Two products can say “lion’s mane” on the front of the bag and share almost nothing inside. The difference is not on the front. It is on the back, in small type, and it comes down to three questions.
First question: which part of the mushroom is it?
A fungus has two very different parts.
The mycelium is the network of white filaments growing inside the substrate. It is the organism proper, the part that feeds and spreads. It lives hidden inside wood or grain.
The fruiting body is the mushroom: what comes out, what gets harvested, what on lion’s mane are the hanging white spines. It is the reproductive structure.
Now the practical point. Growing fruiting body is slow and expensive: you have to colonise the substrate and then get it to fruit, which is the hard part. Growing mycelium is fast and cheap: you sow it on grain — rice, oats, sorghum — let it colonise for a few weeks, and mill the whole thing together.
And there is the problem: when it is all milled together, the grain goes into the product. A powder of mycelium on grain is, in good part, cereal starch.
This has been measured. A 2025 study compared chaga products and found that the fermented-grain ones carried between 33 % and 74 % alpha-glucans — the starch marker — against under 2 % in authentic material. Put iodine on them and the grain ones stained navy blue, which is what starch does. The authors’ conclusion is that those polysaccharides “likely originate from the cereal substrate, not from fungal biomass”.
And there is a more uncomfortable figure, this one from a university team with a co-author from the United States Pharmacopeia, with no industry ties: of 19 reishi supplements bought on the U.S. market, 13 carried starch-type polysaccharides and only 5 had the branched beta-glucan you are supposed to be buying. Barely 26 % matched what the label said.
It is not fraud if the label says so. It is a problem when it does not.
The signal to look for is the explicit phrase: fruiting body. If the label says mycelium, mycelial biomass, or grown on grain, you already know what you are buying.
Second question: is it a powder or an extract?
Powder is the mushroom dried and milled. Nothing else.
Extract is the mushroom put through a process — usually hot water, sometimes water and alcohol — to concentrate certain components and discard the rest.
And there is a chemical reason, not a commercial one, why the fruiting-body-versus-mycelium distinction matters. An analysis published in 2026 looked for four compounds in lion’s mane materials and found that some appear only in the mycelium and others only in the fruiting body. They are not the same material at a different yield: they are different materials.
Neither is better in the abstract: they are different things. Powder keeps the whole mushroom, fibre included. Extract concentrates.
What is a signal is a product that does not say which of the two it is.
Third question: what does that 10:1 mean?
It is a concentration ratio. A 10:1 extract means 10 kilos of dried material went in to get 1 kilo of extract. A 12:1, twelve kilos.
It sounds as though more is always better, and it is not necessarily. The ratio tells you how much it was reduced, not what was in it. A 20:1 made from bad material is still bad material, only more concentrated.
Which is why the ratio on its own is not enough.
The figure that actually sorts everything out: beta-glucans
In the cell walls of fungi there are polysaccharides called beta-glucans. They are measurable in a laboratory, which is why they work as the reference indicator for comparing products.
It is exactly like the cocoa percentage on a chocolate bar: it does not tell you whether you will like it, but it tells you what you bought. A producer who tests the batch and publishes the beta-glucan percentage is giving you a verifiable number. One who only says “high potency” is giving you an adjective.
Watch out for an old trick: some products declare total polysaccharides instead of beta-glucans. The total-polysaccharide measurement uses a colorimetric method which — in the researchers’ own words — “does not specifically measure either beta-glucan or alpha-glucan content”. Translated: it counts the grain starch as though it were mushroom. A higher number, and a less honest one.
One precision worth making, because almost nobody makes it: there is no official international method for measuring beta-glucans in mushrooms. What gets used is a de facto reference method, published in 2016, which measures total glucan, measures alpha-glucan separately, and derives beta-glucan by subtraction. It works, but it is worth knowing that it is being subtracted, not measured directly.
The short list, for when you are standing in front of a bag
- Does it say fruiting body, in those words?
- Does it say whether it is powder or extract, and at what ratio?
- Does it declare beta-glucans, and not total polysaccharides?
- Does it say which species, with the scientific name?
- Does it say who packed it and where, with a lot number?
Five questions. If a product answers all five on the pack, you know what you bought. If it dodges three, you know something else.
Our figures are printed on the pack.
Saccro is a food. It is not a medicine and it does not replace a balanced diet.
Colombia