Originally published at: Lion’s Mane: The Nerve Growth Nootropic Mushroom
Lion’s Mane is an incredible mushroom that touts some extremely unique nootropic benefits including increasing Nerve Growth Factor. If you’ve been keen to the nootropic world lately, you’ve probably seen a certain member of the Fungi Kingdom showing up more frequently. This mighty mushroom is rather impressive and could be… …(Read more on the PricePlow Blog)
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Nice writeup. Have used this in ANS Rave most recently as MagicLion
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Wow! Your article sold me on this! I’m having a heck of a time finding a brand that lists the beta-glucans percentage. I’m hoping the Swanson Vitamins brand is good, as I buy a ton of stuff from them…but again, they don’t list percentages either.
(btw, your Amazon link for the Swanson brand is dead)
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Thanks for the feedback guys! Really appreciate it.
As you can tell, I LOVE nootropics and researching/ writing about them. So, it’s encouraging to see that the noot articles I’m writing are of interest to you guys.
Any requests for specific nootropics mega posts you’d like to see?
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I am very interested in anything nootropic you can post. I’m fairly high stress and anxious (and high blood pressure). I am willing to try anything that will help with those. So far nothing has worked 
I just started taking ashwagandha last week (I posted that in another thread I think), and haven’t seen any changes just yet; so we’ll see how that goes. How about an article on that?
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Have you tried Bacopa or Rhodiola yet to relieve stress/anxiety?
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I was taking this for a few months, and didn’t notice any difference…but it was mostly Relora with a pixie dust of other stuff, including rhodiola.
I’ll have to give Bacopa and Rhodiola a go, too. I got the Lions Mane on order; so try that with the ashwagandha first.
EDIT: Meh, I’m tacking the rhodiola onto my order 
In addition to pixie dusting, most aren’t extracts.
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Will be giving this a read since I have yet to try any nootropics even though they’ve caught my attention as of late. Looks like a typical solid read.
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Alright! My lions mane came in today from Swanson Vitamins. Unfortunately it’s “Full Spectrum” (which means non-standardized). Going to start at 1500 mg per day (split over 3 doses). Let’s see how it goes…
Good starting point but I think 2-3g would be the best dose for this. But starting lower is a good idea.
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Rhodiola arrived today. Gonna give that a shot for stress/anxiety. Thanks for the tips!
My new stress/anxiety stack:
- 1000 mg Rhodiola (3% rosavins)
- 1500 mg Lions Mane ("Full Spectrum) (will probably increase dosage to 3000 mg over time per @lightningfast 's rec)
- 1350 mg Ashwagandha (2.5%)
- (plus 100-200 mg 5-HTP some evenings as needed)
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Haven’t tried rhodiola that high. Interested in how it goes.
In my experience, rhodiola’s effects are typically pretty immediate, less long term vs. others. 1000mg is pretty high, are you splitting that?
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Yeah, 500 mg in the morning, and another 500 mg in the early afternoon. The others in the stack I split over 3x/day.
Worth noting that rhodiola has a bell curve response, too high of a dose can have the same lack of effectiveness as too small of a dose. I stick in the ~400mg/day range myself.
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Yeah, I saw that on examine.com. I figured that splitting the dose would make a difference, especially if it has a “short term” versus “long term” type of effect.
The past couple days, I noticed that that I am feeling less anxious/stressed, but I pretty much started taking all 3 supps at about the same time…plus the whole placebo factor of course. The real test is when I’m back at work tomorrow 
I know this is an old post, but since the nootropic subforum isn’t always super active, I figured I’d add to this discussion a bit.
Both of the human studies, which we know used 2-3g/day, used the fruiting body powder, not the mycelium. Now, that’s not to say that the mycelim won’t work, or isn’t effective, but we don’t really have human studies on it, so if you want to replicate the human studies the most closely, I’d suggest using fruiting body powder.
Also, I had a bit of a discussion with Host Defense regarding mycelium vs fruiting bodies. Here’s some excerpts:
From Host Defense:
From Me:
given that erinacines were able to stimulate NGF synthesis, even if hericenones are not, I see some research showing (in rodent cells anyway), that they (hericenones) did potentiate NGF-induced neuritogenesis in the presence of NGF (making low doses of NGF have comparable effects to higher doses). Could perhaps mean that, even if the erinacines are the “active” compounds in lion’s mane, and are more present in the mycellum, a higher presence of hericenones in the fruiting body may make the lower amounts of the active erinacines more effective, provdiding similar or even potentially greater effects relative to the mycellum that has more of the active erinacines, but less hericenones to potentiate them? I suppose without knowing how much of each there are in both, and also having more than in vitro and rodent studies, nothing will be absolutely certain here though.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25288148/[/quote]
Me again:
I actually just found a third study (in addition to the two aforementioned studies that used fruiting body powder) that used 80% bulk mycelia and 20% fruiting body extract and found that it decreased depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. The dose used was 1200mg/day of bulk mycelia and 300mg/day of fruiting body extract. The mycelia had >37% Polysaccharides/total glucans, and the fruiting body extract had >45%.
Edit: it may be worth noting that this study had no placebo group though, while the two studies that used the fruiting body powder did.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6500611/[/quote]
Host Defense:
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Now, there IS a third human study that noted benefits with lion’s mane (which found it Improves Mood and Sleep Disorders in Patients Affected by Overweight or Obesity), but, unlike the other two studies, there was no placebo group. That said, this study used a combination of fruiting body and mycelium. Specifically, 1200mg/day mycelium and 300mg/day fruiting body extract.
And the study provides us more information on the mushroooms used in this study than simply the doses used:
The polysaccharide content of the fruiting body extract seems to have been 150mg/day, from 300mg/day extract (so 50% polysaccharide).
Note: “The polysaccharide content was determined by β -Glucan Assay Kit (Megazyme, Ireland) and expressed as total ( α plus β ) glucan content.”
Furthermore, the Polysaccharides/total glucans % of the mycelium powder was >37%, while it was >45% for the fruiting body extract.
So we’re looking at (1200mg * 0.37) + (300mg * 0.45) = 579mg/day polysaccharides between the mycelium powder and the fruiting body extract.
So, what’s the takeaway here, besides another study that suggest lion’s mane is useful in humans? Well, the lack of a placebo group makes this study a bit less “convincing” than the other two studies IMO, but it does provide us on some useful info on the polysaccharide and beta-glucan content of lion’s mane, since a lot of extract seem to be standardized for these things, but we didn’t really have too much info on how to actually dose these extracts.
Edit: calculations fixed
Edit 2: given the above polysaccharide content used in the study (579mg/day from 1500mg powder/extract), we can sort of start to try to figure out how to dose extracts standardized for polysaccharides, instead of just trusting that the companies using them are dosing them properly (hint: they’re probably not).
So we have 579mg of polysaccharides “determined by β -Glucan Assay Kit (Megazyme, Ireland) and expressed as total ( α plus β ) glucan content.”
Now, I can’t say what percent o these glucans were α and which were β, but hey, it’s still better than nothing I suppose.
So, when we see lion’s mane extracts used in supplements standardized for polysaccharides, we can kind-of-sort-of see if it’s dosed remotely correctly, based on the above-studied 579mg/day polysaccharide content of the lion’s mane “blend.” So if you have a 50% polysaccharide extract, you’d need ~1158mg. 20% would require ~2895mg. So it looks like you’re not really getting away with much smaller doses by using these extracts (which are often mycelium extracts) relative to just using the 2-3g/day fruiting body powder (not extracts) that have been shown to “work” in placebo-controlled human studies.
Now, it’s not lion’s mane, but in shiitake mushrooms, the fruiting body contained higher amounts of beta-glucans (29-54%) than the mycelium (15-27%).
So it seems that you may need higher doses of the mycelium than the fruiting body, if you prescribe to the idea of basing your dose on beta-glucan content, which I’d imagine you probably should/do if you’re opting to use an extract standardized for them. So, even if you do have an “extract” from mycelium, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily much “stronger” than just plain old fruiting body powder because it’s more “concentrated.” So you may not be able to get away with using a much smaller dose and expect similar benefits because it’s “more concentrated.” Of course, there’s still a lot of debate about what extracts should actually be standardized for, and what compounds in lion’s mane are actually/most responsible for it’s benefits, but this is what we have to go on now.
More reading:
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About nootropics, do you know any that have long term benefits? Like do I have to keep taking them, cycling off and taking again to have any effect?