Do Beta-Glucans Really Matter?
A look at how to approach the beta-glucan conversation when it comes to functional mushroom supplements
When shopping for functional mushroom supplements, you may see one measurement highlighted again and again: beta-glucan content.
Many functional mushroom supplement companies use beta-glucan amounts as a way to communicate the quality or potential efficacy of their products. But there’s a problem with that approach.
Simply put, beta-glucan content is not the full story when judging the quality of functional mushroom supplements.
That may sound surprising. After all, beta-glucans have been a major focus of mushroom research for decades. But as our ability to study fungal chemistry has advanced, we’ve learned that functional mushrooms are far more chemically complex than any single measurement can capture.
To understand why, it helps to look at what beta-glucans actually are—and what beta-glucan amounts can and can’t tell us.
What Are Beta-Glucans?
Beta-glucans are long chains of sugar molecules found throughout nature. They occur in grains, seafood, insects, yeasts, fungi, and more.
In mushroom fruiting bodies, beta-glucans are an important part of the cell wall. One easy way to think about them is as part of the structural framework that helps fungal tissue hold its shape. This is important because beta-glucan content is often discussed as though it were a direct measurement of a functional mushroom supplement’s potency or quality. It isn’t.
Fruiting bodies, for example, often contain relatively high levels of beta-glucans because they need more structural material to form the familiar mushroom shapes we recognize. In mushroom mycelium, however, beta-glucans are much less important or prominent. That’s because mycelium is only one cell wall thick, and the beta-glucans needed to hold a mushroom fruiting body together are not as necessary for the mycelium.
Mycelium’s relative lack of beta-glucans is actually to its benefit because mycelium needs to be agile in order to carry out its function in nature. Mycelium acts as the immune system of the fungus, constantly adapting to its environment, supporting the health and vitality of surrounding organisms, and ensuring that the short-lived fruiting body can perform its primary function: reproduction.
So, a higher beta-glucan number simply reflects more structure—not necessarily more beneficial compounds. That’s why we believe beta-glucan content is just a small part of the benefits that functional mushroom supplements can provide.*
Beta-Glucans Are Only One Part of Mushroom Chemistry
Fungi are incredibly complex organisms. As analytical technology has improved, scientists have gained the ability to look much more closely at their chemistry. What we find is not one important compound, but thousands of chemical features representing a broad spectrum of naturally occurring constituents. Beta-glucans are just one part of that picture.
Fungi can also contain lipids, fatty acids, enzymes, antioxidants, metabolites, and many other compounds that may contribute to their biological activity.*
Think of beta-glucans like the framework of a house. Knowing the framework is there tells you something about the structure, but it doesn’t tell you about the wiring, plumbing, appliances, furniture, or everything else that makes the house function. The same principle applies to mushrooms.
Measuring beta-glucans tells us something about one part of their chemistry. It doesn’t tell us about everything else that is present—or how those compounds may work together to benefit human health.*
Why More Beta-Glucans Doesn't Mean a Better Supplement
A beta-glucan amount tells you how much of one broad class of compounds was measured. What it doesn’t tell you is more important.
It doesn’t tell you about the full spectrum of other compounds in the ingredient. It doesn’t tell you how those compounds were affected by processing. And it doesn’t tell you how biologically beneficial the finished functional mushroom supplement will be.*
There is no one-to-one relationship between the amount of beta-glucans present and the number of other compounds we may care about. That means a product can have a high beta-glucan percentage without that number telling us whether it contains a rich and diverse spectrum of more beneficial fungal compounds.*
This is the fundamental limitation of using beta-glucans as a measure of quality: A high beta-glucan number does not provide a complete picture of the potential beneficial qualities found within a functional mushroom supplement.*
Why Processing Matters for Quality Functional Mushroom Supplements
How a mushroom ingredient is processed can also affect the compounds that remain in the finished product. Hot-water extraction is the prime example.
Hot water can extract certain water-soluble compounds from fungal material, including beta-glucans. But fungi also contain compounds that aren't water-soluble, including certain lipids and fatty acids found to benefit human health.*
When processing is focused on hot-water extraction, some of these compounds can be left behind. That means a finished extract may test very high in beta-glucans while no longer containing some of the potentially beneficial compounds originally present in the fungal material.*
At Host Defense®, our dual-extraction approach keeps different extraction fractions together in the finished product. Rather than optimizing for one irrelevant beta-glucan measurement, our goal is to preserve the broader spectrum of potentially beneficial fungal compounds.*
Why Beta-Glucans Aren't a Useful Biomarker for Quality
There’s another challenge with using beta-glucans as a benchmark: not all beta-glucans are the same.
“Beta-glucan” describes a broad group of molecules that can have different structures, branching patterns, and shapes. Yet when beta-glucans are reduced to a single percentage on a supplement label, those differences disappear.
There is also no authenticated scientific method for measuring beta-glucans that can tell consumers whether the beta-glucans being measured are actually beneficial. Measuring the amount of beta-glucans present doesn't tell us what those beta-glucans actually do.
And it doesn’t tell us what the finished functional mushroom supplement will do, either.
Why Mushroom Mycelium Matters
Mushroom mycelium can produce a diverse spectrum of naturally occurring beneficial compounds that cannot be measured by a beta-glucan test, including:
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Lipids and fatty acids
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Peptides
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Antioxidants
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Immune-supporting metabolites*
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Other unique beneficial bioactive compounds produced during growth*
Lion’s Mane offers a useful example.
Lion’s Mane mushroom mycelium produces compounds called erinacines. And even “erinacines” describes a larger family of potentially beneficial compounds—not just one molecule, such as Erinacine A. That distinction matters.
Testing every compound within a complex fungal ingredient can be difficult and expensive. As a result, researchers and manufacturers may focus on individual compounds simply because they are easier to measure.
Over time, that can create a misleading impression: the compound we measure most often starts to look like the compound that matters most. But those aren't necessarily the same thing.
Beta-glucans illustrate this perfectly. They provide a relatively simple number that can be communicated on a label. Fungal chemistry is much more complicated.
The Host Defense® Approach
At Host Defense® Mushrooms™, mushroom mycelium is at the heart of what we do.
For decades, our team has studied how mushroom mycelium grows, the compounds it produces, and how those compounds may interact with and benefit biological systems through exploring the functional outcomes of our products.*
We cultivate our mushroom mycelium on our certified organic farm in Washington state, where our scientists and production specialists carefully oversee every stage of the process.
Our goal has never been to create the highest possible beta-glucan percentage. Instead, we focus on cultivating and preserving the diverse spectrum of naturally occurring beneficial compounds produced by mushroom mycelium and studying the finished ingredients we actually use in our products.*
Consumers deserve more meaningful information than a single number on a label.
When evaluating a mushroom supplement, we believe the best questions are:
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What species is being used?
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What stage of the fungal life cycle does the ingredient come from?
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How was it grown?
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How was it processed?
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What did that processing preserve?
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What does the research tell us about the finished ingredient?
Looking Beyond Beta-Glucans
Beta-glucans played an important role in the early scientific exploration of mushrooms, but science evolves.
Today, new analytical tools allow researchers to look far beyond one class of structural compounds and explore the enormous chemical complexity found within fungi. The more we learn, the clearer the limitations of beta-glucan percentages become.
Beta-glucans are not the whole story when judging the overall quality of a functional mushroom supplement because beta-glucan content cannot tell us the quality, diversity, or biological activity of the many other compounds present in the finished ingredient.
More structural material does not mean more beneficial compounds. Measuring one compound cannot tell us the full story of a complex biological system.*
That's why at Host Defense®, we're interested in:
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Mushroom mycelium as the primary living engine of the fungal organism
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The diversity of compounds mycelium produces
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How the compounds in mycelium are preserved
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And what the research tells us about the finished ingredient
Because when it comes to something as complex as fungi, the quality of the whole can't be understood by measuring just one of its parts.*
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.