“Triterpenes are believed to be ingredients that might have something to do with lowering cholesterol.”Īncient Chinese textbooks said reishi would help people live longer, “enhancing vital energy,” while the 2000 edition of The State Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China once recommended it for palpitations, insomnia, and to “ease the mind.”Ī brochure for the Four Sigmatic elixir echoes the general wellbeing and heart health claims, saying “reishi reduces the possibility of heart disease” by lowering the LDL cholesterol levels and blood pressure.

These two ingredients are what give reishi its reputation for being a “sacred fungus” and the “mushroom of immortality.” “Polysaccharides are believed to stimulate white cells and the immune system and possibly be involved in preventing new blood vessel growth, which has an anticancer effect because cancer cells growing rapidly need a good blood supply and encourage blood vessel growth to nourish them,” says the reishi researcher Benzie. What’s left is a powder supposedly concentrated with the two main components of reishi: polysaccharides and triterpenes. Four Sigmatic makes the products by drying out the fungi, which they get from southeast China, boiling them for roughly 12-24 hours in water and alcohol and then putting the mixture into a “spray-drier that uses pressurized hot air” to remove the liquids. “Indigenous cultures would use reishi to make a tea or soup, but many people don’t drink soup on daily basis, and tea didn’t catch on,” says Tero Isokauppila, the company’s CEO. One company that has received some recent press for trying to cultivate the use of reishi in the West is Four Sigmatic, which sells a reishi hot cocoa mix (a box of 10 packets costs $20) and a reishi elixir, a powder that also contains various herbs (a box of 20 packets for $35).

The long dark reishi tea