Lion's Mane Mushroom Extract Capsules

Lion's mane is the fruiting body of Hericium erinaceus (Bull.) Pers., a tooth fungus of the family Hericiaceae and the order Russulales that grows on hardwoods - beech and maple in particular - across North America and Eurasia. It is a genuine culinary mushroom before it is anything else: young fruiting bodies are eaten as a gourmet ingredient alongside shiitake and oyster, and the fruiting body runs roughly 57% carbohydrate with 8% of that as dietary fibre, 22% protein and 4% fat. The constituents buyers ask about split by tissue, and that split matters more than any other single fact about this raw material. Hericenones C to H are isolated from the fruiting bodies; erinacines A to I are cyathane diterpenoids of the cultured mycelium. A fruiting-body extract and a mycelial biomass are therefore not interchangeable articles, and a purchase specification that says only "lion's mane" has not specified anything. The second thing to fix in the specification is how the carbohydrate is measured. Mushroom material is commonly sold on a total-polysaccharide figure obtained gravimetrically or by UV after alcohol precipitation, and that figure counts starch. Where the material is mycelium grown on a cereal substrate, residual grain carries alpha-glucan straight into the assay and the number inflates without a milligram more fungal biomass in the drum. The mushroom and yeast beta-glucan method separates the two: total glucan by controlled sulphuric-acid hydrolysis, alpha-glucan by glucoamylase and invertase digestion, and 1,3:1,6-beta-glucan by difference, the method published by McCleary and Draga in the Journal of AOAC International 99(2), 364-373, 2016. Thovek declares beta-glucan on that basis and states the substrate on the certificate of analysis. Ergosterol, the characteristic fungal sterol, is available as a supporting authenticity and biomass marker. On origin the article is fungal, vegan and vegetarian, with no milk, egg, soy, fish, crustacean or nut input at any stage, and the shell is HPMC unless the buyer asks for gelatin. One allergen question here is real rather than theoretical: cereal-grown mycelium can carry gluten from rye, oat or millet substrate, so a gluten-free declaration is issued only against hardwood-sawdust fruiting-body material with a supporting test to back it. Titanium dioxide, E171, is no longer an approved food additive in the European Union, so EU-bound shells are supplied without it. Encapsulation runs under FSSAI-licensed GMP with HACCP and ISO 22000, batch-coded at every packaging level, and brands take the article for the brain-and-focus shelf as a single-ingredient SKU or inside a multi-mushroom formula.