Rant: As a zombie fan I love 'The last of us'. As a mushroom fan I hate it.
The amount of mycophobia I have seen as a result of the show has been enormous towards one of the most potent medicinal mushrooms on the planet.
I dont blame the show, mycophobia is a problem that goes back hundreds of years, when christianity and colonization erased our ancestral knowledge and rejected anything that was even vaguely non-christian.
Mushrooms were poison, evil, magic, pagan and many other phobic words.
Cordyceps has been proven to increase energy on a cellular level, lower bloodsugar and treat type 2 diabetes, inhibit cancer cell growth, provide antivirals and even fight hiv, increase oxygen levels in blood, lower lactic acid in muscle fibers, contains adaptagens that help your body deal with stress, lowers cholesterol, increases focus and energy and the list goes on.
And now people think it will turn them into a zombie if they eat it. Great. Fantastic progress.
I have a theory, and its a pretty good one.
Mushrooms are the oldest form of life on this planet. Long before the dinosaurs, there were forests of giant mushrooms. We came from them, and we evolved with them. They created medicinal compounds that we ate and in time they started to change us. The mushrooms and us became codependent.
In the last 1000 years, we rejected mushrooms, and lost these compounds in our diet.
I dont think that they boost out health, or alter our states of mind. I think we have just been mushroom deficient. Now we are rediscovering them and talking about how great they are like its something new, like they haven't been doing this with us for millions of years.
Its like if I just discovered vegetables and started talking about all the medicinal benefits of broccoli 🥦.
Eat more mushrooms. Eat a variety of them. The mycellium want you to, its why they grow them.
Combine cordyceps with lions man, turkeytail, reishi and chaga, and you have a powerful combination of compounds that will change your life, even if you think you're at peak performance.
If people continue to be afraid of these things, reject them, dismiss their value, then we are living in the dark age dispite the lights being on. Dispite having access to all of human kinds wealth of knowledge at our fingertips.