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Mushrooms tasty, nutritious

June 21, 2009 12:36 am

WHEN YOU'RE cooking out this summer, throw some mushrooms on the grill.

Sizzling mushrooms are delicious, affordable and packed with antioxidants and nutrients.

In China and Japan, mushrooms are used both as food and as medicine to stimulate the immune system and reduce infections and cancer.

At a recent nutrition conference in Chicago, Dr. Andrew Weil--a physician and expert in natural medicine--recommended eating cooked Asian mushrooms often.

Shiitake mushrooms, with their deliciously rich and meaty flavor, are more widely available in the U.S. than are other Asian mushrooms, so I'll focus on them.

According to Weil, shiitake mushrooms contain a substance called eritadenine, which may reduce cholesterol. Shiitakes also fight germs.

This year, Irish scientists found that an extract of shiitake mushrooms killed 85 percent of the germs it was tested on. It compared favorably to a common antibiotic, Ciprofloxacin. Shiitake extract also killed 50 percent of the yeasts and molds tested.

Another shiitake extract killed disease-causing E. coli and staph bacteria in a Russian study, and spared "friendly" bugs that help digestion, such as lactobacillus and bifidobacteria.

Although mushrooms are being studied for their health effects, they cannot replace a doctor's care. Consider adding mushrooms to your meals, but continue to take medications your doctor prescribes.

Also, never pick wild mushrooms unless you are a mushroom expert! It's difficult to tell which ones are poisonous. Stick to the farmers market or the supermarket.

Those cautions aside, there's more to tell about the virtues of mushrooms.

Several studies have shown that shiitake mushrooms extracts slowed West Nile virus and HIV. But the research was done either with mice or in test tubes, not with people.

Asian researchers suggest that shiitake extracts may stimulate the spleen to help fight cancers of the breast, liver and colon, as well as leukemia and myeloma.

PACKED WITH NUTRIENTS

Mushrooms are one of the only natural food sources of vitamin D-3. Like people, mushrooms produce vitamin D-3 when exposed to sunlight.

"Even if you take dried mushrooms and put them out in the sun, they can generate large amounts of vitamin D," said Dr. Donald Abrams, a physician and cancer specialist at the University of California at San Francisco, who spoke at a recent conference with Weil.

Along with vitamin D, shiitake mushrooms are good sources of several minerals. A half cup of cooked shiitakes has only 41 calories but provides 26 percent of your daily requirement of selenium, an antioxidant cancer-fighting mineral.

Shiitakes are also rich sources of potassium, which helps reduce blood pressure, and copper, which keeps red blood cells healthy.

KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS

Mushrooms are strange organisms. Unlike plants, mushrooms need darkness to grow.

Interestingly, humans "share more genetic sequences with mushrooms than we do with plants," Weil said at the conference last month.

Mushrooms have played a special role in human history. In ancient Egypt, only pharaohs were allowed to eat mushrooms, which were believed to have magical powers. And the ancient Romans served mushrooms to warriors, believing it gave them god-like strength, according to the American Mushroom Institute, a trade group.

Nowadays, mushrooms are farmed, not just hunted in the wild. It takes at least 10 weeks to grow a mushroom on sterilized compost such as straw.

"After the mushrooms are harvested, the soil is still valuable," according to the American Mushroom Institute. "This spent mushroom compost is recycled in peoples' gardens [and] spread in farm fields to provide a growing base for other crops."

COOK THEM IN A SNAP

"You should never eat any mushrooms raw," warned Dr. Weil.

Cooking destroys the low levels of natural toxins present in mushrooms, he said.

It's easy to prepare shiitake mushrooms. If they're dried mushrooms, reconstitute them by soaking them in hot water for 10 minutes. You can save the water for soup. Then, take the reconstituted (or fresh) mushrooms and discard the tough stems.

You can saute the mushroom caps with garlic and olive oil and serve them as a side dish or as part of a stir-fry. Or grill shiitakes on shish-kabob skewers along with cherry tomatoes, onion, zucchini and chunks of meat or shrimp.

It's also easy to make fresh mushroom pizza on your grill--much more fun than heating up your oven in the summertime.

Jennifer Motl welcomes reader questions via her Web site, brighteat ing.com, or mailed to Nutrition, The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401.