The Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home https://amzn.to/2QKpeRG www.nammex.com www.realmushrooms.com Redefining Medicinal Mushrooms: A new scientific screening program for active compounds in medicinal mushrooms. White Paper published in 2015   Mushrooms http://learntruehealth.com/mushrooms Mushrooms are generally known to be a delicious addition to our dishes. But did you know there’s more to mushrooms than that? Mushroom expert Jeff Chilton is our guest on this episode. He will explain how mushrooms can be used as medicine, help the body to prevent cancer, make as extracts, drink, capsules, as well as boost our immune system. Growing Up Jeff Chilton grew up in Seattle where it rains so much. He remembers during the fall season, the place where he lived had lots of mushrooms everywhere. So, he used to go on mushroom hunts when he was younger. When Jeff Chilton got into university, his field of study was not about mushrooms. Despite that, he researched the use of mushrooms in indigenous cultures worldwide as well as the use of mushrooms in shamanism. Eventually, he took courses in his college about the study of mushrooms which is ethnomycology. Working At A Farm After college, Jeff Chilton decided to work on a mushroom farm and learn how to grow mushrooms. He went to Olympia, Washington, applied for a job and eventually got a job working at a big mushroom farm.  During the next decade, he became the production manager, responsible for the cultivation of over 2 million pounds of Agaricus mushrooms per year. On this farm he worked on, they had a program using specific chemicals at certain times during the crop to avoid molds attacking the mushrooms, especially with Agaricus mushrooms. Mushrooms in North America are grown indoors in huge warehouses, so it’s a monoculture. Understanding Mushrooms Jeff Chilton says mushrooms are a reproductive structure of an organism that we usually don’t see. They don’t have seeds. The mushroom will produce a spore; the spore will go out and land on the ground and germinate into a very fine thread-like filament. “Those filaments from different spores will fuse and form a network. The network is called mycelium which creates a lot of the soil out there used to grow our crops and plants. They are recyclers and important for our ecosystem,” explains Jeff Chilton. When he was working on that large farm, they put in four new crops every week. Every crop was producing 20,000 pounds of mushrooms. They had mushrooms in every stage of development. Choosing from among the various kinds of mushroom, Jeff Chilton highly recommends highly-certified organic Agaricus mushrooms in particular. There are so many other species that are good, but he says shiitake mushrooms is the one that everybody should be eating because it has so many great benefits.  Deeper Research Jeff Chilton just started to delve into the literature deeper about growing mushrooms and all the different species that could be grown. He was also learning about the medicinal benefits of mushrooms. Certain mushrooms were used in traditional Chinese medicine. From 1979 to 1983, Jeff Chilton worked with three other men. They put together mushroom conferences in the Northwest. Furthermore, the group organized two well-attended conferences in Washington State and two in Oregon. The conferences had experts from all over the country talking about how to identify mushrooms, how to cook mushrooms and Jeff Chilton spoke on how to cultivate mushrooms. A New Chapter Jeff Chilton also co-authored a book on mushroom cultivation in 1983 called The Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide of Growing Mushrooms At Home. That was the year that he finally left the mushroom farm in Olympia and started his own business. Then in 1989, Jeff Chilton made his very first trip to China for an international mushroom conference. That was also the year he established his new business, Nammex. Nammex is a business that introduced medicinal mushro