Wild Turkey Tail Mushrooms (Tremates Versicolor)

by Dwight Thornton March 09, 2023

Now that you have done some of your own research, let me share with you some of my thoughts and conclusions on the subject while doing my own research since seeing and sharing the news about the FDA funding the research back in 2008 & 2012 to Bastre University for which we posted on our Facebook page in 2012.

So I have been asking myself this question since 2008. Why would the FDA put so much money into the research for Turkey Tail and not do or fund research on the Chaga mushroom when so many Cancer Centers were already using Chaga as part of their Cancer treatments?

The answer to that question is simple and is the same answer that was given way back in 1951 when a research team was sent to Russia, Poland and the Ukraine to find out why so many remote villages in those countries had little to none of the diseases that plagued the western world. After a year of traveling around to remote areas of these countries the common thread they discovered was the tea that they were drinking in each of the villages that they visited, and of course that tea was Chaga. So with samples in hand they returned to America where first they analyzed it for it's medicinal properties, the results of course were amazing and then to their dismay they discovered that they could not grow or synthesize the properties in Chaga in a lab, nor was there any chance of recreating it in the wild, because Chaga has a symbiotic relationship with living tree's rather than dying tree's!

Therefore it was useless to them because of course there were no patents to be had nor any money to made! So they simply shared their findings with the Universities in the countries they had visited on the medicinal properties they discovered.

Are they creating and growing the Turkey Tail & Chaga mycelium in laboratories and on grains now? Yes they are and lots of companies are doing it and then drying the mycelium only and selling it to the public, but in my opinion and others who know the difference, the mycelium does not contain the full spectrum of nutrients, , vitamins nor Beta Glucans that the fruiting body of the Mushroom has.

So why did the FDA fund the research for Turkey Tail and not for Chaga? Because Turkey Tail is symbiotic to dying wood rather than living debris, meaning that it can be cultivated and is a renewable resource (cultivation) and patents can be had and more and more cultivation is happening here in North America for sure as they have been doing in China for many years or more and are sold to the North American markets.

However, I am very disappointed that they used only the mycelium (that was obtained from Fungi Perfecti Inc. and not the fruiting body as well in the Phase 1 Clinical Trials of the TurkeyTail (Trametes versicolor ) mushrooms. To be fair to the people in the study, there should have been divided into two groups , one group using the mycelium powder and the other using the fruiting body.

I think that this link will help distinguish the differences. http://www.fungimag.com/spring-2016-articles/LR%20V9I1%20Medicinal%20Mycology.pdf

The chart below shows these differences between the mycelium grown on grains and the fruiting bodies (mushrooms).

Wild Turkey Tail Mushrooms (Tremates Versicolor)

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