A biochemist doctor has warned of the dangers of eating mushrooms from marketplaces
Consumption of mushrooms offered by marketplaces is unsafe, Ludmila Tishchenko, a medical biochemist and advisor to the general director of Invitro, told Izvestia on January 19.
"Chinese medicine has been using mushrooms for a very long time for the therapy of certain conditions. However, from the point of view of evidence-based medicine, we cannot talk about the presence of a positive effect when using mushrooms as a medicinal product," she said.
The doctor clarified that no clinical studies have been conducted that meet all the rules and all the requirements to prove the positive effect of using mushrooms.
"The consumption of mushrooms, which are now widely offered by marketplaces, is actually unsafe. The whole point is that each of these mushrooms - hedgehog, reishi, cordyceps - has a fairly large number of subspecies in its area. And which subspecies was collected, where it was collected, how it was collected, how it was prepared, we do not know. Therefore, the use of such drugs can carry a number of side effects and may not even help health, but, on the contrary, harm it and cause very serious negative consequences," the expert explained.
According to her, fly agaric mushrooms, which have recently been actively sold on marketplaces, contain ibotenic acid and muscovisone. These substances are not contained in hedgehog, cordyceps and reishi mushrooms, so they do not have a psychotropic effect. But if we talk about the use of dried fly agaric, then here the situation is very serious, because both of these substances are psychotropic. They easily penetrate the blood-brain barrier, lead to the destruction of nerve cells and can provoke the development of mental illness, especially in people with a predisposition to schizophrenia. Use of these drugs can trigger the debut of a disease that was previously dormant.
"The scariest thing is when we read that mushroom-based supplements can have an antitumor effect, regulate the cardiovascular system, respiratory, nervous system, there are immediately a lot of both questions and concerns. As long as we use mushrooms as the main therapeutic drug, we can simply launch the disease and bring it to an irreversible stage. This is very dangerous, so you can't rely on what is written. We need to turn to evidence-based treatments and use them in therapy, but only after consulting a doctor," Tishchenko concluded.
Earlier, on August 2, 2024, Invitro medical expert Polina Kontzedailo told Izvestia that food high in sugars, saturated fats (fatty types of meat) and ultra-processed foods (convenience foods, fast food, industrial baked goods and sweets, chips) are harmful to the intestines. According to her, ultra-processed food contains high amounts of salt, sugars, various food additives and preservatives that can cause dysbiosis, which negatively affects the health of the whole body.
