Fungi officinalis project-description
” Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Hippocrates (460 B.C.)
Summary
According to Hippocrates, the spiritual father of every doctor, food should be our main medicine. However, global warming, pollution with soil impoverishment and overpopulated world forced mass food production. This process leads to nutritional deficiencies and junk food rich in saturated fats and carbohydrates, good for energy supply only; that is often a source of disease both when there is enough and even more when there is a shortage. It is not by chance to believe that almost all tumors originate from epigenetics, i.e. they are due to the two environmental factors mentioned: pollution and bad/insufficient nutrition. The individual factor or so-called “lifestyle” (for instance smoking) is an additional cause. Therefore, as doctors we cannot follow the Hippocratic dictates on food, not being able to arrange prevention for a healthy diet, often expensive, treating most (avoidable) diseases such as chronic ones and many neoplasias only at the end when these occur, through necessary and expensive chemotherapy drugs, with highly relevant social economic and personal costs. Unfortunately, culturally and economically our societies base oneself on disease and not on health, with the interested approval and media support by Big Pharma. The economic and social Elites are well aware of this and it is no coincidence that the Healthy Diet with Medicinal Mushrooms (M.M.) is currently exclusive to wealthy and cultured people. Medicinal Mushrooms so called also Chinese mushrooms as Shiitake, Maitake, Ganoderma etc, are some species of mushrooms, used in feeding by Chinese immigrant in US (from which the name) and traditional in oriental diet, with hystorical or scientifical evidences of health and pharmacological actions. Unfortunately, knowledge and culinary tradition, frequently in addition to the money, is not for all. Is a scientific evidence that in recent decades polluted and low nutrient food, are among the major causes of the exponential growth of chronic diseases and cancer in the most developed countries as well as in the poorer ones called “in developing countries”. In fact in those countries, in addition to the economic impossibility of accessing healthy and sufficient food and to the medical treatments and prevention programs, there is a so high level of soil, atmospheric and water wasting, that we are witnessing to a great cancer epidemic in younger people (Report “Global cancer statistics 2020 “ WHO).
The connection food-pollution-cancer put together rich and poor countries, old rich and young poor people, the whole world. The association feeding with mushrooms=healthy is tightly connected to the mass presence inside the fruit body (cell wall) of branched-chain Polisaccarydes and Proteoglycan with unique and relevant immunomodulation action basic in prevention throught feeding (Immunocompetence). But the action against cancer/degenerative diseases is synergistic, needs more in quantity and quality and involves a lot of other actors presents (but in few quantities) only in mushrooms, like Ergothioneine, Ergosterol, Vitamin D2, trace elements and minerals (Selenium, Germanium etc). Those molecules are subject of the enrichment method “Fungi officinalis” ® (see later) together to others like alkaloids terpenoids vitamins etc etc. already present in the 20 species of Medicinal Mushrooms (MM) selected by the method.
In short, the problem seems only technical: find a new cultivation method for a new product: a nutraceutical at the same time nutrition as a pharmacological action. Nevertheless, things are not quite like this, the problem is “Philosophical” and regards how we face Nature or Gaia from Lovelock hypothesis (1996) of a living Earth. If as a species want to dominate the Nature (this Era is called Anthropocene rightly for impact), we are seeing the results with Global Warming, Cancer by polluted environment and Covid Pandemic; at the opposite we have to accept changing and the evidence that we cannot win this challenge in competitive terms. Respecting our biological limits but trying to prevent by reducing the environmental impact both individual and collective, doing the right thing: consume less and consume the right, improving quality and eco-sustainability. Let us take example from mushrooms that feed on and through waste with excellent energy balance, recreating themselves and all living beings at no cost. From technical point of view, we have all the possibilities, what we lack is the philosophical approach that we must borrow from the fungal symbiosis, that I believe have found in “Fungi officinalis project”.
Furthermore, it was not ethically acceptable for a doctor like me, at the beginning of this story, that cancer is only a question of money and information (denied).
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