Chaga King of The Polypores by David Wolfe April 2011

Chaga: King of the Polypores by David Wolfe April 2011
Chaga: King of the Polypores

David Wolfe at The Longevity Now Conference Costa Mesa, California
There have been a lot of questions asked about raw foods this weekend. It's a very important subject. This is my experience, and here is what I believe is really what we should be eating. There are three categories of food that are important. The first category is: food. That would include everything that you eat that is macronutrient-oriented major protein, major fat, and major sugar/carbohydrate. That category used to be the only category, and that was your diet. For example: fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, seaweeds, grasses, sprouts, and flowers would fit into that category. Even fermented foods would fit into that category. Fermented foods have a little bit of medicinal quality, but ultimately do not have that much when we really look at the overall picture. In fact, a lot of that food whether it is plant food or animal food has been domesticated. And that means that all of the medicine has been removed. There is a second category, and that second category is your insurance policy to make sure that you are actually getting everything that you should have gotten from food. That includes superfoods, that includes supplements, and that includes vitamins, like vitamin B12. That is category two. Category three is your medicine. I get this every single day: "My aunt has fungus in her toe. What should we do?" "My uncle has tinnitus in his ear. What should we do?" "A friend of mine got sick ten years ago and never was able to get his throat cleared out and still has scruffy stuff in the back. What should we do?" "I have a friend who had a tooth infection and it's still wonky two years later and they don't know what to do." And we are all susceptible to all of those things because we have never really eaten medicine. Youve heard the phrase: "Let food be your medicine." The other half says: "Let medicine be your food." So what we are talking about in the third category is herbalism. Let medicine herbs be your food. Herbs are very important because they give us immune system. Otherwise, we are just hoping
Copyright 2011 David Wolfe and New Horizon Health, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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we wont get the bubonic plague. We are guessing, we are hoping. "I did wheatgrass enemas. I am hoping I am not going to get the bubonic plague." This is a super-important area of knowledge, and this is the reason why we do these events the way that we do them, and why we have such a focus on herbalism. Because, otherwise, we are going to be left kind of stranded, believing, "Hey, I did a wheatgrass shot," or "I ate an avocado and that's enough medicine. It's not. Those are just macronutrients, really. What we want are real medicinal properties the beta-glucans and the lanostanes that are found in the medicinal mushrooms, for example; the alkaloids that are found in ginseng, the ginsenocides; the alkaloids that are found in astragalus, the astragalosides. Those are medicines. When we take medicine and turn it into our food, then we have really got something. Look at the whole thing: "Let food be our medicine and medicine be our food." It's an important phrase to live by. I assume that its true for everybody here. Whatever your diet is, you're doing the best you can. You are already doing better than 99.99% of the whole planet on diet. You're doing everything you can. You are buying organic, you are going to farmer's markets, you are buying tiger figs, you are eating grapes, you're doing bananas, mangos, and strawberries; you're doing whatever you can. And you are trying to figure out: should it be plant food always, or should it be animal food? Basically, what it comes down to is this: your calorie sources should be well thought out and based on your metabolism. This is hinting back to what I was talking about yesterday. If you are going to cleanse, then you want to go all plant and strip away calorie sources to cleanse your body. But you can't do that forever. I have known people who after two years of doing the Ann Wigmore diet looked like they were coming out of a concentration camp. In the early days, people would tell me, "I don't want to look like that." Do you remember those days? There is a point where it goes too far. Then we have to backtrack and go, "Okay, what do my calorie sources actually need to be?" For some people, the calorie sources need to be baked yam and sweet potato and rice, but everything else should be plants and should be raw. When you are dealing with a raw calorie source, that's that; everything else is raw food, if that is going to be your diet. If people are into
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cheese, boom, put raw cheese on your salad and that's your calorie source in salad. Everything else is just raw plants. That's your diet. But that isnt the medicine. The insurance policy I would really recommend because of the situation we are in is that you have things like iodine. We have hit that ad infinitum, ad nauseum, haven't we? We have talked a lot about B12 and the B vitamins. Remember Dr. Yus presentation? B vitamins help in every single category. Glucuronidation and methylation require B vitamins. We are breaking down B vitamins because they are methyl donors; they have many other properties that are actually helping us out, too. So that's insurance. Then we eat superfoods just to make sure we are getting the minerals. When we get into the herbal category, we immediately want to focus on medicinal mushrooms mushrooms that grow on trees. That's what I am here to talk to you about the king of the mushrooms: chaga. We have heard about the queen, reishi. Now it's time for the king, chaga. I got so into reishi and chaga that I actually bought a house way up in the woods in the middle of nowhere so I can hunt medicinal mushrooms and make that part of my lifestyle, part of my diet. Are you guys ready to explore the magic of the King of the Mushrooms and what that means? We are going to look at the science; we are going to look at where the stuff grows; we are going to talk a little about the history of this food in the West. We are going to talk about what it can do for you, and we are going to talk about using chaga for cancer, because chaga is the number one herb in the world against cancer that we know of. Chaga is the king of the polypores. You are going to see some imagery here that is extra-terrestrial. It's beyond-this-planetary. This is to give the topic a little bit of an angle that chaga is not quite from here. It's from a cold planet somewhere. It grows in the circumpolar region of the world. It grows in deciduous forests at the very brink of where they can survive. There is a book, The Cancer Ward, which I will be referencing later that says, "Man is provided with all he needs in every corner of the Earth. He only has to know where to look." That's why we came here. You have everything you need. It's all around you. It's always been around you always. You live in Los Angeles; do you think there are no springs here in Los Angeles? There
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are. You think in Los Angeles there is not enough food? There is tons of food here. There is pine pollen in the Thousand Oaks Whole Foods parking lot. It's here. A polypore is a woody pore fungus that sometimes forms large, brightly colored shelf-like growths on trees either dead trees or living trees. The polypores are the ennobled representatives of the mushroom kingdom. All these years of doing nutrition I found out and you do find things out if you have been in it as long as I have that the main part of our diet should be plants, and some of our diet actually has to be mushrooms. That is actually what we require. Some of our diet has to come from the insect kingdom. That is also what we require. Now I'm not going to recommend you eat a cockroach or a grasshopper; however, honey is good. Let's say you don't believe me. Let's say you go, "Nope. I don't do honey, I don't do grasshoppers, I don't do cockroaches, I don't do ants, I don't do any of that stuff." Then you actually lose years of your life. Let's say you do believe me. You say, "I'll do the honey." Then you will add years to your life. And that has been shown. Honey is a super longevity food. It's number two, right behind chocolate. Chocolate and honey. That's it. That's what the research indicates. That's the basis of all candy. The entire candy industry began with raw cacao beans and honey. And that is kind of interesting because it means that having a good time, eating what you enjoy, creating little concoctions with chocolate and honey is associated with a long life. It's an interesting thing. Any child will tell you that. The polypores come from "up there," as we are going to see. Of the polypores, Inonotus obliquus, otherwise known as chaga, is king. I have seen this in so many different ways. It is always a magical experience when you find a chaga, and it's always an incredible experience when you dry it, when you crush it to a powder, when you eat it, when you make teas out of it, when you are adding it to your smoothie, when you are making extracts of it everything about it, in every way, is true magic. We live in a disenchanted world most of the time. In this little cubbyhole, in this hotel, for this weekend, we are in natural magic. However, when we get out there in that world, and we
Copyright 2011 David Wolfe and New Horizon Health, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 4
get on freeways and the two guys cut us off, we start sensing the disenchantment of our world. We all have heard that there is a lost, enchanted world close by. We are inspired by books that hint at that alternate reality, that dimension that is near, but far. J.R.R. Tolkien. Harry Potter. If we look into those archetypes a little more deeply, we find that there are certain iconic representatives of those kingdoms the magical kingdom such as fairies, elves, dwarves, gnomes, toads and mushrooms. Is it possible that if we take in something from the mushroom kingdom not number 8, not number 4,000, not number 10,802, but number 1 that we could invite in some of the enchantment of the mushroom world; of a dimension that is near, of a dimension that brings inspiration, that invites in creativity? And the answer is: yes. The word chaga is a Russian word. The Russians brought it to us. It was originally a Siberian medicine although it is present across the entire circumpolar region of the world, usually growing on birch trees. Sometimes it grows on alder, ash, beech and elm trees. Sometimes, even apple trees. This particular image is the growing region of chaga, which is the circumpolar region of the Northern Hemisphere of our Earth. Wherever deciduous forests can survive Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, some of Northern Europe, and you can even see some of Iceland are ideal growing environments for chaga. What the heck is a deciduous forest? At the very northern regions where it is minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit, pine trees can survive. As it warms up and gets to about minus 40, birch can survive. Where birch is found, you also find chaga. Chaga, according to the lore, grows best where it is minus 40 in the winter. I use minus 40 for a particular reason, because some people are on Celsius and some people are on Fahrenheit. But there is one place where they are the same: minus 40. Russian dissident and Nobel Laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, brought chaga to the attention of the West in his book The Cancer Ward. He described a group of cancer patients in Siberia political prisoners who were being irradiated with chemotherapy who were hoping that something would come down the pipeline. And in the book, that thing was chaga.
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This is actually an autobiographical story. He is telling us the story of how he was healed of cancer. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was going down with cancer. He chose chemotherapy with chaga and survived, and this is his story about how that happened. The Cancer Ward was published in the English language in 1968 and became a sensation all across Europe, all across America, and all across the UK. It's still available in used book stores today. One day I was sitting at home reading about this book online. I got up, drove into town, went to the used book store, asked about the book, and they had it. I pulled it off the shelf and read it. Fascinating book. A doctor in the book worked for dozens of years in the same hospital, and he discovered a strange thing: the peasants in his district saved money on their tea and instead of tea brewed up a thing called chaga birch fungus. He noticed that the peasants never got cancer, and they would live to be over 100. That is in the chaga lore: people who drink chaga tea live to be over 100. The doctor decided to bring chaga into his treatments for cancer based on what he had observed with the peasants. They found in Russia, as early as the 1940s, that chaga has these properties: it's an herbal adaptogen; a cancer fighter; an immune modulator; antiviral and antifungal. And some of you are going to go, "Wait a second. I read Dr. Young's book, The pH Miracle." Did you know that when Dr. Young wrote that book, he didn't even know what reishi mushroom was? No idea. And he had absolutely no idea what chaga mushroom was. I think it's a great book, but we can't really say that a button mushroom is the same as an ennobled representative of that magical kingdom that we call the mushrooms. What is the best way to get rid of a rat? Say you have a rat in your house. Let's say I am over at David Wilcock's house. There's a rat in the basement. What do we do about it? Audience member: Cat. DW: But who gets the cat? You. The best way to get rid of a rat, you get a human on the case. Right? A human is going to figure out how to get that rat. That's like chaga versus candida. Chaga is an ennobled representation of the mushroom world and it knows how to get rid of candida. That's easy. That's a no-brainer, all-hearter. That will be a rewind later. It will be like, "No-brainer, all what? Rewind."
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Here is what is in chaga that makes the magic. The first thing is betulin. Out of 2,500 botanical substances reviewed for their power to fight cancer, betulin is number one. What is betulin? Betulin is the white powdery stuff that is in birch. Some people have a birch tree right in front of their house, right here in Los Angeles. Betulin is that white stuff in the birch bark. If you strip the bark around, and you break it up the white powder that comes out is betulin. Betulin, betulinic acid and lupeol which are all, basically, the same kind of compound are concentrated by chaga. Chaga takes those substances and leverages it against the cancer. I don't know about you, but I'm all for the natural stuff. We have found that we don't need herb number 1,111 anymore. That's over. That game ended. We don't need herb number 400. It's over. Herb number 333, we're not going there. We need herb number 1, and then we need to megadose on that one. Because what makes it herb number one is that you can live on it. You can blast it down all day. Frank Giglio was up here earlier. His wife has been drinking chaga tea every day of her pregnancy. There is no threat to any kind of life. It's for life all for life and that's why chaga is number one, and that's why reishi is number two, and that's why astragalus is number three because they are for life. And that's why we go to them. They are the most powerful medicines. Melanin. This is appropriate for the situation that we are in currently radioactive debris in the environment. The Russian research since 1955 found that radioactive isotopes that are present in chemotherapy degrade in the presence of melanin. Melanin is a substance you have in your skin. It takes radiation from the Sun, and it absorbs it and deactivates it. That is basically what our skin is doing. So it's like chlorophyll, isn't it? Melanin is a very nutrient-dense substance and it has tremendous draw of resources and minerals wherever it is found. Whenever we find little white spots on us maybe vitiligo, or something like that that shows our body is not able to push out all the nutrients to the skin. The skin is furthest away. I'll say that again. It's an interesting idea. Your skin is furthest away.
Let's say you were dealing with something going on with your skin. I would really recommend that you start looking at chaga tea, that you start taking chaga and cooking it in oil, like cacao butter. I've been doing this. You take cacao butter and you do a double boiler method, and you put chaga in there. You extract fat-soluble substances out of there, then you take the whole darned thing, the chaga, the oil, everything, and rub it into your skin so you come at it from the outside in, instead of from the inside out. This is especially important with advancing age, so that we can get a little of nutrition coming into our skin this way. There is a strong relationship between chaga and reversing melanomas that has been welldocumented. There is nothing better against melanoma than chaga. It's number one. In a minute well go through the list of all the different cancers chaga has been noted to be beneficial for. Let's talk a little bit about melanin and the pigments that are in chaga. About 25 percent of the pigments in chaga are actually melanin. That is really a high amount; whereas with reishi it is 2 percent. There is no other mushroom that even comes close. David Wilcock: It is very important for the pineal gland. DW: We have Mr. Pineal himself. Stand up, David Wilcock. This guy had the number one video on Google on December 1st, 2008. And what was it about? It was about the pineal gland. And what does the pineal gland require? David Wilcock: You see, the pineal gland is actually a physiological connection to being psychic. In my new book, I did all the homework. It turns out that the pineal gland is in the geometric center of your brain. It's wired up like an eye. It has what they call a focal transduction cascade. It takes photons that are coming from somewhere in there and shoots them into the visual cortex of your brain. All different cultures around the world have legends of the pine cone, which is associated with the pineal gland. It appears that this gland is the key to your psychic awareness. I have talked with a lot of people who have worked in Black Ops programs for the government, Uncle Sam, or Uncle as they call it sometimes; and this one guy was telling me that melanin is the big thing for the pineal gland, which is all about being psychic and switching on your awareness. And I'm like,
"Well, where am I going to get melanin?" And then you just told me this, so that's part of why it's number one, bro! DW: Turn on your psychic powers with chaga. Thank you, David Wilcock! So melanin is a very interesting compound, and there are all different kinds of philosophies and theories about it, this latest being a very interesting angle on it: it activates the pineal gland, and that's that third eye that David was just talking about. It's wired up like an eye in your brain, and in reptiles, in some cases, it actually is an eye, isn't it? Let's jump to the next thing: beta-glucans. In the last ten years, there have been tremendous breakthroughs in understanding how beta-glucans work with the immune system. In fact, there was an article that came out just a few months ago, a fascinating article about how macrophages, your white blood cells, actually dice up the beta-glucans, which are found in almost all medicinal mushrooms, and use those as weapons against viruses, against cancer, against bad bacteria, and against harmful fungi like candida.
(Journal of Hematology & Oncology 2009, 2:25 doi:10.1186/1756-8722-2-25) Beta-glucans are immune modulators. In cancer, what we are looking to do is to sharpen up the intelligence of our immune system. Beta-glucans are modulatory in that if your immune system needs to come up it will come up; if your immune system is overactive and missing something down here, the beta-glucans will turn it back down so you can see where the cancer is. So betaglucans are not like a very strong garlic hit that shoots your immune system up. Beta-glucans have been well-studied in cancer research, and they are found in many different medicinal mushrooms.
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Activated barley that is out now that has beta-glucans in it. This is one of the super nutrients of the future. It's a polysaccharide. I want to digress for a second to talk about polysaccharides. There are eight essential sugars. Glucose is one of them; fucose is another; arabano-galactose is another. And there are five more. These essential sugars are found in medicinal mushrooms, in seaweeds, and in certain superherbs like goji berry and astragalus but they are rarely achieved just by eating food. We rarely get enough of them to activate all the essential sugars that we require. And this is an area to look into. My feeling is that the future of medicine is all about the essential sugars, because that polysaccharide unlike glucose, which is a simple sugar has a bunch of different twists and turns and bells and whistles on it. And your immune system will cleave pieces of it off to use to fight different invaders and to modulate your immune system. Thats where the ormus is, for those of you who are tuned in to that. It's in the polysaccharide. That is what David Hudson discovered all those years ago. I have been researching this for 17 years, and I think he's right. I think the aloe vera gel, where those polysaccharides are, can have this much ormus mineral in it, or that much. If you are really clever and you are really tuning in to this whole thing about polysaccharides, you are probably thinking, "Wait a second. We could grow medicinal mushrooms in such a way to increase the amount of ormus the strange matter, the weird minerals that are in the polysaccharides that modulate our immune system." That's where I'm at, too. That's actually where my research is at, and that's what I like to do in my spare time. I don't know what other people do for fun, but that's what I do. Antioxidants. Chaga is number one for antioxidants in the mushroom kingdom. It has the most pigments of color. What do we know about those pigments of color? Melanin is part of that complex; there are lanostane triterpenes that are part of that complex; there are betaglucans that are part of that complex. Beta-glucans are usually red, and that's what gives that fiery red to reishi mushroom, if you have seen that before. Now we have access to greater, deeper, more beautiful, richer pigments of color than we have ever had before. Look at chlorella. Look at chaga. Look at what is going on with the red
pigments in astaxanthin. I mean, you can't even bite into that stuff. It will stain your teeth red for two days. It's folding over and over: the worse it gets, the better it gets. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, its the best time ever and it's the worst time ever, all at the same time. So with these disasters that we are seeing, we have got to know that on the other side of that is magic; impossible possibilities. Right? Unlimited potential becomes available to us. All the people who have gone down with cancer, and all the people who have survived cancer have brought a new addition to our herbal pharmacopeia. Boom: chaga. Here are the different cancers that chaga is known to be beneficial for, if not curative of: brain, breast, cervical, colon, Ewing's sarcoma, leukemia. Leukemia is associated with radiation poisoning, isn't it? And what does chaga do? It deactivates radioactive isotopes. It will take radioactive cesium and break it down; it will take radioactive iodine and break it down; it will take radioactive strontium and break it down. Liver, lung, medulloblastoma, melanoma. Melanoma is the big one skin cancer. Chaga is number one. That's the research. Neuroblastomas, ovarian cancer, squamous cell. A very dear friend of mine right here in Orange County died of squamous cell cancer, which is a cancer of the neck or the head. Stomach and uterine cancer. Brain, breast, cervical, colon cancer. And on top of helping with all that, the thing that really amazes me and another reason why chaga is number one is it tastes good. It's not like you are chewing down something that is awful; it's not like some bitter medicine. It's nothing like that. You want to eat it. What a difference. What an amazing aspect of all this. Betulinic acid. You'll see it as betulin in some of the literature and you will see it as lupeol in some of the literature. Once again, it's that white stuff. Chaga has taken that out of the tree and it is concentrating it. Chaga is a white rot fungus. That means it does not corrode the cellulose of the tree, so it can live and does live in living trees. It is able to go into a living tree and the cellulose, the fiber of that tree, is not affected at all. If you see mushrooms rotting a log, the log is going to melt four or five years later, because of black rot fungus that gets a hold of the cellulose and starts breaking it down. But chaga is not like that. It's a white rot fungus, so it can live in a living tree.
If you look at a birch forest, you will see that chaga may be present in one out of every two or three hundred trees. But those chagas are all in communication with each other; and it has been shown that there is chaga DNA present in the soil. In fact, it is possible that there may be one chaga organism dominating an entire forest. That is possible. The same organism. There have been various insights in the literature stating that chaga is actually eating the tree, and the tree is dying. But I have seen chagas in trees that are 50 years old. There is no way it is killing the tree, even though some people say, "In four to six years it kills the tree." I have seen disparity in books on medicinal mushrooms and tree mushrooms. Some scientists have taken the betulin from chaga, and they have concentrated it and sprayed it on trees with diseases to see what was really going on. "Is that stuff really killing the tree or is it actually good?" They found that it actually helps other trees fight off their diseases. So it's a medicine a true medicine. It's a medicine for us; it's a medicine for other plants. There are two aspects of beta-glucans. One is they are immunomodulatory. In some cases, though, they are cytotoxic. If certain types of cancer cells are exposed to beta-glucans, they die. They can't even be around it. And that may have something to do with the hydrating power of beta-glucans, which is a polysaccharide. It's juicy. It's spongy. These medicinal mushrooms, by the way, contain the spongy stuff that is in your joints. Glucosamine and chondroitin. What is chondroitin? Where does it come from? It comes from the seafood industry. They basically take crab shells and they crush it to a powder, and that is chondroitin. And where does that go? It goes right into your joints. That same material is in mushrooms. And within the layers of that material are the beta-glucans. To ingest these mushrooms, you can crush them like I do eat them, make teas out of them, do extracts, dump that back into the tea, let the tea boil off the alcohol. I'm just giving you little hints. Then I'll dose up on the chaga mycelium, too. Those are wild chagas right here. That is wild chaga sclerotium. Chaga is exactly the opposite of every other medicinal mushroom in the world in that it actually shows part of its body on the outside of a tree. Every other medicinal mushroom shows its body in the inside of the tree.
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What in the world is on the inside of a tree that is so interesting that every medicinal mushroom is trying to get at that stuff? Then it pushes a reproductive body or a fruiting body out of the tree. The part of reishi that you see is the part where the spores come out. It's a reproductive organ. You guys are not getting that. It's the penis and vagina. Now you're getting it. The part of the medicinal mushroom that comes out of the tree is actually the reproductive organ. The actual mushroom itself is in the tree: but with chaga, this is reversed. Chaga pushes its body out of the tree; this is called the sclerotium, or the sclerotia. And that's the part you break off. So chaga is very, very different from every other medicinal mushroom in that it is actually exposing its body. When you are able to get both the sclerotia and the mycelium, you get all kinds of novel immunomodulatory compounds, or essential sugar type of compounds weird polysaccharides that modulate things. This is the future. This is where we are going. It's all going to be about polysaccharides, and it's all going to come from medicinal mushrooms. In fact, if you look at antibiotics today, where do the antibiotics come from today? Where does penicillin come from? What is penicillin? It's fungi. Streptomycin. Tetracycline. What is it made out of? Fungi. But what is going on with Western science is, "Let's keep the chemistry but strip the intelligence away." With this, we keep the intelligence. That's the whole idea of the medicinal mushrooms: let's keep the intelligence. Then if we start putting the mushrooms together reishi, chaga, maitake, birch polypore that's one of my favorites fomes fomentarius, shiitake and it's not shitake, it's shiitake. It's s-h-i-i. I cannot tell you how many products in health food stores spell that wrong. I just look for fun. I go into a health food store and I look at the product and it's s-h-i-t. I'm like, "Oh my God. They put that on their product." It's s-h-i-i. When you guild all those mushrooms together, then you get what Paul Stamets, the great mycologist, calls a host defense. Then you start getting immune system. Then you do not become susceptible to the fungal toe; you lose the
susceptibility to the tinnitus. You no longer have the thing that lingers on and never heals because you actually have defenses, you actually have immune system. Eventually, you can work yourself into a position of no more flu, no more colds, no more fevers, no more coughs. I've done 2,000 events in a row and never missed one. Nobody can deny that. Can you imagine? Let's say we're going to Detroit this summer. Where are you, Andrea? You're like, "We're having this great event. It's going to be the best thing ever," and all of a sudden you get a call. Ring. "Andrea, it's Avocado. I'm sick." Wouldn't that be ridiculous? We've got to get to a place where that can never happen, no chance, out of the question; and this is how. This is how we get there. This is the direction that we're going. We have access to all kinds of novel compounds. I'll take the wild chaga, like we did up here, and I'll mix it with a chaga mycelium. I'll take the wild reishi tea, and I'll mix it with the reishi mycelium. I'll take the wild shiitake and mix it with the shiitake mycelium. You get all kinds of novel immune system compounds. And now what we are doing: I dragged a bunch of logs out from the forest and I'm inoculating them with mycelium, squirting ormus in there, putting our beeswax over it. I'm inoculating logs that have been tampered with a little bit so they can grow certain types of mushrooms. That's the easiest way. If you guys want to get the easiest medicine the fastest way possible, this is the fastest way ever. You take a log like that and you can do this right here in Los Angeles and you literally drill holes in it, and then you pound little dowels that are contaminated with the mycelium of reishi mushroom or chaga, or any of them, and you pound it in. And then you pour beeswax over it, or you don't. You don't even need to do anything else. You just pound it in there. The whole thing takes 10 minutes. For years that log will produce reishi or chaga or whatever one you want. It takes 10 minutes and then for years you will be getting medicine, the best mushrooms ever, and it's pretty. It looks pretty. I was in Bali and my friend Dale showed me pictures of the reishi mushroom that he is growing on coconut logs. Gorgeous. Real beauty. They are the noble representatives of their kingdom. This is where we are, folks. This whole thing about going to the hospital? You don't want it. That's dangerous. Youre just asking for it. You could walk down Compton Boulevard in the middle of the night, or Watts, nude, like this. You're safer there than in the hospital. Sorry, I had to say that. Chaga has magic in it and all these novel compounds. Beyond the melanin, the beta-glucans, the antioxidants and the betulin, chaga also has superoxide dismutase. Chaga is one of the greatest sources of that, so it's a super liver detoxifier. It also has triterpenes, the lanostane triterpenes, which have an orange color.
According to Paul Stamets' research, the betulin is in that black sclerotia the charcoal-looking stuff. And the lanostane triterpenes are in the orangey interior of the chaga. When you start playing around with this stuff, you will know what I mean. Besides having all of those goodies, chaga has another way that it heals you, and this is probably the real way that it heals you. This is the way that it is phrased in The Cancer Ward, so Ill just read this: "He could not imagine any greater joy than to go away into the woods for months on end to break off the chaga, crumble it, boil it up in a campfire, drink it and get well like an animal. To walk through the forest for months, to know no other care than to get better, just as a dog goes to search for some mysterious grass that will save him." The thing about chaga is it actually gets you up off your booty. You are out in that forest and you are hunting this stuff down. And I bet you that is more healing than the stuff itself especially with this whole barefoot thing. Right? Because now I'm out in the woods barefoot, running around, looking for this stuff. I just want to point that out. Now let's look at some original traditional uses of chaga. In Siberia, chaga has been used as a nutritional medicine and tonic. I have found no clear representation of chaga being used by Native Americans, even though it was here. This is difficult for some of us to understand, but let me bring an idea in here. Down in South America near the border of Brazil there are three groups of people that live in Guyana. There are the white people, there are the black people and there are the Native American people. And about 200 years, ago black people said, "Sorry. We're not slaves anymore," and they went out into the jungle and tried to survive. They have in the same ecosystem as the Native Americans a completely different medicine, a completely different diet, completely different foods the same ecosystem. You see, right there, you get it: that there are many, many different medicinal systems and food systems that can be carved out of the same ecosystem.
What we are doing now is, based on cross-reference of knowledge, we are cutting right to the chase.. We understand that all the research is in on medicinal mushrooms, the scales have been weighed, and now we want to go right to this. That may not have been an insight to a Native American. In fact people ask me all the time, "How come Native Americans weren't onto this whole raw thing?" Do you know what a luxury it is to even know that you could change your diet? First of all, we are one of the few literate people that have ever lived on this Earth. The luxury to even know that you can change your diet is something we take so much for granted we never ever thought that thought before. And it's usually the case that in that type of tribal society, that the Shaman realizes, Okay, in order to survive here, we've got to get this, this, this and that. There is some trial and error and trial and success, and inevitably a system is figured out and then that becomes structured. And that's the way those people lived there for thousands of years. That's what is going on worldwide. And what is going on at the fundamental basis of our culture is that all of those traditions are being broken up so that we can reevaluate them and go, "That's good, that's good, that's good, that's good," and everything else is a wash; don't need it anymore. And we can reconfigure it. And that's ultimately what Len Foley, myself, Rebecca, Truth Calkins, all our presenters who have been up here, Dr. Yu, Dr. Dave, Dr. Oschman, Clint Ober, Daniel Vitalis this is what we are all trying to do. Is to reconfigure and put it back together based on what we know, and advance it so that we can easily make it to 100, make it to 120, make it to 150. My goal is 3,000. Everybody always says, "Don't tell them that. They are going to think you are crazy. It will get on YouTube." So chaga has been traditionally used as tonic, as a medicine. It is wetted for external treatment on the skin so it can be used as a poultice. It can be used against skin cancer that way. It can be inhaled as a smoke. And it's also a tinder polypore. It can be used to start fires. This is an advertisement in Russian for chaga. Isn't that cool? No bikinis there. Cute girl, but no bikini. They don't have bikinis in Siberia. And she is holding a chaga right next to her birch tree. Some of you remember the iceman that was found, tzi the Iceman. In his pouch were three medicinal mushrooms. One of them was chaga mushroom. Actually, there were two pieces of chaga mushroom
that he had on him. Over a number of decades, there has been melting of a glacier on the border between Austria and Italy, and eventually somebody was hiking through there and found him. Can you imagine that? You are out hiking in the ice, and then you are like, "Oh. There's a guy in there." So the Italians and the Austrians have been fighting over who owns tzi the Iceman ever since. I think the Italians now own him. I could be wrong. They went through all his equipment, all the clothing, the jacket, everything; and they found out that he probably died of an arrow wound. He wasn't hit by an arrow and died right there, but it was an infection, and he had chaga on him. Now, why would an ancient human like that have chaga on him? Well, there are some different reasons. One of the reasons is to prevent wound infections from advancing too quickly or too far. Another one is to treat internal parasites. But a big one is actually to start a fire. This is so huge. What I am about to tell you is some big news. Listen closely to this. Almost nobody knows this. It's outrageous. I'm appalled, actually, that almost nobody knows this. Before the chemicals that came along from 1900 on, how was gunpowder made? Audience member: Charcoal. DW: Charcoal. Audience member: Salt peter. DW: Salt peter. Audience member: Sulfur. DW: Sulfur. Where did all those things come from by the way? Audience member: Fertilizer. DW: Fertilizer. What kind of fertilizer? Piss and shit. Doesn't that make sense, like where gunpowder comes from? It comes from piss and shit. So that's where you get the spark. Now it's not like somebody poops into a gun, right? But it's processed that way. A great series of books that was written years ago called the Firefox series that teaches you how to make technology out of nothing. Let's say you are in Iceland. You're in the middle of nowhere and you've got to learn how to make a gun. That book teaches you how to make a gun out of nothing. You have no materials whatsoever. Very interesting book. As time goes on, and we get
to this more precarious place, we start thinking, "If something goes really wrong, we could go all the way back to the Stone Age." So you know, you start looking at survival, like, "Oh boy, I'd better learn about this stuff." Anyway, the way that they used chaga was that they would take little pieces of chaga and pee on it, and then dry it. Then they would pee on it again, and then dry it. Then they would pee on it again, and then dry it. As soon as it's been peed on a few times, bam, next to your flint, it sparks and it burns right away. That's why it was so important for controlling fire in the Northern Hemisphere of the world. Chaga is key, and that's what tzi the Iceman was actually using chaga for: to start a fire. That's how it was done. Mushrooms have been intimately involved in controlling fire since the beginning of time. It's always a mushroom. How did they carry fire from one place to another? How did they get it from one place to another? They'd drill a hole in a chaga, or drill a hole in a Fomes fomentarius, put the hot ember in there and put a little bit of wax on top, or put a little piece of the mushroom back on top. Then you could walk with the ember. That's how it was done for thousands of years most of our time on this planet since we crash-landed here, of course. There is Groove from Om Goddess with her chaga find. Men, that's how you make women happy. This is how it grows on trees. That particular one was probably out of the tree for about seven years. Before it showed itself, it was probably another seven years, so that tree has probably had chaga in it for about 15 years. Let's talk about that for a second, because we never eat anything that is seven years old, ever. Right? Any fans of Rudolf Steiner here? Steiner said it this way. If we are eating annual plants very common in the raw food scene, lettuce, tomatoes, that kind of a thing then what's happening is that's all controlled by the inner planets and the Moon. We are only getting a very limited amount of information in that annual time. However, some types of plants namely trees have figured out how to form bark and have barked themselves over. And some of those get mushrooms in them that can be sitting out there for years. They are taking in all the information of the inner and outer planets and the stars. So if something is sitting out there and I have seen chagas that were probably 25 years old they are actually taking in information from planets as far away as Saturn. Because it takes Saturn 228 years to go all the way around the Sun. It's picking up all that information, tracking the stars.
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The reality of a tree is not like our reality, sitting at home on YouTube on our grounded bed. A tree is out there in the elements. And what's happening out there in the elements? The Sun comes up and goes down, the Moon comes up and goes down, the stars come up and go down. It's going on like that. There is a certain imprint of information that we miss if we only eat annuals. But if we eat perennials, then we get it. Chaga has given us that. So has ginseng. Fiftyyear-old ginseng roots, 75-year-old ginseng roots. Now that sounds a whole lot more appealing, doesn't it? That has a whole different amount of information in it than a 6-year-old or 1-yearold. This one right here is a little bit younger. This may have been out of the tree for perhaps 4 or 5 years, and the way I know this is because I have been picking chagas for 4 or 5 years, so I go back to the same trees and I see how quickly it grows back. It will repair itself. And probably what happens is, if a tree is damaged that has chaga in it, the chaga sclerotium, that part that is coming out right there, will show up there to seal it off so the tree is protected in that particular area. That's what it appears like to me at this point. When you break it off you see that it has all those different colors. Those lanostane triterpenes are the orange-yellowish bits; the betulin in that area, like charcoal, is the black bit; and you can even see some reds in there. That's the beta-glucans. Do we just eat it? Can we eat it raw? Can we extract it with alcohol? Should we make teas out of it? There are different extraction methods for chaga. I want to talk about this because Daniel and I have spent years working on this how to get the maximum out of your chaga, what kind of chaga products you want to look for and what exactly is out there. Generally, the beta-glucans and the polysaccharides are not alcohol-soluble; they are watersoluble. There is a problem though: the cell wells of these mushrooms are very thick and very hard. You are going to get a little bit more if you can strip it apart. It's like the shell of a crab. It's that kind of material. It's very hard material. So what Daniel came up with it's a brilliant idea, an herbal idea you make your chaga tea with the chaga still in it, and you take the whole darn thing and put it in the freezer. Then you freeze it. The freezing expands and rips apart all the cell walls of the mushroom. You take it out
of the freezer after eight hours. After it completely freezes and you put it back on the stove, you are going activate more aspects of the polysaccharides of the chaga. Then you can take the piece of chaga and crush it into a powder. You can see those bits floating around. You take a mortar and pestle, crush it to a powder. Chaga is one of the weirdest things in that you can literally go to a tree, rip the thing off, and eat it right there you can eat chaga as it is right there or take it home, leave it in the Sun or put it next to a stove; let it get dried out, and then you can take those materials, crush it to a powder, put it in alcohol, take whatever interesting stuff gets pulled out with the alcohol the lanostanes, for example, and the triterpenes and then dump that back into your tea, because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water. The alcohol will boil off and you get all of those interesting ingredients in there. That's actually how Daniel Vitalis' chaga extract is made. All of that is in there. So they are taking the water, they are doing the extract, then they freeze it, then they put it back on again, then they take the alcohol, then they boil it off and then they take that and then they put that in a container of 15 to 20 percent grape alcohol, with a little bit of vanilla bean, a little bit of maple syrup and a little bit of spring water. That's a lot of herbalism. It's taken a long time to get to this point: to get the most powerful type of chaga product that you can get that is the easiest to take. What's the biggest challenge in herbalism? Compliance. What does that mean? It means will you actually take the herb? If something tastes good will you do it? Yes, probably. If something tastes awful? No way. Alcohol extraction is easy, but the beta-glucans and the other polysaccharides don't come out. You do get the triterpenes out, so that works; then you can flip them back into the tea. With water extraction, you get the beta-glucans out, but you don't get the triterpenes out. You also have the matrix to break up. If you freeze it you break up that matrix. When you mix both of those together, then you get the magic. Chaga products from around the world. So there are different products out there. What we had when I was up here with Chef Franky that sclerotium that was just broken off a tree. That's the most natural chaga product out there. That's what you want to make your teas out
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of. It's delicious, and easy to do. It's 100% wild food that you can instantly make into something that tastes a little bit like vanilla, which is nice. We've got the techno-grown chaga, which is the chaga mycelium. That was the powdered stuff that we put back in. That has novel and interesting polysaccharides that modulate immunity, and are excellent for your joints. By the way, chaga also contains nerve growth factors. Real quick aside. If somebody has Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, or if they have some kind of a nervous system disorder, nerve growth factors are required. That would be things like deer antler, elk antler, chaga mushroom, lion's mane mushroom; and recent data has indicated that ashwagandha also contains nerve growth factors. Chlorella also contains nerve growth factors. Let's say you mix all of those in with marine phytoplankton. If you are into fish oil, you'd mix that in too, and then you'd put in MegaHydrate. Now you've got something that can do some real good that's going to go right into the brain and central nervous system. That's where the medicine is at. That's where we are going. Chaga alcohol extracts, those are just chaga that has been broken down, put into alcohol. What has been extracted, generally the triterpenes, have great medicinal properties. Not as powerful as the water extracts with the beta-glucans. Still, very good. There are hot water extracts that have been vacuum evaporated, where they literally took the chaga, boiled it in water and then evaporated the water off until there is sediment left over, and then that is encapsulated. That's called a hot water extract powder. And then you can get mixtures of both. That is like Daniel Vitalis' product. There are also chaga medicines out there. There is a big one in Russia that is very popular that has been used since 1955 as a chemotherapy adjunct. In the West we hear a lot about using ginseng adjunctively with chemotherapy. In Russia it has always been chaga with chemotherapy that gives the best results. And again, what are we noticing there? The chaga is taking the radioactive isotopes and breaking them down. Where to look for chaga. Anybody live in the temperate regions of the world, that circumpolar zone? There are some people from Ontario that I see out there in the audience. Who is from Ontario? Who is from Quebec? Anybody from Russia here? Anybody from Scandinavia? Audience member: Latvia. DW: Latvia. They kept their forests in Latvia. When you are going out and looking, you want to go to an old growth region that has some birch. You want to look between mid-July to midNovember. That's the mushroom-picking season. You don't have to. You can go out in skis in February with a hatchet and bust that stuff off. I found out that chaga freezes to the tree. In the
summer, you can take a rock and bust the darned thing off. Not so in the winter. I found out the hard way. As soon as the snow is sitting on the ground, the mushroom season is over. Coming back all the way to the beginning, let's talk about this. We've got food, we've got insurance, and we've got superherbs. Of the superherbs, the medicinal mushrooms are in a class above almost anything else. The only herbs on par with the medicinal mushrooms are astragalus, ashwagandha, Ho Shou Wu, and schizandra berry. These are unique, very specialized herbs. We are using food as medicine, but also medicine as food. Isn't that important to know both sides of that equation? This is my station at home. You can see that I do actually have a 316T stainless steel Saladmaster 16-liter pot. And that's my wood-burning stove. You heat your house up with a wood-burning stove, and you can also make teas on it. Those teas are all spring water, so it's kind of an alchemical operation. The spring water goes in cold, I bust the chagas down, throw those in, then put in reishi mushroom. Those mushrooms turned upside down there at the top are reishis. That's reishi, reishi, reishi. That's lion's mane. These are chagas. There is the hot part right there, where the logs go in. I usually start cold, steeping it. The idea of just boiling water and then putting a teabag in? Nobody wants to be teabagged. It's got to be done with more intent. It's got to be a little bit more sophisticated than that. And then I heat all that up. These mushrooms kick out so many interesting polysaccharides for so long that I might keep that tea going for 7 to 10 days. The stuff that's in the front, like the nettles, the horsetail, the goji berries, the wild cloudberries that grow in the forest, all the interesting stuff like that maybe even the Ho Shou Wu that will burn out after a day; but the chaga won't. It will keep kicking it out. After 10 days, once I drain it and drink it all, I take the entire pot out to my favorite tree and dump it right on that tree. And that's the compost. That's how it works at my house. The biggest fight we got into at my house in 2008 was over the recycling bin. I started noticing that stuff that should have been recycled was going into the trash, like landfill. We had everything as landfill glass recycling, plastic, compost. And metals. Now its all broken down. There should be hardly anything coming out of your house that is actually going into a landfill, if you break it all down correctly.
So I busted everything out. I took the trash, threw it on the ground. We had this whole breakdown fight, because I'm thinking, "If we can't recycle properly, who is going to?" If we can't do it right at our house, who the heck is going to be able to do this right? And from that point on, we have been on the composting mission, really on it. So we try to take as much stuff as we can and dump it right back into the yard. Let me tell you what else I'm doing with this wood-burning stove. Theres a chamber down there that you can't really see in this picture. You lift it up, throw the log in, put the thing back down. After I am finished with the mushrooms, I throw them in that chamber with birch bark, light the whole thing on fire, and then clamp it completely shut. That cuts off all the oxygen so it burns down without too much oxidation. I take that ash as a fertilizer for all my trees and my garden, because there are different minerals in mushrooms than in plants. Is everyone following me? So when I dump all of that reishi and chaga on those trees, I'm getting different minerals. A lot of the minerals have been stripped out by the tea-making; but every now and then, I'll burn that stuff down and use that as a fertilizer. This is how we want to be thinking about our environment, because we are a product of our environment. There is a porcupine who lives on the side of cliff. I'll go with a bucket to the porcupine mound and I'll scoop up the dung that's been sitting there for 20 years and I'll bring that back. That goes in the compost pile. Develop different strategies to grow really good quality food. When you have the medicinal mushrooms coming from the forest, it tunes you in to what is going on in that forest. Otherwise, we don't know. You become part of the forest when you know where the chagas are growing. Now I am leaving chagas close to the house, because I want to see how they grow over the years. So if this is you, if you have a situation like that, thats one of the greatest joys of living. I found that gardening can do more to cure a man's ills than almost anything he could eat. [applause] Thats me in my forest, behind my house. Chaga as a way of life. It's a little bit difficult to go barefoot in minus 30, I have to admit. So you get your Sorels on you know, the Sorel boots and you're out there, having a good time, running around, jumping on trees. You see
where the deer have been sleeping, you see where the chagas are; occasionally you even find good reishis in the winter. Sometimes you will see the reishis, bust them off, bring them back. And then you've got exercise with a purpose. You're knocking down ten coconuts with one stone. That's chaga as a way of life for me. I love to work out as much as I can, but I don't always get that chance. But if I can get out on my land and I can be out in the forest and I can be collecting things, picking up stuff, carrying spring water on my back it is the Age of Aquarius, after all. Bear your water on your own back. Then I feel like I get like a workout, I get my water, I'm having fun while doing it, I'm breathing fresh air, all that at once. And that, to me, is the chaga lifestyle. Are there any questions about any of this? Audience member: How hot are you heating the water? DW: This is what we found out, and its something that was so interesting to me. About 18 years ago, I was at the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation in San Diego, California. All the books that were there like Paul Kouchakoff's seminal work on when food actually becomes cooked where it causes a white blood cell reaction are now online. I went through all of Kouchakoff's work and found his research about water temperature and where the flip temperature is, after which water becomes cooked and causes a white blood cell reaction. So let me review this. If you eat a strawberry, you don't have any reaction. But according to Western medicine, you should have a reaction whenever you eat any food a white blood cell reaction. In the 1930s it was Kouchakoff who showed that only cooked food will cause a white blood cell reaction. Raw food will not. I keep all of my teas below 75C, or 181F. That is already scalding you are never getting there, anyway so 50C, or 150 F is perfectly fine to get all the goodies out of your teas, and to get all the stuff out of your bark. I will take issue with any herbalists around who think youre not getting all the goodies out of barks and mushrooms at that temperature. My experience over 10 years has taught me that you do get it all out, if you steep it over time. Audience member: What type of logs are best for plugging and what type of wood? And what type of environment? How much moisture do you need?
DW: Great question. I'm just a beginner at this, but I have been studying it for a while. If you are growing reishi you want hardwood. Here in California, manzanita is a hard wood. Madrone is the best. You would plug into the log, and you want it to be in a moist, shaded corner of your yard. What I have done in my backyard is I've stacked those logs back into the forest where they are shaded most of the time and where the moisture level is high. The first year, generally, you don't get a spawn. It's going to be the second year when they come out. You can get a lot of information about that from Paul Stamets and his website Fungi.com. He actually sells those dowels that are contaminated with the mycelium that you want such as reishi or shiitake or any of the others. Audience member: What is the shelf life of chaga? DW: If you are able to get these mushrooms dried out properly and the way you do that, if you can is you turn them upside down, white side up, in the Sun for about 3 days until they are completely crispy dry; and then they will store for years. They will last for years on your kitchen counter. People come into my house and they look at the kitchen table. In the middle of the table is a stack of medicinal mushrooms like this. They look at that and they turn around and they get out of there, fast. They don't know what the heck's going on. I've had people come in, and I'm like, "Oh yeah. You want some tea?" and they're like, "No." Audience member: If you live in a humid state where it's really hot, where can you get the actual mushrooms? Not in a powder form. DW: These mushrooms come from forests. There is plenty of reishi all across the state of Florida. In a reasonably forested area, wherever there are enough dead logs and dead wood you are going to find a good variety of medicinal mushrooms. Audience member: Is there somewhere to buy chaga? DW: Can you buy chaga? Yeah. In Florida you would have to buy chaga, because it's not cold enough there for chaga to grow, so I would call somebody like Daniel or Franky and have them ship you down a box of chagas. That's my recommendation. Whenever I am traveling around the world I bring that with me. Like, if I am going to Amsterdam or if I am going to go to Belgium because they cut all their forests down. I went to the last forest in Belgium, and it had been replanted. The trees were in rows. They were like, "We're in the forest!" and I'm like, "Oh. We are? All just in rows. That's how far it's gone. People don't even know what's been lost. Audience member: Are you concerned about radiation at some point?
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DW: Well, of course I'm concerned about radiation. One of the stories about these polypores and about the mushrooms in general is that they suck up radioactivity. So in the ancient Earth I mean just in Sweden alone in an ancient time there were eighty different active volcanoes. Eighty, eight-zero. So you can imagine how much radioactive debris was blown out of the Earth radioactive uranium, all kinds of active compounds that had to be sponged out of the ecosystem in order for life to go on more gentle life; life that couldn't handle that level of radiation. So the mushrooms appear to have played a role in sponging the radiation out of the ancient environment of the Earth. It is noted that not only will tree mushrooms sponge up radioactivity, but they could actually get stimulated by it. They actually like it. Now, that's not good for us, if we are in a radioactive fallout zone. That means it's a no-go on wild medicinal mushrooms. What you could do in that case is you turn to mycelium that is grown in an indoor environment like what Paul Stamets puts out, where the mycelium biomass is grown in an indoor environment. Thats when you take in your favorite spore let's say it's reishi and you culture it on organic rice or organic rye or organic corn and then you allow it to go almost to fruiting; then you freeze-dry it and crush it to a powder. That's exactly what that material is. Can you take too much chaga? Not that I have ever heard of. This is one of the interesting areas here, and this is one of the reasons why I have mentioned that the future of medicine is about these polysaccharides because they are kidney-gentle. They actually modulate immunity. They don't just drive it up like garlic would, or like echinacea would. They will bring it down if you need it. If you use a lot of it, thats actually extra material for your joints, for your brain, for your connective tissue so chaga appears to be one of those rare things, like DHA, where the more you take, the better it is for you.
For more information about David Wolfe, please visit the following websites: www.thelongevitynowconference.com www.longevitywarehouse.com www.thebestdayever.com www.davidwolfe.com
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This advice is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your physician before using this advice.

Chaga King of The Polypores by David Wolfe April 2011

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Chaga King of The Polypores by David Wolfe April 2011

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Chaga: King of the Polypores by David Wolfe April 2011