The Best Turkey Tail Mushroom Powder in Australia
Are you on looking to purchase the best Turkey Tail mushrooms supplements in Australia? This guide will help you understand this medicinal mushroom and ensure you’re getting the highest quality product. Turkey Tail is growing to be one of the most commonly consumed medicinal mushrooms in Australia.
Incorporating Turkey Tail mushrooms into your daily life can help improve your health and may help with the treatment of certain medical conditions. If you’re looking to buy supplements or already taking them, it is important to consider their quality which will influence their effectiveness. After all, there are many products in the Australian medicinal mushroom industry that are inferior in quality and may not have the desired effects. This is particularly important when using Turkey Tail to treat serious or potentially life-threatening illnesses.
This being said, Turkey Tail and other supplements will rarely cure an illness on their own. They should be used in combination with a healthy lifestyle and potentially other conventional/alternative therapies. Having a high-quality supplement will ensure that Turkey Tail has its intended effect and can help in the treatment. Consuming low-quality products may not only be a waste of money, but it could reduce the effectiveness of treatments compared to using a high-quality product.
What determines a high quality Turkey Tail Mushroom Powder?
Mycelium vs Fruiting Bodies
A lot of people ask us: Which products are better: the ones containing mycelium or fruit bodies? But before we get to it, let’s first understand the basics.
In the fungal kingdom, most people identify a mushroom by its cap and stem. This is known as the fruit body or the reproductive structure. Now, the majority of the mushroom exists underground, in soil, wood, or other material on which it is growing. This filamentous web-like structure is called the mycelium or the vegetative body.
The benefits of functional mushrooms are derived from their active compounds (like beta-glucans) which are found in abundance in the fruiting body of the mushroom.
Commercially cultivated Turkey ail is the mycelium grown on grain, sawdust, brown rice, oats, or wood chips. This is then dried and ground into a powdered form. While it is a simpler and faster process, and many studies do show the medicinal properties of mycelium, there are problems with mushroom products that are based on mycelium.
The most important issue is that the resultant mushroom supplement is of inferior quality. Essentially, it is mostly grain with some added mushroom mycelium. Turkey Tail mycelium produced on grains is low in fungal-derived compounds such as beta-glucans and high in plant-based starch.
Read the ingredients on the Turkey Tail mushroom supplement package to see which part of these fungi the producer used. It is always best to choose the one that is derived from the fruiting body as they contain higher concentrations of bioactive compounds than colonized grain products.
When a product does not specifically list the source of turkey tail in its product, you might be faced with a product that uses mycelium instead of the fruiting body.
Certain mycelium products may be produced with 100% mycelium. While the mycelium itself is medicinal, it is the non-bioactive grain materials that degrade the quality of many mycelium-based products.
Some studies even show that mycelium colonized grains may be helpful in the treatment of disease as they do have bioactivity.
Extraction
Another important thing to look out for when selecting Turkey Tail supplement is the extraction method.
For starters, the beneficial bioactive compounds in medicinal mushrooms like Turkey Tail are entrapped within the cell wall of the fungus. They are made bioavailable by different extraction methods.
While it may be tempting, for some, to try some of the raw Turkey Tail mushrooms, our bodies lack the enzyme to break down the mushroom cell wall. So, you are going to get few, if any, benefits. Besides, it’s kind of hard to chew the tough and leathery raw Turkey Tail.
That is where extraction comes in. So how is Turkey Tail mushroom extracted? They can be conducted in several different ways but the most common methods of extraction are done using water and alcohol.
Water extraction
Water extraction is done by simmering the Turkey Tail mushroom in hot water for several hours so that the water-soluble compounds are extracted out of the chitinous mushroom wall.
Protein-bound polysaccharides or beta-glucans are water-soluble, and turkey tail has many of those.
There are two types of beta-glucans in Turkey Tail:
- Polysaccharide K, also known as PSK: Is a beta-glucan commonly used in Japan as an adjunct therapy in cancer treatment.
- Polysaccharopeptide, also known as PSP: Is another beta-glucan that is commonly used in China for cancer treatment. It has chemicals like arabinose and rhamnose.
As the mushroom is packed with several water-soluble polysaccharides, a hot water extraction method keeps the beta-glucan levels high.
Alcohol extraction
There is a lot of debate as to whether Turkey Tail mushroom requires an alcohol extraction as the most important compounds are water-soluble. However, triterpenes in Turkey Tail are not water-soluble. To get the benefits of this compound, the mushroom should be alcohol extracted.
In tinctures, 20% alcohol content is usually used to ensure their shelf life. Since alcohol does not contain much of bioactive compounds, high content of alcohol is not necessary for Turkey Tail tinctures. It may even result in lower potency.
What is the ideal extraction method?
For most mushrooms, the most effective method is a dual-extraction using both water and alcohol and also why it is called “dual”. But for the case of Turkey Tail Mushrooms, hot water extraction is sufficient enough to isolate the water soluble compounds.
What are extraction ratios?
Extraction ratio simply means the volume of mushroom that was used to make the extract. For instance, a 4:1 extract would mean it took 4 lbs. of Turkey Tail mushroom to make 1 lb. of the extract.
You may be tempted to buy a mushroom with a crazy high extraction ratio. However, you should note that this number also depends on several physical characteristics and the density of the mushroom rather than the thoroughness of the extraction process.
What Is The Beta-Glucan Content Of The Turkey Tail Supplement?
Beta-glucans are the primary mushroom compounds that give their health-supporting functions. The most reliable and trustworthy producers are going to mention the number of beta-glucans in their products.
Both beta-glucans and the grains on mycelium-based products are polysaccharides. It is therefore important to discern between these two while reading product labels. A Turkey Tail supplement of high quality should contain low quantities of starches (<4%) and large quantities of beta-glucans (10-40%). If the label only mentions the polysaccharide and the total beta-glucan content, make sure the polysaccharide doesn’t exceed the beta-glucan content by more than 5%.
Australian grown Turkey Tail vs Chinese grown
It is important not to disregard Chinese grown Turkey Tail. China is the largest producer of Turkey Tail mushrooms in the world and has been growing and cultivating medicinal mushrooms for centuries. The majority of the best quality Turkey Tail products are grown in China. After all, Turkey Tail and other medicinal mushrooms have been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine for thousands of years, long before usage by Western society.
While some cities of China have high rates of air pollution which can negatively affect the quality of soil, most Chinese mushrooms are grown in rural provinces in mountain communities. This is something to consider when purchasing Turkey Tail products in Australia. We suggest always looking for a Certification of Analysis that has stringent testing and on heavy metals and pesticides.
Certificate of analysis
If you are unsure of the quality of the Turkey Tail product, ask the Australian producer for a third party Certificate of Analysis (COA). A Certificate of Analysis from a third party lab is important to identify the beneficial compounds (eg. beta-glucans, PSP, PSK) in the Turkey Tail product, as well as to avoid heavy metals, pesticides and other foreign contaminants. Heavy metals that are typically tested for range from arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. If an Australian producer does not have this on their website, they may be able to provide a COA upon request.
Organic
Certified organic Turkey Tail products ensure that your products do not contain herbicides, fungicides or pesticides and other harmful chemicals. Look for the Australian Certified Organic logo stamp of quality and integrity on the label of the bottle or pouch.
