Adriana C.
3/5
This is not a review of their product (I have not tried it) or their persons (they seem nice enough). This is a review of their presentation at the Botanica Festival on mycology. They really need to fact check their presentation. They stated that uncooked chitin will make you sick, which is why you shouldn't eat raw mushrooms. That's not true. What makes you sick when you eat some raw mushrooms are toxins that the mushroom makes to protect itself, some of which can be denatured by heat (Mushroom Toxicity. Tran, Juergens. 2023). The mushrooms that are available all year at supermarkets (button, Portobello) are edible raw. Chitin is to fungi what cellulose is to plants: a polysaccharide that provides structure and is largely inert.
They also stated that table sugar is a polysaccharide, and stated that "other companies" will put "polysaccharides" on the label but "it's just syrup". That's not true. Sucrose (table sugar) is a monosaccharide, and calling it or any other simple sugar (fructose, glucose, etc) a polysaccharide on packaging would be blatantly false.
This last bit is more opinion than fact. I strongly object to paying $50 to be advertised to for 2 hours. I went hoping to learn something about local foraging, or interesting facts about fungi. If that had been the case I would have left with good feelings about the company and might have even purchased some things from them. What I got was 1.5 hours (I left after it was clear this presentation wasn't for me) of "our product good, their product bad" and falsehoods together with a smattering of high school biology class. To be fair to them, maybe they got to the part of the presentation that involved how different cultures used mushrooms, or the ecology of different wild edible mushrooms, after I left. They also had a problem with their projector, so maybe their ad hoc presentation was very different from their planned one.
All that being said, if you are into alternative medicine you would have enjoyed the presentation a lot more than me. The information about the effects of their extracts didn't leave any impression on me and I can't comment on it. I don't like how they used scientific jargon as a confusing marketing tactic. Seemed like a very "Say enough smart sounding things and people will buy your product" gambit.
