Benefits of American Reishi Mushroom: A Complete Guide -

The American native Reishi mushroom, also known as Ganoderma tsugae, grows on the Eastern white hemlock tree (Tsuga canadensis.)

If you wild harvest some of this amazing mushroom, be sure to slice it up within a few days after you cut it off the tree. Reishi dries as hard as wood VERY quickly and once it’s completely dry you won’t be cutting it unless you have a band saw or something similar.

You can eat the outer white layer of young Reishi mushrooms as it fades into the yellow layer as that is the supple new growth and softest part of this varnished shelf mushroom. Reishi mushroom is a good source of vitamins A and C, as well as antioxidants.

Like other mushrooms (and people!), it also absorbs and creates its own Vitamin D when exposed to sunlight. Harvesting Reishi from a spot where it gets some sun during its growth stages is ideal if you want the added vitamin D, though you can also set your harvested mushrooms in the sunlight for a few hours before you cut it up for medicine.

Reishi boosts the immune system, reduces inflammation, helps modulate the body’s histamine (allergy) response, and improves heart health. Reishi mushroom has been shown to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease as well as cancer.

This mushroom can be taken orally in capsule form or powder form. It can also be used to make tea or broth, an especially good method if you have large chunks of the dehydrated mushroom sitting around from a previous harvest.

The recommended dosage of Reishi mushroom is 2-3 grams per day. I normally take a dropper full of my double-extracted tincture twice a day. If you’d like to learn how I make my highly effective medicinal tinctures, get my Making Tinctures Safely PDF.

It is important to start with a lower dose and gradually increase the dose as tolerated. Reishi mushroom is generally safe for most people to take, but it may cause some side effects, such as:

Stomach upset
Diarrhea
Vomiting

If you experience any of these side effects, stop taking the supplement and consult a healthcare practitioner. Reishi is only meant to be taken for up to 16 months at a time. After that you must give your body a break from this mushroom for 2-3 months to allow your body to reset. This will also allow you to really notice how the Reishi has been affecting your system while you’ve been on it.

One of my favorite ways to get Reishi into my body is simply by adding it to my homemade Bone Broth. I always keep a jar of dried Reishi strips on my shelf for this purpose!

This recipe is featured in my Wildcrafted Eats course!

I also found and made a naturally sweetened Chocolate Reishi Truffle Recipe that I absolutely loved! Pro Tip: if you can use pre-powdered Reishi for this, I highly recommend it. The hardest part of this recipe was grinding and sifting the rock-hard dried mushrooms.

I absolutely recommend you find and work with Reishi if you get the chance! The book Healing Mushrooms gets a lot of love off my shelf. You may also be interested in my Mushroom Foraging Mini Mastery Class.

Since I wrote this post on February 1st, I want to say Blessed Imbolc to those who celebrate it! Seed planting time will be here before we know it.

I also want to tell you that my Facebook Business Page is still down for now. I fell victim to a scam last Wednesday and the hackers immediately removed my admin permissions from my page that I have lovingly curated for eight years with over 160k followers.

Thankfully I quickly got hold of Meta support and was able to report the hack and prove my identity to them. While they have reinstated my admin privileges, the page itself was unpublished due to the whole fiasco. I was told that my case was escalated and that I have to wait for Meta Internal Affairs to decide whether to reinstate my page for me. I will let everyone know how it’s going as soon as I hear from them, but in the meantime I created a Backup Facebook Page that you can follow.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your love and support in this circumstance.

This unfortunate event has shown me just how much I rely on Facebook for my business and it’s not a fact I’m happy about. If you enjoy my posts or want to support my business in a way that would really bring my spirits up, I’m giving you some options below: