Hello and welcome to Zoe Recan where each week we find the best bits from one of our

podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing

mushrooms, neither animal nor plant, mushrooms are entirely unique.

And their novel chemistry provides us with powerful and often surprising health benefits.

So how can we take advantage of this mushroom magic?

Tim Specter and fungi expert Merlin Shelldrink explain how and why you should

invite more mushrooms into your diet.

They taste fantastic.

They have this amazing range of chemicals that give you this umami taste,

this savory taste, which is sort of mimicking meaten in ways and some people it's better than meat

Particularly if you've got a range of different mushrooms and you've slow cooked them even get more taste if you dehydrate them in many cases, so you actually get even more

savory flavours and more chemicals.

But as well as being super tasty, you know, there's a lot of water in them, so once you've got rid of the water, they have huge

amounts of protein, 25% protein, pretty good amounts of fiber as well, all these chemicals we've been talking about that have a whole variety of these effects.

The source of selenium, they're actually a source of vitamin D, and they sunbathe like humans and they can... You mentioned this before?

Is this really true that if you leave them out in the sun before eating they have more

vitamin D? It is. I mean it depends slightly on the variety but some of them are really good at converting

natural steroids in them to vitamin D which is a steroid and basically you can get

half of your vitamin D amounts from from eating portions of mushrooms.

Is it just a lucky byproduct for us that these mushrooms are so nutritious and have all of these chemicals we don't access elsewhere?

In some sense, I mean it's also important to remember that these, they haven't been

busily evolving for ever a billion years to give us a

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