By Dr. Glenn Rothfed, MD DBMA 

If you think mushrooms are white things that get put on pizza, you’re missing a lot. One of the hottest areas of herbal medicine is the study and growing awareness of medicinal uses of mushrooms and other fungi. From cordyceps, the fungus claimed by the Chinese olympic team to be responsible for their recent successes, to ganoderma (Reishi) mushrooms being used as immune and energy enhancers, to Kombucha tea (technically not a fungus but a collection of different organisms) for, well, everything, this neglected area of botanical medicine is coming into its own.

One of the most exciting substances becoming popular is the Maitake mushroom, or Grifola frondosa. Maitake is also called Hen of the Woods, since it sticks out from trees in the wild. In fact, until less than 20 years ago, maitake was not cultivated at all, and thus not well known. This has changed since a series of Japanese studies have shown a plethora of possible uses for this unique substance.

Maitake, like other mushrooms, is rich in polysaccharides. In this case, b-D-glucans is present in high doses, as well as other polysaccharides of all kinds, phospholipids, nucleotides, and unsaturated fatty acids. The result of these components is that maitake seems to lower blood pressure. It also has been found to lower cholesterol (without lowering the important HDL fraction), and lower blood sugar in non-insulin-dependent diabetics. Although many of these studies are on animal models or are preliminary, the possibility of a non-toxic (maitake has no known side effects) alternative to drugs in these conditions is promising.

Another promising area of investigation is the possibility that maitake protects the liver from the effects of hepatitis. Shiitake and maitake mushrooms both seem to have hepatoprotective effects in studies done.

But the effects of the D-glucan fraction on the immune system are the newest area that makes maitake a hot property. This portion of maitake has been shown to have a stimulating effect on interleukin-1, on natural killer cells, and on macrophages. The result of these effects, mostly in animal based studies, shows anti-tumor activity in a wide variety of solid cancers. In humans, it is being studied in liver and stomach cancer in China, breast and colon cancer in the U.S., and in Kaposi’s sarcoma, the virulent cancer seen in AIDS patients.

Since this fraction seems to be water soluble, it appears that maitake tea might be helpful in boosting the immune system, though the extracted D fraction is the one that has been studied. For its blood sugar and blood pressure lowering effects, it is usually given in capsule or powder form. And, mushroom hunters may occasionally come upon this mushroom in the wild, dancing amongst the trees in the eastern U.S. (”maitake” means “dancing mushroom” in Japanese).