Ashwagandha is a herb that belongs to the night shade family of plants. The nightshade family of plants is a very interesting one and includes a lot of vegetables that make up large parts of many diets. Notable nightshade members are potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, goji berries and even tobacco! Another name for the nightshade family is Solanaceae. This is where Ashwagandha gets its Latin name from; Withania somnifera. Ashwagandha is a short perennial shrub, with a large root system that develops small deep orange fruits. The fruits resemble a small cherry and the leaves look frosty due to the many tiny hairs that are on them. This one of the reasons why Ashwagandha is also referred to as ‘winter cherry’. Traditionally, the Ashwagandha root is used, however new research has found high concentrations of key components in the leaves too. Various manufacturers have taken notice of this. One of the most notable being Natreon who produce a specialized extract of Ashwagandha called Sensoril. Sensoril is made from the leaves of Ashwagandha, giving it a unique chemical composition, which produces noticeable calming effects.

“One Tomson, a Jesuit, showed me such a collection of rarities, sent from the Jesuits of Japan and China to their Order at Paris, as a present to be reserved in their repository, but brought to London by the East India ships for them, as in my life I had not seen…

…divers drugs that our druggfists and physicians could make nothing of, especially one which the Jesuit called Lac Tigridis : it looked like a fungus, but was weighty like metal, yet was a concretion, or coagulation, of some other matter;”

Due to the complexity in cultivating tiger milk mushrooms, not a whole lot of attempts have been made throughout history to cultivate it. This also means that tiger milk mushroom was predominantly consumed as a traditional remedy almost exclusively by indigenous populations who had a long history of finding this mushroom in the wild and using it for its unique health benefits. Some of the foraged tiger milk mushrooms did make it into the hands of other people within a limited range from its natural habitat, but it certainly was not being consumed on a large scale globally.

This all changed one day, when Dr. Tan Chon Seng was attending the ‘The International Convention on Biotechnology’ in 2002. At this conference, Dr. Tan Chon Seng was listening to a talk by the Malaysian prime minister at the time, Tun Dr. Mahathir. In this talk, Tun Dr. Mahathir was talking about how he had taken tiger milk mushroom to mitigate a cough he was having. This fascinated Dr. Tan Chon Seng, and he could not believe a practitioner of conventional modern medicine was talking so highly about a mushroom. However, this is also when Dr. Tan Chon Seng’s memory was jogged and he realized that his mother had frequently given him tiger milk mushroom during his youth! Inspired by Tun Dr. Mahathir talk, and his own memories of tiger milk mushroom, Dr. Tan Chon Seng set out to learn more about this elusive mushroom. This eventually led Dr. Tan Chon Seng to discovering a cultivation technique for tiger milk mushroom, but this took a whopping 8 years to develop!

The first challenge in cultivating tiger milk mushroom, was to get hold of a viable culture. Unlike with plants and trees, mushrooms do not produce seeds. Instead they produce mycelium, and capturing mycelium in order to cultivate mushrooms can be quite tricky. First of all, you actually have to find the mushroom in the wild. With tiger milk mushroom, this is clearly quite a difficult task since they are so rare in their natural habitat. Due to this, Dr. Tan Chon Seng spent a long time with indigenous Malaysian people in the jungle, hunting for tiger milk mushrooms and learning about their traditional use. Once Dr. Tan Chon Seng and his team got hold of enough tiger milk mushroom biomass, it needed to be cloned or cultured from the spores which can be quite tricky!

In order to clone a mushroom, a small sample of mushroom tissue is taken, and placed on a sterile agar dish. Since this stage of the process is highly susceptible to contamination, extreme care must be taken to obtain a tissue sample that is as clean as possible. This is usually done by spraying down the mushroom with a disinfectant like isopropyl alcohol, after which a tissue sample is taken from deep within the mushroom biomass with a sterilized blade. This all needs to be done underneath a laminar flow hood which provides a constant stream of sterile air in order to ensure that no external contaminants are added. While remaining in the sterile airflow of a laminar flowhood, this clean tissue sample is then placed onto a sterile agar dish and sealed off. After a few days, small wisps of mycelium should start to become visible if you are lucky. More often than not when working with wild mushrooms however, some contaminants, like molds, may also start to grow on this agar plate too. If this is the case, then the healthy mycelium from the agar plate needs to be carefully separated from the contaminants, again under the sterile airflow of a laminar flow hood, and transferred to another sterile agar plate. By doing this, the culture can be cleaned up, yielding a healthy mycelium culture.

Similar to the cloning process, contamination is still a major concern here, and multiple attempts may be necessary in order to isolate a clean mycelium culture. More interestingly, since this process is not cloning the mushroom it means that the spores can yield multiple different phenotypes. This adds more complexity to the process, but can also allow scientists to isolate particular phenotypes which grow well and produce high amounts of bioactives.

The sclerotium allows the tiger milk mushroom to survive extreme weather conditions, affording it the ability to lie dormant until conditions are just right for it to form a fruiting body. Most conventional mushroom cultivation knowledge is catered towards producing fruiting bodies rather than producing sclerotium. A few exceptions exist, for example our poria mushroom is also a sclerotium. However, due to the fact that sclerotium cultivation knowledge is not super developed, it is very tricky to cultivate tiger milk mushroom sclerotium.

The general procedure for cultivating tiger milk mushroom sclerotium is quite similar to growing fruiting bodies, but with a few key differences. Most mushrooms are grown in a three stage process. The first of which is to generate mycelium on a solid agar medium or in a liquid nutrient broth. We already described the process of generating a solid mycelium culture on an agar plate by either cloning a wild mushroom, or by generating mycelium from its spores. Agar lates are usually preferred during the initial stage, because it is much easier to spot contaminations. Once a plate has produced viable and clean mycelium, chunks of the agar plate can be cut out and dropped inside of a sterile nutrient broth. Again this is all happening under the sterile airflow of a laminar flow hood. The nutrient broth and agar mycelium culture are then gently shaken in something like an orbital shaker, or it is stirred on a lab stir plate. This process can sometimes take multiple weeks, after which you have liquid culture mycelium. This liquid culture mycelium can then be used to inoculate a solid substrate, usually some type of grain, a process which again has to be performed under sterile conditions.

After a few weeks of growth, the mycelium on grain can then be used to inoculate another substrate which is more conducive to the growth of fruiting bodies, or in the case of tiger milk mushroom, sclerotium. The myceliated grain, as you may have already guessed, is transferred under sterile conditions, to this secondary growth substrate.

This makes it very different from cultivating regular fruiting bodies of mushrooms, and together with how finicky tiger milk mushrooms can be, drastically increases the complexity of cultivation!

One of the biggest challenges in cultivating tiger milk mushroom is certainly also how long it takes to cultivate it. For example, from start to finish, you can cultivate a lion’s mane fruiting body in under 3 months if you are a skilled cultivator. With tiger milk mushroom this process can take up to a year. The hardest part being the formation of the sclerotium which takes many months. This means that during this long time frame, small fluctuations in environmental parameters can stack up to produce much more issues than we’d normally see, which means that cultivating tiger milk mushrooms requires extra care in ensuring everything is done as sterile as possible, and with very tight regulation of environmental parameters! It is likely easy to see now why it took such a long time to crack tiger milk mushroom sclerotium cultivation, and what an incredible feat Dr. Tan Chon Seng and his team pulled off!

Now that we can finally produce massive quantities of super high quality tiger milk mushroom sclerotium, research on it has started to boom. It’s a fascinating mushroom, and the scientific insights we have gained in the last decade make it an increasingly more interesting mushroom in the functional mushroom space. This is why we immediately jumped at the opportunity to work with our Malaysia partners to bring out one of the first high quality, and lab tested, tiger milk mushroom sclerotium products in the United States! The rest of the blog will focus on the unique health benefits tiger milk mushroom can have, paying particular attention to its nootropic benefits!

One of the most unique attributes of tiger milk mushroom is its ability to mimic the effects of nerve growth factor (NGF). It appears to do this by binding to the TrkA receptor, which is the same receptor where NGF binds in order to drive neuroplasticity. This finding is corroborated by multiple studies now which indicate that tiger milk mushroom, through currently unknown bioactives, can stimulate the process of neuritogenesis. This is occurring in a manner that is very similar to NGF induced neuritogenesis, without affecting the synthesis or secretion of NGF. This then indicates that tiger milk mushroom itself can stimulate the TrkA receptors, without relying on endogenous NGF.

When TrkA receptors are stimulated, either by NGF or in this case tiger milk mushroom, a large signaling cascade is initiated. TrkA stimulation mainly triggers PI3K/AKT and Raf/ERK signaling pathways, which play a major role in neuroplasticity. In fact, the PI3K/AKT pathway is crucial for the process of longer term potentiation (LTP). For those unfamiliar with the process of LTP, this is one of the primary mechanisms by which we store memories. Thus, by enhancing LTP via TrkA mediated PI3K/AKT activation, tiger milk mushroom may be able to enhance memory consolidation. While there is currently no research on tiger milk mushroom’s ability to enhance memory, anecdotal reports suggest that tiger milk mushroom has a palpable memory enhancing effect after a few weeks of regular supplementation.

Tiger milk mushroom has traditionally been used primarily for its effects on respiratory health, and this is also where the majority of tiger milk mushroom research has been focused on. In fact, there is even a human clinical trial on tiger milk mushroom which demonstrates its respiratory function promoting effects! Tiger milk mushroom has both acute and long term effects on respiratory function, and as many initial adopters of tiger milk mushroom have noticed, it seems to have an acute benefit on breathing. This is not surprising when reading through recent research which indicates that tiger milk mushroom appears to be a good bronchodilator! This means that it can relax our airways, allowing us to breathe slightly deeper.

Instead, the current evidence seems to be pointing towards tiger milk mushroom modulating calcium channels. Calcium plays a major role in bronchial tone, and thus by modulating calcium activity, tiger milk mushroom appears to be able to produce a more relaxed bronchial tone. With this unique mechanism in action in mind, it is no surprise that tiger milk mushroom has been used for hundreds of years for its respiratory benefits, and that most research efforts on tiger milk mushroom are currently investigating these respiratory effects!

Tiger milk mushroom produces more long term effects on the respiratory system too , which bolster its acute bronchodilatory effects. Tiger milk mushroom can dampen the production of two of the primary inflammatory cytokines found in our respiratory system, interleukin 1-beta (IL 1-beta) and interleukin 8 (IL-8). By dampening the production of these two inflammatory cytokines, tiger milk mushroom has the ability to balance the inflammatory tone in our respiratory system. Tiger milk mushroom likely suppresses IL 1-beta and IL-8 production by suppressing tumor-necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha). TNF-alpha normally triggers the synthesis and release of IL 1-beta and IL-8, thus by suppressing TNF-alpha, tiger milk mushroom dampens the levels of IL 1-beta and IL-8!

In a recent study on humans, it was also found that tiger milk mushroom could double the levels of immunoglobulin A (IgA) after three months of supplementation. IgA is one of the major regulators of respiratory immune function, and serves as one of the primary defense mechanisms for our respiratory system. Thus, by significantly elevating IgA levels, tiger milk mushroom has a robust effect on supporting respiratory immune function!  Tiger milk mushroom also has much more broad effects on general immune function too, helping to sensitize various immune cells and sensors. The overall effect, especially in combination with the IgA elevating effects, makes tiger milk mushroom very useful for supporting overall immune function. This is a great combination for dialing in overall respiratory function!

Due to the fact that tiger milk mushroom has an effect on NGF, it has naturally been compared quite extensively with the most famous NGF modulating mushroom, lion’s mane! As we discovered earlier, tiger milk mushroom appears to mimic NGF, directly activating the TrkA receptor which NGF acts on. Due to this, it has a more direct and targeted effect in regards to NGF mediated effects, when compared to lion’s mane. Lion’s mane approaches NGF in a much different way. The active compounds present in the lion’s mane mycelium, for example erinacine A, stimulate the synthesis of NGF. The active compounds present in the fruiting bodies, for example hericenone E, appear to potentiate the effects of NGF, and other unknown compounds present in the fruiting bodies also appear to stimulate NGF synthesis. With this in mind, it is clear to see why tiger milk mushroom and lion’s mane are being compared!

Lion’s mane has much more research on it, so we have a better understanding of what it is doing cognitively, when compared to tiger milk mushroom. Due to this, we know of many more targets on which lion’s mane acts, for example it can also enhance brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and monoamine levels. Lion’s mane also appears to activate kappa-opioid receptors, specifically via the compound erinacine E. Lion’s mane may also mildly inhibits the 5-alpha reductase enzyme which converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Taken together, this would indicate that lion’s mane has a much more full-spectrum effect than tiger milk mushroom. However, do keep in mind that due to the fact that the research into tiger milk mushroom and cognitive function is still very much lacking, we may learn a lot more about it in the coming years. For now, we mostly have to rely on anecdotal reports when comparing tiger milk mushroom to lion’s mane mushroom.

Anecdotally, we have found that tiger milk mushroom produces a zippier and cleaner effect than lion’s mane. It seems to be a little bit better at dialing in focus, while it loses out to lion’s mane in terms of enhancing mood and mental clarity. Similar types of anecdotal reports have also started to pop up on reddit. It seems that the effects of tiger milk mushroom are a little bit more acute, and are especially beneficial for those looking to gain a quick mental edge. In terms of the long term effects, tiger milk mushroom and lion’s mane mushroom start to converge after some time. Both seem to be excellent at dialing in memory over time, which makes sense since they are both producing a large portion of their memory effects via NGF related pathways.

Tiger milk mushroom also stands out from lion’s mane mushroom for its respiratory function promoting effects. These effects are quite unique to tiger milk mushroom and we did not notice similar respiratory function benefits with lion’s mane. That being said, both should have fairly equal effects on overall immune function.

Anecdotally we have also seen reports that individuals who did not respond well to lion’s mane mushroom, do end up responding well to tiger milk mushroom. This likely has something to do with tiger milk mushroom’s overall “cleaner” effects profile. Thus, if you have previously not responded well to lion’s mane mushroom, but would like to experience similar benefits, then tiger milk mushroom could be a great choice! We’d also be remiss to not mention that for those who do respond well to lion’s mane mushroom, a combination of tiger milk mushroom and lion’s mane mushroom seems to be an incredible combination. In fact, tiger milk mushroom really seems to lend itself to stacking, so let’s dive into that topic next!

Ashwagandha is a herb that belongs to the night shade family of plants. The nightshade family of plants is a very interesting one and includes a lot of vegetables that make up large parts of many diets. Notable nightshade members are potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, goji berries and even tobacco! Another name for the nightshade family is Solanaceae. This is where Ashwagandha gets its Latin name from; Withania somnifera. Ashwagandha is a short perennial shrub, with a large root system that develops small deep orange fruits. The fruits resemble a small cherry and the leaves look frosty due to the many tiny hairs that are on them. This one of the reasons why Ashwagandha is also referred to as ‘winter cherry’. Traditionally, the Ashwagandha root is used, however new research has found high concentrations of key components in the leaves too. Various manufacturers have taken notice of this. One of the most notable being Natreon who produce a specialized extract of Ashwagandha called Sensoril. Sensoril is made from the leaves of Ashwagandha, giving it a unique chemical composition, which produces noticeable calming effects.

“One Tomson, a Jesuit, showed me such a collection of rarities, sent from the Jesuits of Japan and China to their Order at Paris, as a present to be reserved in their repository, but brought to London by the East India ships for them, as in my life I had not seen…

…divers drugs that our druggfists and physicians could make nothing of, especially one which the Jesuit called Lac Tigridis : it looked like a fungus, but was weighty like metal, yet was a concretion, or coagulation, of some other matter;”

Due to the complexity in cultivating tiger milk mushrooms, not a whole lot of attempts have been made throughout history to cultivate it. This also means that tiger milk mushroom was predominantly consumed as a traditional remedy almost exclusively by indigenous populations who had a long history of finding this mushroom in the wild and using it for its unique health benefits. Some of the foraged tiger milk mushrooms did make it into the hands of other people within a limited range from its natural habitat, but it certainly was not being consumed on a large scale globally.

This all changed one day, when Dr. Tan Chon Seng was attending the ‘The International Convention on Biotechnology’ in 2002. At this conference, Dr. Tan Chon Seng was listening to a talk by the Malaysian prime minister at the time, Tun Dr. Mahathir. In this talk, Tun Dr. Mahathir was talking about how he had taken tiger milk mushroom to mitigate a cough he was having. This fascinated Dr. Tan Chon Seng, and he could not believe a practitioner of conventional modern medicine was talking so highly about a mushroom. However, this is also when Dr. Tan Chon Seng’s memory was jogged and he realized that his mother had frequently given him tiger milk mushroom during his youth! Inspired by Tun Dr. Mahathir talk, and his own memories of tiger milk mushroom, Dr. Tan Chon Seng set out to learn more about this elusive mushroom. This eventually led Dr. Tan Chon Seng to discovering a cultivation technique for tiger milk mushroom, but this took a whopping 8 years to develop!

The first challenge in cultivating tiger milk mushroom, was to get hold of a viable culture. Unlike with plants and trees, mushrooms do not produce seeds. Instead they produce mycelium, and capturing mycelium in order to cultivate mushrooms can be quite tricky. First of all, you actually have to find the mushroom in the wild. With tiger milk mushroom, this is clearly quite a difficult task since they are so rare in their natural habitat. Due to this, Dr. Tan Chon Seng spent a long time with indigenous Malaysian people in the jungle, hunting for tiger milk mushrooms and learning about their traditional use. Once Dr. Tan Chon Seng and his team got hold of enough tiger milk mushroom biomass, it needed to be cloned or cultured from the spores which can be quite tricky!

In order to clone a mushroom, a small sample of mushroom tissue is taken, and placed on a sterile agar dish. Since this stage of the process is highly susceptible to contamination, extreme care must be taken to obtain a tissue sample that is as clean as possible. This is usually done by spraying down the mushroom with a disinfectant like isopropyl alcohol, after which a tissue sample is taken from deep within the mushroom biomass with a sterilized blade. This all needs to be done underneath a laminar flow hood which provides a constant stream of sterile air in order to ensure that no external contaminants are added. While remaining in the sterile airflow of a laminar flowhood, this clean tissue sample is then placed onto a sterile agar dish and sealed off. After a few days, small wisps of mycelium should start to become visible if you are lucky. More often than not when working with wild mushrooms however, some contaminants, like molds, may also start to grow on this agar plate too. If this is the case, then the healthy mycelium from the agar plate needs to be carefully separated from the contaminants, again under the sterile airflow of a laminar flow hood, and transferred to another sterile agar plate. By doing this, the culture can be cleaned up, yielding a healthy mycelium culture.

Similar to the cloning process, contamination is still a major concern here, and multiple attempts may be necessary in order to isolate a clean mycelium culture. More interestingly, since this process is not cloning the mushroom it means that the spores can yield multiple different phenotypes. This adds more complexity to the process, but can also allow scientists to isolate particular phenotypes which grow well and produce high amounts of bioactives.

The sclerotium allows the tiger milk mushroom to survive extreme weather conditions, affording it the ability to lie dormant until conditions are just right for it to form a fruiting body. Most conventional mushroom cultivation knowledge is catered towards producing fruiting bodies rather than producing sclerotium. A few exceptions exist, for example our poria mushroom is also a sclerotium. However, due to the fact that sclerotium cultivation knowledge is not super developed, it is very tricky to cultivate tiger milk mushroom sclerotium.

The general procedure for cultivating tiger milk mushroom sclerotium is quite similar to growing fruiting bodies, but with a few key differences. Most mushrooms are grown in a three stage process. The first of which is to generate mycelium on a solid agar medium or in a liquid nutrient broth. We already described the process of generating a solid mycelium culture on an agar plate by either cloning a wild mushroom, or by generating mycelium from its spores. Agar lates are usually preferred during the initial stage, because it is much easier to spot contaminations. Once a plate has produced viable and clean mycelium, chunks of the agar plate can be cut out and dropped inside of a sterile nutrient broth. Again this is all happening under the sterile airflow of a laminar flow hood. The nutrient broth and agar mycelium culture are then gently shaken in something like an orbital shaker, or it is stirred on a lab stir plate. This process can sometimes take multiple weeks, after which you have liquid culture mycelium. This liquid culture mycelium can then be used to inoculate a solid substrate, usually some type of grain, a process which again has to be performed under sterile conditions.

After a few weeks of growth, the mycelium on grain can then be used to inoculate another substrate which is more conducive to the growth of fruiting bodies, or in the case of tiger milk mushroom, sclerotium. The myceliated grain, as you may have already guessed, is transferred under sterile conditions, to this secondary growth substrate.

This makes it very different from cultivating regular fruiting bodies of mushrooms, and together with how finicky tiger milk mushrooms can be, drastically increases the complexity of cultivation!

One of the biggest challenges in cultivating tiger milk mushroom is certainly also how long it takes to cultivate it. For example, from start to finish, you can cultivate a lion’s mane fruiting body in under 3 months if you are a skilled cultivator. With tiger milk mushroom this process can take up to a year. The hardest part being the formation of the sclerotium which takes many months. This means that during this long time frame, small fluctuations in environmental parameters can stack up to produce much more issues than we’d normally see, which means that cultivating tiger milk mushrooms requires extra care in ensuring everything is done as sterile as possible, and with very tight regulation of environmental parameters! It is likely easy to see now why it took such a long time to crack tiger milk mushroom sclerotium cultivation, and what an incredible feat Dr. Tan Chon Seng and his team pulled off!

Now that we can finally produce massive quantities of super high quality tiger milk mushroom sclerotium, research on it has started to boom. It’s a fascinating mushroom, and the scientific insights we have gained in the last decade make it an increasingly more interesting mushroom in the functional mushroom space. This is why we immediately jumped at the opportunity to work with our Malaysia partners to bring out one of the first high quality, and lab tested, tiger milk mushroom sclerotium products in the United States! The rest of the blog will focus on the unique health benefits tiger milk mushroom can have, paying particular attention to its nootropic benefits!

One of the most unique attributes of tiger milk mushroom is its ability to mimic the effects of nerve growth factor (NGF). It appears to do this by binding to the TrkA receptor, which is the same receptor where NGF binds in order to drive neuroplasticity. This finding is corroborated by multiple studies now which indicate that tiger milk mushroom, through currently unknown bioactives, can stimulate the process of neuritogenesis. This is occurring in a manner that is very similar to NGF induced neuritogenesis, without affecting the synthesis or secretion of NGF. This then indicates that tiger milk mushroom itself can stimulate the TrkA receptors, without relying on endogenous NGF.

When TrkA receptors are stimulated, either by NGF or in this case tiger milk mushroom, a large signaling cascade is initiated. TrkA stimulation mainly triggers PI3K/AKT and Raf/ERK signaling pathways, which play a major role in neuroplasticity. In fact, the PI3K/AKT pathway is crucial for the process of longer term potentiation (LTP). For those unfamiliar with the process of LTP, this is one of the primary mechanisms by which we store memories. Thus, by enhancing LTP via TrkA mediated PI3K/AKT activation, tiger milk mushroom may be able to enhance memory consolidation. While there is currently no research on tiger milk mushroom’s ability to enhance memory, anecdotal reports suggest that tiger milk mushroom has a palpable memory enhancing effect after a few weeks of regular supplementation.

Tiger milk mushroom has traditionally been used primarily for its effects on respiratory health, and this is also where the majority of tiger milk mushroom research has been focused on. In fact, there is even a human clinical trial on tiger milk mushroom which demonstrates its respiratory function promoting effects! Tiger milk mushroom has both acute and long term effects on respiratory function, and as many initial adopters of tiger milk mushroom have noticed, it seems to have an acute benefit on breathing. This is not surprising when reading through recent research which indicates that tiger milk mushroom appears to be a good bronchodilator! This means that it can relax our airways, allowing us to breathe slightly deeper.

Instead, the current evidence seems to be pointing towards tiger milk mushroom modulating calcium channels. Calcium plays a major role in bronchial tone, and thus by modulating calcium activity, tiger milk mushroom appears to be able to produce a more relaxed bronchial tone. With this unique mechanism in action in mind, it is no surprise that tiger milk mushroom has been used for hundreds of years for its respiratory benefits, and that most research efforts on tiger milk mushroom are currently investigating these respiratory effects!

Tiger milk mushroom produces more long term effects on the respiratory system too , which bolster its acute bronchodilatory effects. Tiger milk mushroom can dampen the production of two of the primary inflammatory cytokines found in our respiratory system, interleukin 1-beta (IL 1-beta) and interleukin 8 (IL-8). By dampening the production of these two inflammatory cytokines, tiger milk mushroom has the ability to balance the inflammatory tone in our respiratory system. Tiger milk mushroom likely suppresses IL 1-beta and IL-8 production by suppressing tumor-necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha). TNF-alpha normally triggers the synthesis and release of IL 1-beta and IL-8, thus by suppressing TNF-alpha, tiger milk mushroom dampens the levels of IL 1-beta and IL-8!

In a recent study on humans, it was also found that tiger milk mushroom could double the levels of immunoglobulin A (IgA) after three months of supplementation. IgA is one of the major regulators of respiratory immune function, and serves as one of the primary defense mechanisms for our respiratory system. Thus, by significantly elevating IgA levels, tiger milk mushroom has a robust effect on supporting respiratory immune function!  Tiger milk mushroom also has much more broad effects on general immune function too, helping to sensitize various immune cells and sensors. The overall effect, especially in combination with the IgA elevating effects, makes tiger milk mushroom very useful for supporting overall immune function. This is a great combination for dialing in overall respiratory function!

Due to the fact that tiger milk mushroom has an effect on NGF, it has naturally been compared quite extensively with the most famous NGF modulating mushroom, lion’s mane! As we discovered earlier, tiger milk mushroom appears to mimic NGF, directly activating the TrkA receptor which NGF acts on. Due to this, it has a more direct and targeted effect in regards to NGF mediated effects, when compared to lion’s mane. Lion’s mane approaches NGF in a much different way. The active compounds present in the lion’s mane mycelium, for example erinacine A, stimulate the synthesis of NGF. The active compounds present in the fruiting bodies, for example hericenone E, appear to potentiate the effects of NGF, and other unknown compounds present in the fruiting bodies also appear to stimulate NGF synthesis. With this in mind, it is clear to see why tiger milk mushroom and lion’s mane are being compared!

Lion’s mane has much more research on it, so we have a better understanding of what it is doing cognitively, when compared to tiger milk mushroom. Due to this, we know of many more targets on which lion’s mane acts, for example it can also enhance brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and monoamine levels. Lion’s mane also appears to activate kappa-opioid receptors, specifically via the compound erinacine E. Lion’s mane may also mildly inhibits the 5-alpha reductase enzyme which converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Taken together, this would indicate that lion’s mane has a much more full-spectrum effect than tiger milk mushroom. However, do keep in mind that due to the fact that the research into tiger milk mushroom and cognitive function is still very much lacking, we may learn a lot more about it in the coming years. For now, we mostly have to rely on anecdotal reports when comparing tiger milk mushroom to lion’s mane mushroom.

Anecdotally, we have found that tiger milk mushroom produces a zippier and cleaner effect than lion’s mane. It seems to be a little bit better at dialing in focus, while it loses out to lion’s mane in terms of enhancing mood and mental clarity. Similar types of anecdotal reports have also started to pop up on reddit. It seems that the effects of tiger milk mushroom are a little bit more acute, and are especially beneficial for those looking to gain a quick mental edge. In terms of the long term effects, tiger milk mushroom and lion’s mane mushroom start to converge after some time. Both seem to be excellent at dialing in memory over time, which makes sense since they are both producing a large portion of their memory effects via NGF related pathways.

Tiger milk mushroom also stands out from lion’s mane mushroom for its respiratory function promoting effects. These effects are quite unique to tiger milk mushroom and we did not notice similar respiratory function benefits with lion’s mane. That being said, both should have fairly equal effects on overall immune function.

Anecdotally we have also seen reports that individuals who did not respond well to lion’s mane mushroom, do end up responding well to tiger milk mushroom. This likely has something to do with tiger milk mushroom’s overall “cleaner” effects profile. Thus, if you have previously not responded well to lion’s mane mushroom, but would like to experience similar benefits, then tiger milk mushroom could be a great choice! We’d also be remiss to not mention that for those who do respond well to lion’s mane mushroom, a combination of tiger milk mushroom and lion’s mane mushroom seems to be an incredible combination. In fact, tiger milk mushroom really seems to lend itself to stacking, so let’s dive into that topic next!