What To Look For In The Best Lion’s Mane Supplement
There’s a whirlwind of functional wellness products wafting around on the web, and the rise of medicinal mushrooms means you are truly spoilt for choice. But which Lion’s Mane supplements are worth your time, money and hope?
From adaptogenic gems to brain boosters, there’s a Lion’s Mane product claiming to be the best option. Beware the low-quality imposters, but you should also know how to spot the real deal when you see it.
Here’s how to choose the best mushroom supplements and unlock the power of Lion’s Mane…
Why Quality Should Matter To You…
Like any other supplement out there, there are good and bad products on the market. Lion’s Mane is popular because it works, and with great popularity comes great responsibility…
Many companies see the demand for functional medicinal mushrooms, and they mass-produce a cheaper, lower-quality product in response, trying to capitalise on a trend. Like with pretty much any product, low quality means poor results.
If you were to take poor-quality Lion’s Mane capsules, you won’t get the same benefits, if any at all. That’s because quality supplements are made with your goals in mind, so your mushrooms are grown, harvested, produced and packaged in specific ways that all add up to an ultimately powerful supplement.
Trim down on any of those important steps, and you just won’t be getting the results you’re expecting.
Peek Inside The Package - Mycelium Or Fruiting Body?
Lion’s Mane, our hericium erinaceus hero, is a fascinating medicinal mushroom with its benefits firmly rooted in traditional medicine practice. There’s more to this shroom than meets the eye. Sure, it could be tasty fried with your steak, but it can also help to unlock the incredible potential of your mind and body.
With that being said, surely you could grab a bunch of Lion’s Mane in any form and devour it, expecting to get all of its popularly studied antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immune-boosting and neuro-protective benefits.
But it’s not as simple as grab and gobble. Lion’s Mane supplements typically come in two forms, mycelium and fruiting body.
Mycelium is essentially the mushroom’s roots (or brain, depending on how much of a mushroom scientist you consider yourself). It’s a network of thread-y structures and is what every Lion’s Mane mushroom starts as.
It’s usually grown in stuff called substrate, like grain or sawdust, and mycelium is where the fruiting bodies - the actual mushrooms - grow from.
It’s easier to wrap your head around fruiting bodies since this is the visible, edible part of the mushroom. It contains the key properties like beta-glucans. Now, these guys are extremely important if you wanna get anything out of your supplements. Low beta-glucans means barely useful shrooms.
Because of this, fruiting bodies are generally considered the more potent, more useful, part of the mushroom. Unfortunately, the supplement market tends to offer mycelium as a budget-friendly offering. So when you’re on the hunt for Lion’s Mane supplements that will do you real good and not just fill up your medicine cabinet, check that you’re getting fruiting bodies, not just a mycelium mush.
At the same time, you want to be sure it IS the mushroom you’re getting in your supplements at all, and not a bunch of fillers and bulking agents like grains and rice. At TwentyTwo, we take the simple approach - single ingredient, no fuss, no filler. We like it that way because it gives you that potent Lion’s Mane effect without the faff.
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Tinctures Versus Capsules - And How They’re Extracted
Lion’s Mane tinctures aren’t as witchy as they may sound. They’re a liquid solution made by soaking dried mushrooms in an alcohol (sometimes with purified water, too) solution. But tinctures come with a big but.
When you pit them against powdered capsule extracts, tinctures simply can’t pack the same punch. The tincture-making process is pretty fiddly, and means the active compounds in the mushroom can get broken down a little too well by soaking in the alcohol.
On top of that, tinctures are usually more diluted by nature, so you need more buck for the same amount of bang.
And, uh, in our experience, not everyone wants the taste of alcohol with their health-boosting supplements. All in all, powdered extracts in capsule form are the winners, especially as the process simply entails drying and grinding the mushroom fruiting body into a potent powder. It’s simple, has less room for error, and makes for a more user-friendly dosing experience.
So, if you have to choose, choose capsules.
And on that note, keep an eye on extraction methods, too. Similarly, all mushroom supplements have to be extracted to get the goodness ready and accessible to your body.
Typically, hot water extraction is considered best because it preserves those all-important beta-glucans. Alcohol extraction might give you a wider spectrum of compounds, but you could lose some oomph in the process. And dual extraction is kinda like the best of both worlds, if you don’t mind the alcohol part.
So take a sec to check if your supplements used an extraction method that aligns with your wellness goals!
Your Lion’s Mane Origin Story
How your Lion’s Mane was grown can affect the final product quality that ends up first in your online shopping basket and then in your stomach! There are two main methods for growing Lion’s Mane that are destined for supplements, and one involves wandering around the wilderness looking for a few fortunate sproutings out in nature.
There’s a pretty obvious problem with that, though. There’s no consistency or quality control. There’s no way to tell if you’ve grown a high-quality mushroom or a polluted and soggy fungus.
Out in the wild, mushrooms can grow from and absorb all sorts of wacky elements in their surroundings. A pretty obvious example would be that a mushroom growing in a forest is 100% more likely to have been peed on by a fox than a mushroom growing in a controlled environment.
And that brings us to growing option number two. Lab-grown Lion’s Mane offers a much more controlled and predictable mushroom. TwentyTwo, for instance, cultivates mushrooms using sterile, organic methods where we can control the process from growth to extraction to packaging.
That way, when we say we’re giving you a premium quality shroom, we know it’s true. Of course, this meticulous approach means more work and investment for us. But we happen to think it’s worth it if it gives you the actual results you’re looking for.
Dose It Right
The old adage of ‘more is always better’ doesn’t reeeally apply to Lion’s Mane supplements. Different brands will recommend a different dosage for the products, but usually, if they’re telling you to take loads, it’s because they’re delivering insufficient active compounds. So you’re the one getting short-changed while you buy up a tonne of their supplements.
If you ask the scientists, they generally agree that an effective dosage range for Lion’s Mane sits somewhere between 1000mg and 3000mg, if you want to reap the antioxidant, neurohealth and anti-inflammatory benefits of Lion’s Mane.
Beware of deceptive advertising, where proceed dosages don’t take into account the dehydration of the product! At TwentyTwo, transparency rules the roost. Our supplements contain a robust 1800mg of fruited Lion’s Mane per daily dose, so you get the full experience.
Scrutinise The Source
In a world where the labels on your supplements might be a bit deceiving, it’s worth putting in your research to make sure the Lion’s Mane you’re getting is 100% pedigree.
What we mean by that is - do you know what’s inside the supplements you’re taking? Are they testing it for any nasties?
At TwentyTwo, we take testing seriously, subjecting every batch to lab examinations for heavy metals, contaminants, and active compound concentrations. We make the results easily available to you so you can shop and munch our Lion’s Mane with peace of mind.
Finding The Best Lion’s Mane Supplements Isn’t All Science
The world of Lion’s Mane supplements is a real jungle of options. But, armed with the knowledge of what matters, like mushroom form, extraction, dosage and origin, you can make a safe choice. You can definitely roar about the amazing results when you give our quality Lion’s Mane capsules a go. Choose wisely, and let the Lion’s Mane magic begin…
