Mushrooms and Your Health

Mushrooms are strange. Neither plant nor animal, they can add subtle flavor to meals and antioxidants to your diet–or, yes, they can kill you if you eat the wrong kind, and there are more than 10,000 kinds. The Nutrition Source, a publication of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, tells us that mushrooms can provide B vitamins, vitamin D and potassium, and that they (particularly maitake and shiitake) have been used as medicine for thousands of years. The Nutrition Source reports that mushrooms can imbue food with “umami,” which is not the latest Disney feature but is a fifth taste, along with sweet, sour, salty and bitter, and can enhance low-sodium foods and spare us from some of the health risks associated with salt. The Nutrition Source also offers several promising mushroom focused recipes, such as Pan Roasted Wild Mushrooms with Coffee and Hazelnuts–along with some extremely healthful advice: “Wild mushrooms with white gills or a ring around the stem are considered poisonous.”