Last year, my friend Skye Chilton visited my house. One night, he sat down at my kitchen table and spread out an array of colorful mushrooms, including cordyceps, a mushroom well-known for it's athletic performance enhancing capabilities (and one that I recently tweeted this study about). "Taste this." Skye said, as he handed me a standard, commercial cordyceps product. It was tasteless, flavorless and a bland brownish color. I didn't care for it. Then he gave me another handful of cordyceps. This different blend was a rich, reddish-brown color, and had a powerful, potent, medicinal taste. Within just a couple minutes I felt a surge of energy. The difference between these two mushroom extracts was noticeable, palatable, and significant. So what makes one mushroom extract different from another? Do medicinal mushrooms have different benefits depending on how they are grown, what stage they are harvested in, or where they are sourced? How do you actually use mushrooms in your daily life? In today's podcast, you'll get all these answers and more from Skye's father, Jeff Chilton, who wrote a book called "The Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home", which Skye gave me after he left my house, and which I realized after I read it is the most comprehensive guide on medicinal mushrooms I've ever seen. In the 1980's he operated a commercial mushroom spawn laboratory, and in 1989 he started one of the first medicinal mushroom businesses in North America. His company, Nammex, sells certified organic mushroom extracts to nutritional supplement businesses in the US, Canada and worldwide. During our discussion, you'll discover:

-Why you should add mushroom extracts such as reishi, shitaake, cordyceps to a morning cup of coffee...

-The important difference between medicinal mushroom and the kind of mushrooms you eat as food...

-How to cut through the confusion of which mushroom extracts are actually quality and which are a complete waste of your money...

-Why some mushrooms just contain grain, with very little actual mushroom extract...