In this episode, Eric Puro returns to discuss the powers of Functional Mushrooms with Teemu Arina. As the CEO of Kääpä Biotech, Eric is at the forefront of unraveling the science behind fungi and their profound impact on human health.

Eric and his team have revolutionized mushroom cultivation in Finland, setting new industry standards and outpacing the competition in terms of extract potency and quality.

Eric is a member of the executive committee of the International Medicinal Mushroom Society, amplifying his commitment to advanced use of Functional Mushrooms.

Learn more about Eric and Kääpä at https://www.kaapamushrooms.com!

This conversation was recorded in November 2024.

Check https://biohackersummit.com for upcoming events & tickets!

Devices, supplements, guides, books & quality online courses for supporting your health & performance: https://biohackercenter.com

Key moments and takeaways:

00:00 Introduction by Teemu Arina

01:00 Mushrooms in the "early days"

02:57 From a scientific standpoint, the clinicals are there

03:49 Growing up in the Nordics and Baltics

04:50 Chaga every day for 10 years

05:42 When Eric first started growing mushrooms

07:12 The importance of a personal relationship to growing

08:04 Walking barefoot in Nuuksio

09:52 Symbiotic relationship between mushrooms and trees

10:45 How mushrooms learn what to feed on

11:39 They can decompose plastic

12:34 How fungi came to decompose cellulose

13:59 Protective biochemistry

16:03 Scientific reductionist compartmentalization

17:03 Why our immune system isn't always great

18:23 Mushrooms preserved Ötzi

19:20 Forests hold thousands of mold species

20:16 Healthy exposure to dangerous things

21:52 The Circle of Life

23:24 What can I do with these mushrooms?

25:08 How Kääpä works with third-party university labs

25:44 Lion's Mane vs. Coffee vs. Placebo

26:27 How Teemu uses mushrooms

28:10 "Reishi is giving me crazy dreams"

29:26 What Cordyceps does

30:45 The Last of Us and cordyceps

31:07 Eating Lion's Mane

31:59 Eating vs. extracts and tinctures

32:14 Bioavailability in water and alcohol vs. ultrasonic extracts

33:47 Turkey Tail in Europe

34:22 European food regulations are a crazy mess

35:26 Suppression of information and understanding in the US

37:16 If you're working with corrupt pharma, pack your bags

37:58 In food innovation, we are shooting ourselves in the foot

39:14 Peer-reviewed journals in Europe are bought and paid-for

40:44 Questionable products vs. Nordic Mushrooms

42:01 Be careful buying mushroom products on Amazon

43:18 Functional Mushrooms are a growth market

44:17 Kääpä is coming to the Hololife Summit!

44:58 Visit kaapamushrooms.com

48:57 Anecdote about Siim Land

49:54 Biohacker's Retreat in January 2025

Music.

Welcome to the Biohacker's Podcast. My name is Teemu Arina and now we will be diving

into one of my favorite topics, which is functional and medicinal mushrooms.

My guest today is Eric Puro from Kääpä Biotech.

You might be familiar with all these mushroom tinctures and powders and all

of that that are on the market and their company is producing some of the highest

quality mushrooms extract out there.

So if you want the active ingredients and you're not paying for hype,

this is the product to go after.

It's also available on the biohackercenter.com store.

Without further ado, welcome to the show, Eric. Thanks, Teemu. Well, good to be here.

Wonderful. Let's just, you know, talk about the term.

So originally when I run into these mushrooms, we were talking about Chinese

medicine and adaptogens in the early days of biohacking,

medicinal mushrooms was a popular term, but because of regulatory crackdown,

we can't say it's medical anymore or medicinal.

So now it's functional, like functional medicine, right?

The science is very clear. If you go into PubMed and you search for most of

the popular mushrooms like reishi or chaga or cordyceps, you will find a ton

of information about how these affect humans.

Now, these are modern discoveries, but these have been used for thousands of

years in traditional cultures and folk medicine and herbalism to treat different conditions,

to also support the immune system,

even topically helping to get rid of infections.

There's so many uses for these so-called functional mushrooms.

What got you interested in it?

Yeah, I guess my interest in functional mushrooms is just mushrooms in general.

I mean, I think we were just talking before we started recording about your

new mushroom growing device.

And I think, yeah, I mean, there's just a, it's fascinating,

right? I mean, it's just such a weird thing. Like they're decomposing wood.

They're creating this incredibly strange amount of different bioactives.

And I think from a supplement standpoint or from

a human health standpoint you know looking at things that

are squishy soft you know

don't have teeth or claws a way

of running away from you you know these are going to be really great things

for a source of bioactives because that's their only defense mechanism so mushrooms

are a perfect kingdom and group of of species to start to look at and go hey

what's the bioactive i think that unknown when we started the company back in 2018.

Before the big mushroom boom, you know, just, hey, like, what is,

this is very interesting.

From a scientific standpoint, the clinicals are there.

PubMed research is there. We're 10,000 human clinicals on, you know,

adjunct therapy to cancer and chemotherapy.

But what are the new things we could look at? What are those new compounds that haven't been studied?

They don't have even really good testing assays developed for them.

Where is this going to be picked up by biohackers? And that's what we started

the company with. So we're very happy to make a relationship with you and the

biohacking folks with your summit.

And now Hololife, right? Hololife. I think this is going to be the podcast because

we haven't talked about it.

And when this podcast comes out, we will have made this whole company called Hololife.

The next one is 14 and 15 of June.

I think that is a much better term than biohacking, but I'm going to give a

deep dive into that in a different upcoming episode.

Let's go into the origin story. Most people in the Nordics and also in the Baltics

have grown up with their parents going into the forest picking mushrooms.

It's part of our culture. Also in Russia, my parents took me into the forest.

So I learned many of the mushrooms myself as a child and I loved collecting them.

I picked up the things that grow on the ground. I only discovered these so-called

polypore mushrooms way later from my co-author, Jakko Halmetoja,

who was one of the co-authors of the early first Biohacker's Handbook.

Before that, he wrote a book about chaga mushroom.

For that book, he had to get the latest evidence on many things.

Some of the most interesting articles were not even available in English.

They were available in Russian or German. So he translated a good amount of that original stuff.

He was very interested in adaptogenic plants and herbalism in general.

And with chaga, since I met Jaakko, I have been basically drinking chaga every

single day for over 10 years now. I have rarely been sick.

Maybe it's biohacking, maybe it's going to sauna regularly, but I think these

mushrooms have played a role by having them as part of my daily routine for so long.

The first mushroom I grew myself was a shiitake mushroom. It was available from

a store as a block. I bought that and I grow some.

And like you mentioned that we had a little discussion on my growing,

but now I have been growing lion's mane, which is one of the most popular hyped

mushrooms for cognitive performance and increasing neurotrophic factors.

What was your first touch with mushrooms? What got you interested in it?

You told, you've set up this company, but I'm curious, why are you interested in mushrooms?

Yeah, I started to grow them myself. I was living in Kentucky,

in the foothills of the Appalachia Mountains.

I bought about 30 hectares of land there.

And I had three springside waterfalls on the property.

I mean, it was like, it was gorgeous place. Just, you know, many people don't

know this area of Kentucky is the most biodiverse temperate zone ecosystem in the world.

There's passion fruit growing, there's pine trees. I mean, it's insane place.

Just magic, magic forest.

And so we were building a house, we were going to live there. And I was like,

man, I really enjoy permaculture, the art of developing food systems that are

very much in line with nature, require very little maintenance,

are inherently regenerative,

mimicking effectively how Native Americans, Native people, and now we found

out in the Amazon as well, have cultivated that forest, right?

We know that in the Amazon, for instance, there's higher than naturally occurring levels

of nut trees fruit trees trees that have some

human benefit so i said okay great this stuff's all cool i was

you know working with all these people and focusing on this a lot in my life

i was uh planting and growing a lot of different nut trees and fruit trees building

and designing these permaculture systems and i said what about fungi and everyone

goes what what's fungi so i go okay pretty much there's a lot of people here

doing really great work on the plant side of things and the plants and the trees

and everything but no one is caring about below ground.

So I started looking at mycorrhizal fungi, ectomycorrhizal fungi,

abuscular mycorrhizal fungi, all different kinds of fungi. Then I started to grow myself.

And I think that personal relationship I had with actually cultivating the substrate,

autoclaving it in pressure cookers, inoculating that with different strains of fungus.

Gave me a really intimate connection to that fungi and a real reverence for it.

And I learned that process and how it works, I just became fascinated like a kid.

I knew that I wanted to work with fungi in my life. There's a lot of untapped

potential there and that we're going to see some major things happen over the next few decades.

So when I needed to make a company, it's like, well, okay, let's do something with fungi.

I got together some mycologists and proper scientific folks,

bought a few companies and put it all together and just got going with CAPA.

Right. And you end up in Finland, I guess, with the typical story of a woman, right?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Always, always this way. But,

you know, my ancestry is from Finland.

So, I mean, when I got here, I took my shoes off and I was walking to Nuuksio.

And I mean, for people who don't know Nuuksio, they should go.

It's like an amazing place. It's lakes.

Most amazing national park in the whole world. I just love that place.

Yeah, it's really special. And the moss and the blueberries.

I was there in July, August. So perfect season, lots of light.

And the understory in the forest, I love finished forest because there's a big

gap between the high trees and the low understory.

So you can see through the forest very nicely.

The low story is like blueberry bushes that are 10, 20 centimeters high.

There's mushrooms growing. It's kind of wet. There's moss. So if you want to

take your shoes off, walk in the forest, it calls you to do that.

And you get hungry, you scoop down and grab some blueberries or some bulica,

cranberries or lingonberries, and then move on.

And I just felt for the first time, I traveled the world 15 years or so before

that, living on $2,000 a year, hitchhiking around and learning from people.

So when I got to this forest and I started walking around, I said,

God damn, this is my home. This is my ecosystem.

I need to be. so he was both my beautiful

finnish wife and the beautiful finnish forest it was just

game over i'm stuck absolutely wonderful

story you're sharing here like flackers like

grounding and i agree there is nothing better on moss in the finnish forest

it's like a pillow it's so great Nuuksio is one of the places where i go mushroom

hunting very often in the autumn and also picking up these wild blueberries

and now in terms of the excitement on mushrooms for you in the early days,

it's very good that you brought up your permaculture background because soil

is the one thing that people are talking about that is important.

And what I think about mushrooms is that if you have a tree or a plant and it's

lacking some nutrients,

it has a symbiotic relationship with the mushroom that helps it to access nutrients

that are not immediately available to its root system.

So that, to me, is incredibly fascinating.

And you also mentioned about growing this ecosystem in a way.

Permaculture also requires healthy soil, and mushrooms can help to extract things

like heavy metals out of the ground.

I remember Paul Stamets discovered some of the mechanisms of healing polluted

areas. Maybe in war zones, we could potentially fix the soil by using mushrooms.

Can you talk a little bit about that soil?

Yeah, so there's people doing that right now. Mushrooms are...

Incredibly adaptogenic themselves right they send

out hyphae from the mycelium and at

the tips of every one of those hyphae they have these little sensing devices each

of those sensing devices can identify the portfolio of

different food that they can consume so let's say

there's 70 things right and so it goes you know

the hyphae bumps into something goes hey what are you oh you're not

on my list see you later it goes to the next one what are you did it

and and through genetic mutation this list

gets bigger randomly and so they bump into

something they go okay you're on my list great and they eat it and then they

actually go okay wow that actually was tasting good gave

me nutrition i could absorb it everything was fine and then instantly they could

tell every other single tip of the hyphae that hey this new thing add to your

list so it's like instant spreading of that knowledge across hectares besides

some of these mushroom organisms and so what it eventually Actually,

what we know is mushrooms can decompose plastic. They can eat plastic.

They figured out how to decompose that. They figured out how to decompose and

not decompose heavy metals because that's impossible.

They're an element. They can't be broken down. But absorbing them, they can eat them.

They can break down radioactive material. We find them in Chernobyl.

We find them helping to heal large swaths of forest after the Chernobyl disaster.

They can do it quite rapidly.

And there's actually a mechanism and a process for anyone who's interested.

You can train fungi to do this more rapidly than waiting for random mutation

to allow it to be interested in something else so you can actually train there's

a lot of guides online where you can learn how to train fungi to eat different

stuff because I think you know fungi in nature they're really decomposers.

Before the boom of fungi, back in the dinosaur age, right? The comet came down,

blew everything up. Oh, crap. It blocked out the sunlight. So what happened?

All the plants died. And in some areas, there was like, what was it,

10 kilometer deep piles of wood that just wasn't being decomposed because the fungi didn't exist yet.

So fungi came in and go, oh, my God, we have some work to do.

And they were this ecological niche of decomposers that was so crucial and needed

for our planet to evolve to the next level. It was just all this piles of junk basically everywhere.

So the fungi were able then to start to rapidly evolve and mutate and make new

versions and niche into different, okay, we'll do primary decomposing of cellulose.

We'll do secondary decomposing of cellulose.

And effectively, they were able to deal with that problem. And that's what they do now.

Whatever things that we mess up in the world and leak and make new weird chemicals

at Dow Chemical Corporation and

all PFAs, all that stuff, they're going to learn how to decompose that.

So I think that there's some great work being done by amazing individuals across

the world right now in terms of actually putting those fungi into the soil to help clean it up.

I think there are incredible chemists that can supplies the molecules that we need.

And what I learned about polypore mushrooms, so the mushrooms that are often

the things that people consume as functional mushrooms that grow on tree bark

instead of on the ground.

They might be there for years instead of seasonal in terms of their fruiting bodies.

It seems that these species that have to last longer periods of time, like multiple seasons,

they tend to produce more complex chemistry, advanced science to protect themselves

from microorganisms, basically, opportunities.

Characters running around in the forest. So in terms of the compounds that we

consume these mushrooms for, like cordyceps in cordyceps or in aides in lion's mane,

which give us, you know, these specific effects.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Why do they use this complex chemistry?

What it's used for and why it might

be doing these things that are beneficial for humans so for

instance one example you were talking about earlier with chaga

this is what grounds a lot of finnish people nordic people estonians

swedish to the functional mushroom space if you take a look at chaga it actually

has this black crust on the outside and it's a very sure tell sure sign way

of going this is chaga versus a cancerous growth on a tree it has a black crust.

And that black crust is mostly made up of melanin, which is a skin pigmentation

compound, same in our skin, which makes us different colors of skin.

The more we have, the more it's blocking the sun's rays.

So the closer you live to the equator, you're going to have more melanin.

You're going to be blacker in your skin because you're going to want to be stopping

that sun's harmful rays from destroying your skin.

I mean, UVB, UVA, these are very harmful rays. That's why we wear sunscreen

and all this kind of stuff. So.

Chaga is, of course, on the tree for 20, 30 years with no protection,

just staring at the sun all a single day.

So it actually produces its own melanin to do that.

Fungi react very similar to mammals in terms of developing these mechanisms to protect themselves.

I think we're so interconnected, right?

Nature, humans, mushrooms, we're all so interconnected. It's unreal.

We have spent effectively decades, a century-ish with the school system.

And our modern way of looking at science compartmentalizing everything.

We have this reductionist philosophy in science where we try to reduce something

to its most singular parts and then we build up a model.

That's how we explain the world, right? A tree acts like this. A fern acts like this.

A blade of grass acts like this. The bat acts like this. And you put all those

sums up and you go, okay, that's the forest.

What you miss when you do a reductionist scientific thinking is you totally

miss the interconnectedness.

You miss all those synergies. You miss all that space that actually things are

depending and controlling and designing and pushing and giving constraints for each other.

It's a very complex web, this earth and our own bodies, if you look at it as a microcosm.

The single biggest organ by

weight we have in our body is our gut microbiome, which is not, is it us?

Is it not us? I don't know. But we're massively interconnected with our ego space.

So the way I think of it is, why do we get sick?

Why have we evolved this amazing body, which can do all this crazy stuff, but yet we get sick?

Why is our immune system not so great? What is it about going beyond all the

biohacks so that we can optimize our body, like intermittent fasting,

dealing with stress better, getting better sleep, or being hydrated?

Well, how can our immune system let us get sick?

Why does our gut microbiome not work super well all the time?

Why are we getting serotonin levels different based on different food we eat?

Why do we, you know...

There was a big conversation about the hookworm parasite we get,

which helps to kind of regulate our autoimmune system that we don't attack ourselves, right?

And I think with the hookworm story, they just go back to the situation and

the context in which all these different mechanisms evolved.

So if we evolved to have hookworm inside of us forever, our immune system just

never really needed to develop a mechanism to stop fighting itself, right? Right?

Because we always had hookworm there to help moderate it.

Because hookworm produces compounds and chemicals that helps to suppress our

immune system from destroying itself, basically.

Because it tricks our body into identifying the hookworm into ourselves.

So then it tells us not to kill itself.

So we evolved and our immune system developed in a context that without hookworm,

it doesn't have that regulatory pressure as much.

So there you go, autoimmune disease. You take hookworm, you can get rid of a

lot of autoimmune problems.

And it's the same with mushrooms. The oldest, you know, mammal that we can find,

human species example, this Ötzi from the northern, sorry, I think it's southern

Tyrolean Alps in northern Italy.

It's very contentious where they found his body, but the guy's like 3,000 years

old, perfectly preserved. And what does he have? Two functional mushrooms on him.

And then you go hiking, what do you need? But this is very fascinating that

you're sharing now, because in the whole health, wellness, biohacking field,

one of the pinnacles of health is never to get sick.

Yet what you're saying is that when your immune system gets challenged,

that is what builds the resilience to deal with pathogens later in life.

This is what early development as a human being looks like.

You are getting exposed to the soil, you're exposed to hookworms and all kinds of things.

And going through all kinds of sickness in your childhood can potentially help

you build a healthy immune system later in life.

When you go to a forest, you are exposed to a lot of different mold species,

for example, when you just breathe air, like thousands of them.

And yet we get sick when we are at a home that is sterile and there is one or

two opportune mushrooms growing there and your immune system goes absolutely crazy about it.

So it seems that this healthy challenge to your immune system simultaneously,

it is what builds this resilience.

It's the same with many of these healing plants that we use,

like ginger and turmeric.

Large quantities can kill you, but if you get a little bit of stimulation,

same with herbs like rosemary and thyme, it can kill a human being, the oils in it.

But in small quantities, they stimulate our immune system so that you become more resilient.

So I think this whole craziness about health and wellness doesn't always recognize

the benefit of getting healthy exposure to dangerous things.

Don't you agree? Yeah, I totally agree.

Whatever the context in which our body evolved is the context that we should

try to create for ourselves. It wasn't sterile.

100,000 years ago, 250,000 years ago. By far, we were eating on the ground.

We did intermittent fasting.

We had some periods where we stayed awake all night.

We had periods where we pushed our bodies to the absolute point of exhaustion

and hunting and fighting activities.

And then we had periods where we rested, you know, and it's like,

okay, and we took mushrooms.

It's like all the things that we did back then is the context in which our body

evolved in. And it's the context in which our immune system has developed.

So when we don't have that context now, something is going to be off.

We don't have enough gut microbiome. Well, our bodies didn't evolve to have

less than what's needed gut microbiome.

You have to supplement it and fix it and quit taking antibiotics.

You have to just look at what is that situation that human beings lived in 250,000

years ago and try to recreate as much of that as humanly possible,

like the blue blockers, right?

So we didn't have blue light at night. We had fire.

Fire doesn't have blue light. So it's like, these things seem new.

They seem weird. They look cool, whatever.

But we just try to get back to where we... Because the hardware hasn't changed, right?

The hardware is exactly the same as it was 250,000 years ago.

The brain is the same. Culture has changed.

And the software that we're using and the way that we evolved and we're culturally

treated, that's, of course, changed.

Last weekend, I raised six sheep and I'm butchering them.

I've got a bunch of ducks I'm raising right now. I just butchered all my chickens.

I'm hunting deer with my kids.

I'm so happy. They love this context. They're out there helping me kill these

sheep. They're not asking, is this right? Is this wrong?

Daddy, what about my hands are bloody? I don't know what, I don't feel good about that.

They're eating, we're eating that raw blood together. We're taking part in activities

that connect us with our ancestry for hundreds of thousands of years.

Well, we're so disconnected from nature, like most people.

Never foraged or hunted or gathered their own food.

It's coming neatly packaged in often plastic containers.

They have no idea of it. And I truly understand people's ethical questions about many of these things.

But if we think of, for example,

this region we are in, it's a pretty harsh condition

most of the year winter nothing grows

you have to store large it is

to summer nothing grows and

so you have to store large quantities to get over the long winter so we have

adapted to hunt we have adapted to gather all wide variety of things including

mushrooms drying them using them in different ways.

Now, I think most people who listen to this podcast, they are interested in,

okay, what can I do? What can I do with these mushrooms?

Okay, you gave me a very interesting story about our relationship with mushrooms.

Why don't you, Eric, give some basic information about this?

So when you look at the majority of the clinical evidence, most things are focused on beta-glucans.

They're the compounds that are immunoadaptogenic.

They're the adaptogenic genic properties of the mushrooms. They're helping to

modulate our immune system.

Each mushroom, it's kind of a cellular building blocks of the mushroom, almost like fiber.

It's big long chain polysaccharide compounds, these beta-glucans,

and they're specific to fungi.

We know they're more in reishi, they're less in chaga, because chaga is 90%

wood, that's a different story.

They're only fungal compounds. When we started working with the biohacking folks,

what we learned right away is that the majority of people do not take mushrooms

for the immunoadaptogenic properties.

Now, that's a side benefit, and that's great. But most people are taking Lion's

Mane not for immunity, they're taking it for cognition, neuroplasticity,

neuroregeneration, gut cell regeneration. They're taking reishi for sleep.

They're taking chaga for antioxidants and longevity.

They're taking shiitake for immediate virus support, maitake for women's cycle

health and hormonal balance, cordyceps for energy.

When you look at where people are taking these mushrooms and how they're feeling

from taking them, it's a totally different thing than majority of the scientific evidence.

So what we started right away as a company is, hey, we got to figure out what

the compounds are inside those mushrooms that do those different benefits, right?

What is the mechanism of action? How do those compounds impact our bodies?

How can we test for the levels of those compounds? And how can we start to do

hemoclinical trials to prove that what we do is effective?

That's our company's strategy. We've been very successful at it.

We're the first company in the world to develop assays with a third-party university

lab who can actually test with these bioactives.

So now we can test for heracines in lion's mane, which are responsible for the

heracines, heracinones.

For the cognition, we can test for cordycebine, adenosines in the cordyceps.

Lucidonic acid profile in reishi, which is responsible for sleep.

And then we can guarantee certain high levels of those compounds in the product.

We just released our first ever human clinical trial. It was peer-reviewed and

released in a journal January of this year. Super exciting.

We studied the impact on the acute side of things. We put lion's mane against

coffee, and we put it against the placebo.

And what we were able to test and look at was the impact on cognition,

memory, depression, and mood.

What we noticed is that lion's mane is better than the placebo,

but it's also better in coffee.

If you need a little bit of a cognition boost and a little bit of a mood boost,

you could reach for lion's mane, not the coffee anymore.

So that's really exciting. And I think now we have a chronic lion's mane study that's underway.

We have slotted studies for both reishi and cordyceps as well. So it's very exciting.

So if I just give for the listeners a quick overview, how I use these mushrooms

myself and for what purpose.

In the morning, I like to put some chaga in my coffee just for the endurance

reasons. It helps with oxygen intake, for example.

It has a ton of antioxidants, 10 times more antioxidants than coffee,

to my understanding. So I use it for that.

I put lion's mane occasionally there as well because it helps with neuro growth factors.

Sometimes I'm not using coffee. I'm making hot cacao or something like this.

So another way, I'm using fats in my coffee because it helps absorption of a

lot of things, including many of the compounds that are in these mushrooms as

well as a carrier in addition to the water.

Now, the other thing that I like to do sometimes is cordyceps instead of coffee.

So I might have like a cordyceps drink and cordyceps, because it has very similar

stimulatory effects like caffeine, but it suppresses sleep.

So I don't take it later in the day. I only take it early in the morning.

In the evening, I like to use reishi and sometimes other mushrooms for digestive

reasons like maitake, for example,

and the shiitake I use for immune system support and turkey tail occasionally as well.

Reishi is another thing for immunity, but I like to take it in the evening because

it doesn't disrupt sleep.

Quite the contrary, it can increase sleep dreaming considerably.

I've seen some super wild dreams while taking Reishi. So if someone wants to

see more dreams, Reishi is amazing for that.

Did I get it right in terms of my protocol of using those things throughout

the day? Yeah, you did great.

The number one question we get from customers on our website is that,

you know, I need to stop taking Reishi. It's giving me crazy dreams.

Their standard response to people is, well, tell me about a normal dream that you have.

Because dreams are crazy. A lot of people take reishi and they dream maybe for

the first time in months because they get proper sufficient amounts of deep sleep.

And I think it's such a blessing to have dreams every night.

If you don't remember the last time you had a dream, you should really fix that.

And it's also great to take with alcohol. If someone's taking some wine or something

like this, having a little bit of reishi reduces the hangover.

Yes, we did a study with the university in Serbia looking at the heart rate,

actually, that spikes after you drink alcohol.

Your heart rate is bumping, your temperature is raised, you don't get very good sleep.

But if you take a little bit of Reishi, you can get that heart rate back down

again much faster within an hour of taking a drink.

So even if you drink a bit at night, it's good. Take some Reishi, you go to bed easier. No.

In terms of these compounds, so you spoke about beta-glucans, great for immunity.

In general, beta-glucans are also in some other plants, like oats have beta-glucans as well.

The interesting chemistry in there, like cordycepin, why do these mushrooms

produce that chemistry?

What's the role of that molecule in the mushroom? Blood-brain barrier.

Right? So we know that it's very, I mean, part of cordyceps attack mechanism

is also to cross the blood-brain barrier in insects and take control over their bodies.

It's a parasitic fungi on insects, right, in nature.

So we wonder, is cordyceps being the compound that also does all that stuff in insects?

Because insect brains and human brains are so different when it crosses into

our adult human brains, it's doing something different.

And then what it does in humans, of course, is increased VO2 max,

it's vasco-dilative, it suppresses melatonin production, our natural hormone for sleep.

So yeah, we have abilities to use these compounds. And that's the interesting

thing. I think it goes back to our original conversation around interconnecting this.

We co-evolve with these mushrooms because we have receptors,

we have the ability to actually take in their compounds.

They could have developed these compounds because they were advantageous for humans.

And so humans took them and helped the farm and keep them alive.

And that could be the reason.

They actually benefit in the fungal side. They're there just for humans.

And we have such a deep relationship with them, like nut trees and fruit trees and whatnot.

But we kept them alive and they kind of kept making those compounds. We grew more of them.

They are more intelligent than us and they are using us.

Maybe some people have seen this series called The Last of Us.

In that it's cordyceps that takes over the world. Sometimes when I grow my lion's

mane, I'm kind of like wondering if that mushroom is like cunningly cunning

me to take over the world by using me.

Now, I'm actually happy for that because it's helping me get stuff done. So I'm good with that.

Now, mushrooms are a great replacement for steaks as well.

Like, I mean, lion's mane, fresh lion's mane steak. I think it's one of the best mushroom hook.

At least I love it. against. What do you do? Do you fry it? I basically...

Fry it on the pan with some garlic and herbs.

I love that. I also sometimes cut it into pieces and make a dish out of it.

If I'm having carbohydrates, one of my favorite ones is to make a wild mushroom risotto.

I use Saga tea as the base, and then I might have a bunch of different fresh

mushrooms, lion's mane now as well, to go with it.

And yeah, that stuff is ridiculous.

In terms of tinctures, why would someone have an alcohol extract instead of

eating the whole mushroom?

Our gut digestive system is just not so great at breaking down all the cells.

And inside those cell walls is where these interesting compounds are.

So, you know, if you just take that lion's mane, eat it raw,

maybe about 5% bioavailability is a testing that we've done on kind of dried mushroom powder.

In terms of the ability for those bioactives to actually get absorbed in their

blood versus just going through your digestive system.

Cooking them obviously increases, but alcohol and water extraction was a great

3,000-year-old Chinese technology developed to increase the bioavailability

or effectively the yield impact of taking some herb medicine.

If you're doing the alcohol and water extraction for about three months,

you start to see around 50% bioavailability.

So we've done testing with this research university in Portugal.

We deployed ultrasonicated extraction technology to boost that up to around 90% bioavailability.

So, I mean, you know, but we're a biotech firm, but, you know,

we're trying to do the best, you know, best bang for your buck you possibly can.

We're trying to make really powerful medicine. They're all great. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. Like actually these tinctures, tinctured forms of lion's mane

is probably better for me in terms of the effects I'm seeking than eating them.

But I love eating as well. I've noticed the gut is like with these things,

there's some mushrooms that you can definitely chew on and eat because of complex

carbohydrate molecule structures that are undigestible.

So in terms of these mushroom tinctures, now you're producing to the market cordyceps, chaga,

reishi, lion's mane, and of course, like maitake, shiitake, and to the American

market, if I understand correctly, also turkey tail, which is not available

in Europe, which is crazy.

This is because of European food regulators. It grows everywhere,

and they say it's novel food. They say no one has ever used it prior to 1997. Yeah, right.

Like, where have you been?

It's incredible. Hey, what do you think about RFK now getting into the White House?

I think that in terms of politics, we have gone too far in bureaucracy.

Whatever means it is that we change things to be a little bit more sane.

I was just going through European food regulations yesterday,

just trying to understand what is allowed and what is not allowed in a certain country.

It's a maze. Not even them know what's going on.

With novel food standards, something produced before 1997 commercially can be

brought into market, but something that has not been available before,

that is so-called novel food that requires separate regulation.

That is just like arbitrary boundary they

define and create complexity in decision making i

understand they try to protect consumers from themselves right

but like it's gone too far and we have also seen that regulators are not always

the best to make rules about health and wellness think of the food standards

they're very prone to lobbying they don't listen to scientists always.

Sometimes they make up their arguments and then they seek the science to support

whatever point of view they have.

And I think that's what's going on right now in the U.S.

Is that we have recognized that some mistakes were made a few years ago in terms

of suppression of information and understanding.

Later on discovered that we should have had an open debate on topic X,

Y, Z. The loudest voices that were speaking against the status quo are getting into power right now.

This is the case with JFK Jr.

Because he wrote a book about this for decades. He's been exposing industry

corruption and lobbying and throwing people into jail.

For or like getting massively fined

and also pharmaceutical companies like i

i think this kind of self-regulation has

failed right in some sense so like we definitely

need like to instruct and bring us back into the

science i just noticed that they're also putting this

cardiologist into power malhontra like the the doctor who was especially interested

in in the cardiac side of things okay interesting i haven't read that yet personally

i think it's very important that we take advice from people who are healthy

and look healthy right and most of our.

I'm surprised they're alive especially in healthcare like health conferences

the food has been the worst i've ever seen it's great that we're getting these

wellness people into the business as well.

We're looking into preventive things and longevity.

I think the next five to 10 years, because of what's happening in the US, is going to be great.

It's going to be a stimulus for a boom in the biohacking health and wellness communities.

It's very positive. Peptides, stem cells, rhombiol, hyperbaric therapies,

vitamins, clean food, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals.

If you're part of the FDA and you're working with the corrupt pharma systems,

preserve your records and pack your bags.

The goal is to look at all these therapies that have interesting potential benefits

for people, get the corruption out of the food system, right?

We know it's not carbohydrates, it's the number one biggest source of calories

that you should be eating. But that's how I grew up in the US, right?

I think it's an amazing thing. And I just hope Trump lets the guy get some stuff done.

I hope he gets a moment to get some stuff implemented and fixed yeah i believe

this will be great for all of us who are in the preventive field to go forward.

And I'm looking forward to how that's going to affect Europe in some sense. Very good point. Yeah.

I think in food innovation, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

Like it's impossible to bring anything on the market. I mean,

if the approval process was faster, but it takes tons of money and it's like so... It's crazy.

It's crazy. It's like experimentation.

Even from a health claim standpoint, like in the US, we did this study.

It got peer reviewed. It got published in a proper peer-reviewed journal,

so we know the science is good. The conclusions are statistically significant.

And that means that the FDA has approved it for structured health claims.

You can now use our ingredients in your product. If you're PepsiCo,

we're working with Thorne right now.

They can actually list Lion's Mane gives you focus.

Lion's Mane improves cognition. Lion's Mane improves mood. They can say those

things because we proved it in a peer-reviewed journal.

If we as a company just publish it ourselves, that's not very credible.

There could be something similar in the European Union to help communicate to

users what the benefit of these products are in a better and more effective way.

It's more erroneous for companies like myself. I've got to pay the hundreds

of thousands of euros and wait the time and do good science.

But if I do that, then I have the option of actually making these structured

health claims, which is so crucial to help explain to people, show advocacy.

Absolutely agree. Yeah, you can't use peer-reviewed journals as evidence for health claims.

In Europe, even though it's the lawmaker who approves the health claims better

at justifying reasoning compared to a peer-reviewed journal.

I think it's crazy that we can't talk about these things openly,

even though the evidence is obviously there.

They are saying things like you can't say medicinal mushroom.

I remember just a few years ago, if we used in marketing on Meta or Google,

the term medicinal mushroom, that led to a ban.

So the mushroom is a negative term because of psychedelics and the medicinal is a term because I'm in.

You can't talk about it, right? Only certain institutions. Right.

But yeah, having said that, everyone who does their own research goes into PubMed,

listens to the real experts,

and has experimented with these things for the last few years knows that these

things have. And that's why it's so crucial what you do, Teemu, right?

It's so crucial what you do, because I think it's such a crucial role you play.

And this kind of inspiration you give and thoughts that you have and the way

you can easily communicate it to people and help educate folks and inspire them

to focus on their health.

I think it's a really amazing thing because we're stuck in a situation that

it's very difficult to do that effectively.

These functional mushrooms are extremely popular now.

I go into biohacking conferences or local health stores anywhere in the world.

They're full of mushroom products, many of them questionable.

So as a consumer, know, how could you make a sound decision on what to put into your body?

My recommendation is don't think too much, just get stuff from Kääpä.

You can't go wrong with that. But if you would give some advice to someone in

terms of choosing the mushroom products, what should they look out for?

Yeah, our company has a division called Nordic Mushrooms, where we supply ingredients

for 130 global brands that use our mushroom extract powders and liquids to make beautiful products.

The reason we started the company was a reaction to the poor quality material

we saw coming in from China,

which is, you know, the majority of brands that are currently making products

is importing the raw material from China or the extract powder from China.

And they're just capsulating it or mixing it with coffee, et cetera, et cetera.

What you need to know as a consumer is traceability, right? Where does this stuff come from?

And what are the COAs? You know, what are the actual compounds inside?

Every single batch. If you don't know that, don't take the product because it could be whatever.

There was a study published a year and a half ago out of Italy that looked at

the top 20 mushroom products sold on Italian Amazon.

Out of the top 20, only six with the correct DNA.

We're not even talking about do they have enough compounds to be medicinally effective.

They just write DNA, only six out of 20. Mushrooms are booming.

Anytime anything's booming, you're going to get a whole bunch of companies that

make blue light blocking glasses

that just have some spray can stuff on it that just looks kind of blue.

I mean, there's going to be people in a booming industry taking advantage of it.

The ethics are not there. The scientific rigor is not there.

They're just trying to sell some Instagram ads and move some product very quickly.

And the product might not be very effective.

So I think as a consumer, we always need to do a little bit of our homework.

That homework to me is, yeah, check it for the compounds. Does it have compounds? Does it have anything?

It doesn't have the compounds that should be there to be effective. Are those proven?

Is there any human clinical trials that the company has done on those products

that show that they're effective? Because that's a surefire way of knowing that it's pretty good.

Is the product extracted or non-extracted? So is it more effective?

It's more effective if it's extracted, so it should be extracted.

And what are those extracting technologies that are being used?

So I think just to look into things a little bit more and dive a little bit deeper...

There's always a great way to approach it. But I'm really excited by,

I mean, right now the Functional Mushrooms is going through 30% compounded annual

growth. I mean, it's a crazy market.

It's growing very fast. We're exposed to a whole bunch of new customers,

a whole bunch of new people. We have to be a little bit careful.

And I think as biohackers, we're technically the early adapters to a lot of

things by definition. And that means we have a little bit more responsibility, in my opinion.

I think we're the educators, the ones on social media helping to influence behavior.

So I really hope that we take stronger ethics in what kind of brands we build,

what kind of products we use, what kind of ways we talk about it,

that we become a little bit more educated, I think is a good plan.

That's really good advice. If you're planning to build a product based on functional

mushrooms, talk to Eric first before going to Chinese manufacturers and buying

stuff that you don't know where it's coming from.

In terms of ingredient quality it's very

important for consumers to get the real benefits from the

products that you develop i know there's people or professionals who

are listening to this as well as consumers now Kääpä will be in 14 and 15 of

june 2025 in our next event so we have Hololife Summit so Biohacker Summit has

a new name it's called Hololife Summit. Holo or holos, which means "complete, whole".

So Hololife is complete, whole life and holistic life. If you are into this lifestyle,

you should come over and talk to Eric about these things.

But before that, you should check

out their products. And we have some of those available on our store.

If you want to check their company website for these things, you can go to where?

kaapamushrooms.com. Yeah, kaapamushrooms.com. Check that one out as well.

Eric has such a wealth of knowledge. I recommend listening to the previous discussions we have had with him.

He's fluent in talking about so many different aspects about mushrooms.

Worth following, Eric Puro. Now, where do you see this industry going next?

What is the most exciting scientific thing you are seeing right now?

I think the biggest thing is we've gotten reishi, chaga, all these mushrooms

famous, right? They've gotten really popular.

It's about seven, eight species at max.

The reason these species are popular is because they were what used 3,000 years ago in China.

They're not necessarily the best, necessarily the greatest.

They're definitely not European, a lot of them. They're just what was used in

China a long time ago and were able to be brought into the FDA and EFSA,

European Food Safety Authority, very quickly.

If we look at cognitive function as a benefit that a mushroom could give,

we have identified three other species that are a lot better than lion's mane.

Some work on different mechanisms of action.

There can be really interesting mushroom stacks for cognition.

I think we're just getting started. We're just skimming the surface.

The two biggest places the market's going to go is with very innovative product

delivery methods, right so right now we have tinctures we've got pills some

people made mushroom coffee,

but i think that there can be innovative replacement technologies

for other functional beverages we can integrate functional mushrooms into people's

daily routine very easily right so i think that's one and i think our technology

around limiting the dose size the effective dose requirement to be less is a

way to help facilitate that and i think new species i think it's exciting

We're going to be part of a Netflix series coming out soon, which is about strain

hunters, looking at new mushroom species and where they are and what are the

medicinal benefits of them?

How do we find them? How do we forage? What's the story behind it?

What's the local use and traditional use cases?

I think we're just getting started. The world's just waking up to the power

of mushrooms for our health.

I agree. Strain Hunters, that

sounds amazing. I'm definitely going to check it out once it comes out.

I'm really looking forward to what you guys are doing,

but I want to also congratulate you guys that you have taken the risk to enter

this complicated market and staying true to the quality and science and testing

and efficacy and bringing these high quality ingredients to the market. I think it's necessary.

I'm very happy that it's coming from Finland and you as an American,

it's great that you're doing the work that you do in Finland,

walking barefoot in the forest in Nuuksio National Park and realizing that this

is my home, taking those products into the largest markets in the world.

So thank you so much for doing your work. I personally don't think there is

any other supplement that i use every single day than mushrooms like i don't

even use vitamin or anything really but i always have some chaga,

tinctures or powders or extracts with me plus many other things so this this

was a great conversation and check out kappa mushrooms.com for more information

and if you want to get some with the products, check out biohackercenter.com.

And Eric, where people can follow you if they want to follow you on social media?

I do a lot more on LinkedIn than Instagram, but LinkedIn is just Eric Puro,

and we're sharing a lot of the

scientific evidence and market research and things like that on LinkedIn.

And then on Instagram, every once in a while I put up something kind of funny or interesting.

Happy to connect. @kaapamushrooms on Instagram, right? We do a lot of content.

Thank you very much for this interview. If you would give someone a quick recommendation

on which product specifically from your product line they should try,

which one would you recommend and why?

I really enjoy this Siim Land, obviously, very well. Probably many of your listeners know the guy.

I was at one of the biohacking retreats, one of the first ones in Estonia.

It was an amazing time. Highly recommended. It was incredible.

Oh, just amazing. Amazing weekend. And he was there.

And I mean, Siim has a lot of knowledge. The guy's just packed to the brim of

all the different mechanisms and vitamins.

But at that, I said, Siim, make this easy for me. What do I need to do?

He said, hey, man, just focus on drinking enough water and getting enough sleep.

I was like, done, I can do that.

And I just so love that we tend to get really detail focused about all these things.

And Siim just goes, hey, bring it back. Hey, are you getting enough water right

now, bro? When's the last time you peed? What color is your pee?

And how many hours did you get to sleep last night?

And I think for that reason, I think Reishi is the one I'd recommend to everybody.

Because you don't know you're not getting enough sleep until you wake up with a crazy dream.

That's for sure.

If people want to come to one of our retreats the Biohacker's Retreat we have one

coming up actually in january i want to go to that i'm going to find out we're

going to announce that very soon check out our newsletter for announcements

on that okay yeah i'll be you come talk to me in person,

you can talk to Eric and have a ice dip while having your mushroom tinctures

it's great to gather with biohackers. beautiful all right thank you so much Eric

for the interview and i'm looking

forward to meeting next year in so many different areas in the industry,

including the retreat and the big Hololife Summit coming in June.

The best time to be in this part of the world is definitely in spring.

June is the most amazing month.

It's like a two-hour boat trip to go to Finland, so it's close by.

We can all go there barefoot.

Hey, kiitos, Teemu. Pleasure. Thanks for doing what you do. Kiitos. Over and out.

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