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Is Amanita muscaria legal in the United States? Under federal drug law, yes: neither the mushroom nor muscimol nor ibotenic acid is a controlled substance. But that's not the whole…
Does Amanita muscaria contain muscarine, and does it matter? It does contain it, and the compound is literally named after the mushroom. Muscarine was isolated from fly agaric in 1...
Can you eat Amanita muscaria? People have, for centuries. In parts of Russia, Lithuania, France and Japan, fly agaric was boiled, the water was thrown away, and the mushroom was ea...
How long does Amanita muscaria take to kick in, and how long does it last? Clinical reports give a fairly consistent answer: effects usually start between 30 minutes and 3 hours af...
Was soma, the sacred drink of the Rig Veda, made from Amanita muscaria? That's the claim the banker and amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson put forward in 1968, and it has never go...
Every Amanita muscaria cap we sell was picked in a forest. It has to be: the fly agaric lives in partnership with tree roots and has never been farmed commercially. Ours is wild-ha...
What colour is the Amanita muscaria spore print, and what does it look like under a microscope? The print is white. The spores are smooth, colourless and broadly oval, roughly 10&n...
Don't combine Amanita pantherina with alcohol. That's the short version, and the reasoning is straightforward. Muscimol, panther cap's main active compound, and alcohol both act on...
Amanita pantherina, the panther cap, attracts more confident claims than evidence. It's "just a brown fly agaric". It's "the strongest, so the best". Drying "makes it safe". White…
How do you make Amanita pantherina tea? Before the how, there's a risk you need to know: tea is the format in which the panther cap is hardest to judge. Hot water draws its active…
You've bought our dried royal fly agaric (Amanita regalis) caps, or you're thinking about it. What do you actually do with them? This guide covers the practical side: what arrives…
How much royal fly agaric (Amanita regalis) should you take? The honest answer is that nobody knows. No published study has measured how much muscimol or ibotenic acid this species...
No study has ever tested royal fly agaric (Amanita regalis) for anxiety. Not in people, not in animals, not in a dish. Nobody has even measured how much muscimol or ibotenic acid i...
Which mushrooms look like royal fly agaric (Amanita regalis), and how do you tell them apart? The usual list is the panther cap, the blusher and the grey spotted amanita, all brown...
No mushroom has been shown to grow hair in people. When a team of US dermatologists reviewed every dietary and supplement study on hair loss up to late 2021, they included 30 studi...
Here's something most tincture guides leave out: none of the published human trials on lion's mane used a tincture. They used dried fruiting-body powder, tablets or mycelium capsul...
Mushroom supplement labels are written in a language of their own: fruiting body, 10:1 extract, dual extracted, 30% beta-glucans, full spectrum. Some of these terms tell you a lot…
Nobody has measured whether reishi, lion's mane, cordyceps, chaga or turkey tail compounds pass into breast milk. The NIH's LactMed database, the standard reference for medicines i...
Online guides to Amanita muscaria decarboxylation sound precise: lemon juice to pH 2.5, simmer for exactly so many hours, never go above a certain temperature. Very little of that…
No mushroom supplement has been shown to cause weight loss in a human trial. That's the honest starting point, and most "best mushrooms for weight loss" lists skip it. The stronges...
Royal fly agaric has spent two centuries switching between two labels. Elias Fries described it in 1821 as a form of the fly agaric, Agaricus muscarius β regalis . Edmund Michael t...
No human study has ever tested reishi, cordyceps, lion's mane, chaga or Amanita alongside hormonal contraception. So anyone who tells you a mushroom definitely does or doesn't affe...
The popular picture is simple: in Siberia, the fly agaric was the shaman's sacred mushroom. That's only half the story. The ethnographic record describes shamans using it, but it a...
The best-documented effect any mushroom has on human skin is a rash. Shiitake dermatitis, a streaky, itchy eruption that looks as if the skin has been whipped, has been described i...
Nobody has ever run a pharmacokinetic study on the royal fly agaric. Every timeline you'll find for it, including this one, is assembled from one 1979 Finnish report on three poiso...
No human trial has tested reishi, lion's mane, cordyceps, chaga or any other medicinal mushroom for thyroid function. Not one. Yet mushrooms and the thyroid do meet in real, practi...
Ask a child to draw a mushroom and you'll almost certainly get a red cap with white spots. That's Amanita muscaria, a mushroom nobody should eat raw, and it has somehow become the…
The best-documented thing mushrooms do to human lungs is harm them. "Mushroom worker's lung" is a recognised occupational disease, caused by breathing in spores and organic dust on...
Search PubMed for "Amanita regalis" and you get exactly one record: a three-patient Finnish poisoning report from 1979. That's the entire indexed clinical literature on the royal f...
Every December the same claim goes round: Santa Claus is really a Siberian shaman, his reindeer fly because they ate fly agaric, and his red-and-white suit is a mushroom in disguis...
