Posted on 15th Mar 2010 @ 3:54 PM

AHCC is not a mushroom product, despite what you hear from the people that sell it.

MGN-3 and AHCC (ImmPower, Kinoko) are modified rice bran supplements that provide active compounds called arabinoxylane and alpha glucans.  These products do not deliver therapeutically effective levels of beta glucans, the clinically researched immune boosting compounds found in all medicinal mushrooms.

When making modified rice bran supplements like AHCC mushroom enzymes are added to the manufacturing process to further break down the cellulose in the rice bran, creating higher levels of arabinoxylane (it is the broken down cellulose that has always provided the active compounds for these types of supplements, once sold as "Bio Bran" before they started adding mushroom enzymes to the manufacturing process).

However, the amount of mushroom material used in this bio-conversion process does not constitute the level of mushroom based raw material normally needed or used when making mushroom supplements. There are no detectable levels of beta glucan in these rice bran supplements and if they are there, they are certainly far below the effective doses identified in the clinical research on mushroom extracts.
Arabinoxylane creates an immune response by interacting with receptors in the gut.  Mushroom beta glucans pass through the gut, enter the lymph system and create an immune response by interacting with receptors on the surface of the immune cells (the attached document explains the process in diagrams).  AHCC and mushroom extracts are complimentary, not redundant. Mushroom extracts offer a patient using AHCC an entirely new and different pathway for influencing immune health, a pathway of documented effectiveness when the appropriate dose is used.

In fact, the reason that companies selling AHCC and Immpower want you to think that they are mushroom supplements is that mushroom supplements work better and the research on mushroom supplements is much more detailed and extensive.

One other point; the AHCC people claim they have a "hybridization" of the different medicinal mushrooms.  That is absolute nonsense.  You can hybridize two roses because they are the same species but not a daisy and a rose, as they are two different species.  In the same way it is impossible to create a hybrid out of two different species of medicinal mushrooms like Shiitake and Maitake and it is absolute nonsense to suggest you can, it shows how little these people know when it comes to real science (of course there is the exception of a mules being bred from the mating of a donkey and a horse).

However, you must be careful when choosing a medicinal mushroom supplement.  Medicinal mushrooms and mushroom mycelium MUST be extracted with hot water to guarantee bioavailability and to create the potency needed for therapeutic effect. (Hot water extracts are dehydrated then encapsulated).  Although hot water extraction is used in 100% of the thousands of independent references, herbal and medical, 90% of the mushroom supplements available in the U.S. and Canada are ground up mushrooms (un-extracted), mycelium grown on grain or rice (un-extracted), or tinctures of these materials (hydro-alcohol “extracts”).  These supplements are 1/30th to 1/80th the strength of a dehydrated hot water extract and are significantly less potent than the materials used in traditional herbalism or the clinical research.
The primary active compounds, the polysaccharides (beta glucans), are found inside of the indigestible cell walls of the mushrooms and mushroom mycelium (made of chitin).  Only hot water extraction can liberate these active compounds while maintaining their structural integrity and concentrating them to defined and therapeutically useful levels.  Also, polysaccharides are not alcohol soluble; therefore tinctures are not an effective means of preparing mushroom supplements.

The good news is that every mushroom supplement label, whether thru inclusion or omission, conveys the information needed to determine quality and type.  Hot water extracts (except for the hot water extracted MaitakeGold 404) will list the polysaccharide (beta glucan) content, as a percentage, on the label in the Supplement Facts panel.   None of the un-extracted mushroom products or tinctures will list polysaccharide/beta glucan content on their labels.  If this potency information is missing the supplement should be avoided.