botanical

medicine

must take into account the contribution of the idic fungi that are associated within these plants because the medicinal properties conferred on them may come from the endemic fungi, unlike the plant itself, these honeycomb networks flow through the landscapes and I have these. epiphanies and I believe that habitats have immune systems and myal networks are the basis of the food web that unites us all now here is something that is that I grow a lot of melio, 20 to 30,000 kilos per week, we have a small business with 67 employees and this is Honestly, it's not fair that I can tell you this in 15 seconds.

What took me 30 years to discover the problem of growing melium in a laboratory. He is immunologically naïve. It is grown in pure culture. When you throw it on the ground, all these organisms consume it. Well, we soak wood chips or straw under water, salt water or fresh water for two weeks. Anaerobic Anor robes become predominant, then we take them out and drain the water and then the oxygen becomes a sterilizer, the anes largely die. The Sim AES are there and then the melum is immunologically educated this is a profoundly powerful mycelium it has an immune system and within this milium reside enormous amounts of bacteria which we did next in the sequencing here and this is a color heatmap a thousand-fold difference in the relative abundance of different genera of bacteria two different species of fungi selected from completely different constellations of bacteria, this allows melium to establish guilds and have commensal mutualistic organisms that it can combine with, allowing it to conquer habitats so big, we all know we have cancer. 41% of us will get cancer 21% of us will die from it, but did you know that 73% of all ants are anti-cancer drugs?

Medicines have their origins and the natural products we grow are around 500 different species. Presented here are turkey taales which are one of the best described and studied medicinal

mushrooms

in the world. We received a $2.2 million breast cancer clinical grant from the NIH for Phase 1 breast cancer and the results of the studies have been published and, depending on the dose, long before radiation, your system immune system is so active. uh and then when you consume 8 turkey tail mushroom capsules a day, there is an upregulation of natural killer cells and then after radiation, most of you know that the immune system is damaged and then you have you recover and then it depends on the dose.

After two weeks and then four weeks, the immune system kicks in. Natural killer cells increase dramatically and also cytotoxic cells from tea look at this significant value here, so the immune system is activated by consuming these mushrooms and there are tlr tlr4 receptors. I don't want to get into it now, but we have identified seven different immune system pathways activated by eating these mushrooms. This became deeply personal for me in June 2009, when my 83-year-old mother called me. she is a charismatic Christian she hasn't seen a doctor since 1968 she called me and said Paul I'm scared I didn't even recognize her voice she was shaking I told her what's wrong and she said my right breast is five times bigger than my left I have six angry, dark, swollen lymphatic notes on my right side, I said I couldn't believe it, I said why don't you tell me sooner, so I rushed her to the Swedish Breast Cancer Clinic in Seattle and then we got the worst news after On the second visit, the oncologist said he should have seen her two years earlier, the cancer was inoperable, they couldn't have it removed because of her age, they couldn't give her radiation therapy for the same reason: the likelihood of infection, etc. the oncologist tried to make the most of it saying you have lived a long life and we kept asking her how long and she said you are lucky if you are 3 months old the tumor is coming out of her breast through the meridian invaded her sternum and entered her liver so we had a circular meeting many of you have had this we planned for her funeral she chose a pink dress and bought the cheapest casket she could find because she was going to Jesus there are a lot of tears and then on the third visit the oncologist said, "You know what If your immune system could activate Patty, maybe you can beat this and then she said you know there is a study on turkey tail fungus that is being carried out at the University B Medical School.” from Minnesota Medical School, you might want to start taking turkey tail mushrooms, well that's what my mom said, well that's what my son was talking about, but he had to hear it from a doctor, so my mother started drinking turkey tail, she was on taxes for a short time. she had a horrible reaction and refused to take it and then she was taking septin off of her, a wonderful medication, well that was June 2009 and I'm happy to say my mom it's all gone, it's all wonderful.

Q, it was all color blind, so thank you for your prayers, I love you and I'll see you later, bye, she crossed a five-year disease-free period, she's totally cancer-free now, this led to a study that said, well maybe turkey tail mushrooms can improve the retina now there is good news that my mother survived but then she told me something that her oncologist told her of the 50 women who joined her seon program they enlisted in a new program in Ellensburg Washington where he enlisted of the 50 women 48 of them died my mother was the only one who took turkey tail with her septin, so how this is interesting on multiple levels, it has been described as the best result in several magazines medical.

She had no Chemin, no nausea, no loss of appetite, so she is happy and her insight has returned. She now she is smarter than and more. faster with its width than she had ever seen, so a series of other articles appeared last year. Turkey tail improves the microbiome specifically of lactobacillus and bidio bacteria while suppressing an anti-inflammatory bacteria, so this is extremely interesting because this speaks. to the fact that when we grow the myum mushroom in pure culture we see a resonant mutualistic population of bacteria that at first we thought were contaminants, but we now better understand that they are part of the fungal microbiome when we separated from fungi 650 million years ago we choose the route of circulating our food in a gastri in a sac in a stomach basically digesting the nutrients inside the melium went well externally just like we have a microbiome inside us, the mycelium is Select a microbiome also mutualistically to your advantage I am very interested in the viral connection with cancer.

There are seven identified viruses or probably many more that cause cancer. Then Fred Hutch Medical School called me and said we had a very interesting case with merco cell carcinoma, one of the deadliest cancers in the world, only 10 people have been reported to have recovered from it and I called the Nim hypothesis in honor of Paul Nim mdphd at Fred Hutch um and they had this patient who started taking a mixture of seven species of mushrooms um and this is immune evasion uh and then after taking the mushrooms there is no chemotherapy or radiotherapy you can't do nothing for these patients um and then after taking the mixture of seven species of mushrooms he had a spontaneous recovery and today he is alive, so we think that hides the cancers Discovery by the immune system, we don't know exactly how it does it, but We have seen this time and time again, your immune system is activated and your immune cells can discover receptor sites and the stroma of tumors, this could be expanded and useful in addressing many tumorssolids as a complementary therapy, so this case was also written up in the medical journals and then, um um haling, Lou and I submitted a request to the NIH to standardize the methodology for analyzing medicinal mushroom products;

It was going to be open source. but unfortunately the kidnapping happened and we didn't get funding for it, but it's a great article that I would love to offer to anyone who wants to see it. Melum produces extracellular metabolites and in these metabolite droplets there are all kinds of instant compounds. I was working with the US Department of Defense's BIOS Shield program directly after 9/11. We sent over 700 samples and these are the mushroom samples in particular, uh agaran RI and chaga, and this is the selectivity index and the h5n1 H3N2 H1N1 viruses um and the ri ofon is the positive control the selectivity index is an indication of anti activity our extracts were diluted from the mycelium 100 to 1 and this is the S activity index of the diluted extracts which were much more powerful than the pharmaceutical control at that timeWe did biog guided fractionation at the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy and we have identified a group of OLS.

This has not been reported in the literature. I've named it fpol, so we have our first API here. which are active against, in this case, smallpox viruses, now come from the same Aaron extract that was active against flu viruses, but we sent these structures to St Jude's University to be tested against h5n1. completely inactive, suggesting that there is more than one antiviral API present within these mushroom extracts. NIH called us three times in the last month. We have now presented 10 of these structures and a potential API for testing against Ebola and a large number of Other viruses that reside within these fungi are very interesting complex molecules that we are starting to discover, so after 10 years I finally received a opinion universality patent by the 10 patent examiners and it took a long time to get the patent, but I was happy to see that Vector in Russia published a paper two years ago authenticating that a gan is highly active against flu viruses.

This paper was published yesterday, so people are playing catch-up, but it's great that other researchers are authenticating what we had discovered now. Working with a gacon and Dr. Scott Fran Blau, director of the Tuberculosis Research Institute at the University of Chicago, we started experimenting and he started using our melum and we did bioga fractionation and found a new active set of anti- TB, chlorine. chlorinated coumarin now, this is interesting to me, this fungus has dual activity against viruses and bacteria, very few drugs cause most people who die from viral pneumonia to actually die from bacterial pneumonia, so having something neutral that can have a broad base against multiple viruses and multiple bacteria I think it is extremely interesting from a medical point of view, my wife and I spent a lot of time in the ancient forest, the forest used to be resplendent around the world and now we are facing a change radical in our ecosystems due to deforestation, so the composition and ecology of the forest have changed and 70% of the soils are composed of microbial mass of which 40% of the mass is fungal, but due to our practices of logging and harvesting and creation of monocultures that, repetitively, plant trees. leads to a premature decline in disease vectors, it spreads, the diameter of trees becomes smaller, that plurality of biodiversity of Ages of trees and their associated organisms is lost, we have truly changed the face of this planet, as well Now I'm going to make a radical decision.

Left turn, so this is the case. Let's imagine that hundreds of millions of years ago our ancestors and other organisms in the ecosystem have become accustomed to these resplendent forests and now we have deforested much of the planet and the deforestation continues at an incredible rate. Now in Sixx the sixth largest extinction event of life on this planet has entered and we are losing around 30,000 species per year out of 8.3 million species on this planet, which means that in 100 years we will lose more than 30% of the biodiversity on this planet, this is a time of practice, so a friend of mine came to me and said, Paul, I work a lot with entomopathogenic fungi that control insects.

He says: can you help the bees? and then Whole Foods provided me with this very interesting chart. Here are your bee dairy options and there are your bee-free dairy options. Bees are the great pollinators. 30% of the food in the supermarket is a direct result of pollination of pollination. 70% is indirect and President Obama presented a presidential memorandum and there. It's what we call it, we call it hexafecta, there are like six different converging stressors in the ecosystem, deforestation is one of the ones that bees now don't have the ecosystem that they evolved to take advantage of as part of their menu, their banquet back then because to pollution and one of the speakers mentioned that they tested his blood, he has a thousand different xenobiotic toxins present in his blood unprecedented in the theater of evolution, mites carry viruses and then there is the fact that bees are being truck hundreds of miles to almond orchards in the middle of the California desert in January and February, this is totally unnatural, so the bees fly away and when you see bees around a flower that is the last seven or 10 days of a life , the bees flutter. wings until the wings get shredded and the bees then with a colony collapse disorder the bees leave the hive and they just don't come back they just disappear now it's a very complicated set of stressors but just like there's a disorder of colony collapse, I suggest we are facing a cultural collapse disorder, this is a proverbial canary in the coal mine, so I had some very strange events in my life, much more than I can tell you, but I was growing Mushroom melum in my garden and this is 1984. and I went out to my garden and these are the mushroom beds and I said: wow, what's going on here?

I looked very closely and the bees had come to my mushroom bed, removed the wood chips and started sucking on my melum. I went, what is it? going here from day to night for 40 days for 40 days a direct flow of bees from my hives to my mycelium back and forth throughout the day the myum was reduced from about 8 or 10 inches to about 3 inches. Well, I noticed this in one of my books and Heros Smith magazine pretty much everyone ignored me. A beekeeper from Canada wrote to me well, maybe that's why they accumulate in saos, so it's okay, I put it in the back of my mind and then a friend of mine said: do you know what you can do? do to help the bees and I thought, well, you know, I had this very strange experience in my garden in 1984, so here's Dusty in the old forest and the bears scratched the trees.

Well, we used to have a lot of bears, but Tim's industry offered a reward. They killed the bears and only in the last 20 years have we done research knowing that bears bring salmon carcasses to the shores and return marine phosphorus from the ocean to the roots of trees, which is a limiting nutrient for tree growth, so which the industry did completely the other way around. The bears help the trees grow well, the bears scratch the trees and Dusty and I are walking in the old growth forest and on the South Fork of ho and we turn the corner and Dusty sees this bear scratching bam.

The bear scratched the tree, the best bear scratch I have ever seen. I photographed it and looked at this and wow, Tim's industry says that bears scratch trees and this causes a fungus to form that is related to a gacon, so it was. Two years later, there was that bear scratch, okay, so think about this and the bear scratched the trees and resin comes out and the bees go after the resins and get propolis, which is a very strong antimicrobial and they use it to patch, you know, spaces in the Beehive, so the red belt polipour was indeed growing on that tree where the bear scratched what we saw, so in a sense the ti industry is right, this is a parasitic fungus that kills trees and then it grows well saprophytically.

It is also interesting that the melum decomposes. pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, okay, so that's another box, another experience. I had the garden, now I walked through the ancient forest. A bear scratched. I looked, you know why the timber industry was trying to kill the bears and then this article comes out. These are all very very recent and it turns out that fungi produced pomic acid related to chlorinated coumerin which Scott Fran found, by the way, are active against tuberculosis and it turns out that the absence of pomic acid stops the upregulation of the cytochrome pathway p450 only in bees. they have 47 cpy genes, while most insects have 80 and the absence of peic acid from fungi turns off their monooxygenase pathway and therefore they cannot toxify this accumulation of all these toxins that become resonant as that raid farmers' fields sprayed with pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, okay, it's interesting, and then it turns out that when the EPA restricts many of these fungicides, insecticides and herbicides, they didn't look at the combination of all of them and it turns out that the Sublethal doses of these toxins defeat the microbiome in the bee's gut, so you have another problem.

What's happening here is not only is this cyto p450 monooxide pathway turned off, but the microbiome is now being damaged by glycosites, by the way, that's one of the Big C culprits, so Craig Ventner. I hope you're listening, so fungicide contamination in the fields is harming the resident fungi and now we don't have rotting logs, we have agricultural crops, many of the species are non-native, okay, so the beekeepers feed the bees with water sugary and up to 50 this is 50% water 50% sugar uh this is because they need to have the sugar obviously to feed themselves um and then the bees are transported in trucks hundreds of miles in this case the almonds and walnuts uh Orchards for pollination so The bees are now being fed pure simple sugars instead of the complex carbohydrates and polysaccharides that come from Bellum sweat, so I had an epiphany why don't we take our melum and my research team gets the credit for this and we came.

Let's go with Mico honey, it's made entirely of melium, it's like 90% sugars, but they're complex sugars and guess what it has pomic acid, it has antiviral agents, it has antibacterial agents, so we contacted Washington State University working with Dr. Steve Shepard. and Brandon Hopkins and we began doing a series of experiments feeding the bees melium extracts at different concentrations. This is called a stress test. They are in captivity. They only live 30 days when the worker bees fly out and do it. a pollination, if they don't return, the nurse bees are prematurely recruited to become worker bees and they fly away, abandon the brood, so it doubles every time fewer and fewer worker bees return, the nurse bees now have to go out and search pollen and food for the hive, so the larvae are abandoned mites and then proliferate, the mites inject viruses into the larvae.

Well, the mushrooms we are talking about, including my my hat amadu RI and chaga, are polyporous mushrooms in birch forests around the world. Apis malef, honey bees are from Europe, they're not native to North America, but they produce prodigious amounts of honey, so there's chaga, there's amadu, and there's red RI. We provide the bees with 12 different species, these are the three I'm going to talk about. I've never shown this before, this information just came in, it came in on sugar control, in one week the virus increased by 63% when the bees started slurping up the melium, the payload of the viral pathogen plummeted in these three different species, in a week. one week versus two, sugar control, the viruses you know increase dramatically and with the bees that were sipping the melium mushroom extract, the virus plummeted, uh, they went up here and they reduced it based on the dose, etc. . it also happened with a red Ri, so now we're trying to get the right concentrations and Al it's obvious now that if we use a combination of these, you know what benefit, what additional benefit it will be, but we don't know the way. of the bee tomorrow the Rosetta spacecraft lands on a comet 300 million years 300 million miles in space well we can find a comet we don't know the path of the bee now I've talked to entomologists about this, they talked to their friends Nobody has never mentioned this.

I spoke at a National Congress of Mology. I said any myologist out there there are 500 myologists. Has anyone heard of these bees? No one has bees go to rotting logs because of the immunological benefit that increases the defensive resistance of their host. The sugarscomplex. of nutrition and antiviral properties I am the first to have actually discovered this, how is this possible? We grew up with Winnie the Pooh reading it to our children, they go after the rotten logs and we don't know it. the way of the bees I think this says a lot, so Dr. Steve Shepard was so impressed that he provided this wonderful quote as an entomologist with 39 years of experience.

I am not aware of any reports that it has extended the life of worker bees. This spread is incredibly important, this is a period of high pollen acquisition, so if you increase the life expectancy of workers by 20%, it has a tremendous effect on a tipping point, a tipping point in favor of for the colony to survive, so I suggest let's be friendly let's multiply scientists from all disciplines we need to work together biodiversity is our biosecurity now think about the bigger picture here we were The people of the forest will evolve in the forest melum confers an immunological benefit to two animals, but it is unprecedented as far as I know that there is an antiviral agent that is properly active to help bees and also humans and these come from polyur fungi that reside in the forest that our ancestors depended on, so I want to conclude that human trees have fungi or all terrestrial ones.

Organisms have evolved to be interconnected within the melal network of life, the Earth's natural Internet, and I think the way of the future is to use the myal scaffolding with the mutualistic organisms in bacteria using epigenesis and then be able to make The corn feels and there is a response of being. capable of positively regulating genetic expressions that might otherwise not be present or upregulated in an organism, but quorum sensing could provide positive regulation of multiple genetic sequences that would otherwise be hidden in nature, this is the way of life, so as much as many of you are ultra-specialized, I want you to do it.

Think about the implications of what I am showing you today: we were once forest people for hundreds of millions of years we had forests that we are in contact with we are losing the perspective I have of the synergism and symbiosis of the ecosystem that has given rise to this birth. I think it's wise that we come full circle and re-investigate. Thank you so much.