Best mushrooms for immune support

Turkey Tail is the banded bracket fungus on every dead log in the northern hemisphere. It is far too tough to eat, which is why it has always been prepared as a decoction, and that is exactly what our extract is: hot water, 10:1, fruiting body only.

The 50% beta-D glucan figure is the reason it leads this page. Reishi and Maitake test at 30%, Chaga at 10%. If you are buying a mushroom for its polysaccharide content, this is where the number is highest, and it is measured on our own batches rather than quoted from a paper.

Maitake is hen of the woods, the big clustered polypore at the base of old oaks. Unlike most of this page it is a mushroom you can actually cook, savoury and faintly peppery, and the powder goes into stock or eggs as easily as into a drink.

Ours is a 10:1 hot water extract from fruiting bodies, tested to 30% beta-D glucans. The studied fraction is usually called the D-fraction in the literature, which is a description of its beta-glucan rather than a separate ingredient.

Reishi is the hard, lacquered bracket fungus of the Chinese materia medica, and it is genuinely bitter, which is why most people take it in capsules.

Ours is a 10:1 hot water extract from fruiting bodies, tested to 30% beta-D glucans. Hot water decoction is the traditional preparation and the method behind nearly all of the human research.

Take it in the evening. It is the only extract on this page with a time of day attached to it, and taking it in the morning is the usual way to decide it does nothing.

Chaga is the black, cracked mass on a birch trunk. It never forms a fruiting body, so what we extract is the conk, a dense mass of fungal tissue and oxidised birch wood. Any brand selling a Chaga fruiting body is describing something that does not exist.

It is the most drinkable thing in the range, dark and faintly vanilla, closer to a weak coffee than to a mushroom. It was traditionally drunk daily through the winter across Siberia and the boreal north.

Its beta-glucan figure is 10%, the lowest here, and we publish it rather than round it up. Chaga is not a high beta-glucan species and a Chaga claiming 40% is worth questioning.

Agarikon is a chalky white bracket that grows high on old conifers, slowly, over decades. It depends on genuinely old forest, and where that forest has been logged it has largely gone with it.

It is wildcrafted rather than certified organic, because it cannot be farmed. Every other mushroom on this page is cultivated, which is what makes certification possible. We say so on the pack rather than printing a seal it has not earned.

Ours is a 10:1 hot water extract tested to 30% beta-D glucans, the same figure as Reishi and Maitake. Scarcity is exactly the condition under which products get padded, so that measured number matters more here than anywhere else.