Shiitake: The Healing Mushroom

Shiitake The Healing Mushroom represents a very good first attempt to bring detailed information about the nutritional and medicinal merits of this exotic Asian mushroom to the general public. According to Mr. Jones, besides tasting sinfully good steamed or sauted in butter and garlic, shiitake has many 'bioactive' compounds that either stimulate, boost, supplement or somehow enhance the disease fighting capability of our immune system. The book, while relatively small (only about 80 pages of text), is very information-dense and overflows with some thirty pages of scientific, pharmaceutical and medical references. As such, Jones has managed to produce a compact and highly informative text. The book itself is divided into seven chapters with one section each for references and a handy index for future consultation. The first two chapters are devoted to the nutritional value of shiitake and its historical medicinal uses. Four individual chapters detail shiitake's anti-cholesterol, anti-cancer, cancer preventing, and anti-viral capabilities. A final chapter elaborates the mushroom's purported ability to alleviate chronic fatigue syndrome.The first chapter gives information on the nutritional value, cultivation, and history of shiitake. In this chapter the reader learns that shiitake has a long and colorful history in Asia as a culinary and medicinal fungus. The reader also learns that shiitake is high in nutritional value, and that one can cultivate shiitake with ease on a variety of wood and agricultural residues. The second chapter gives the reader a brief review of the medicinal uses of shiitake, both past and present. This chapter elaborates on the surprisingly important role of shiitake in ancient folk medicine. In times both ancient and modern, shiitake has been and continues to be used to treat a variety of maladies ranging from high blood pressure and diabetes to hepatitis. The reader is given a brief introduction to the roles that shiitake has played in traditional Chinese medicine and its history as an aphrodisiac and therapeutic agent in ancient Japan. In particular, folk medicinal uses of shiitake focused primarily on cures for the common cold, diabetes and liver ailments. The chapter concludes with a few brief remarks about the safety and preparation of shiitake. The remaining five chapters tout shiitake's ability to provide relief from a variety of modern day ailments. In short, Jones does not fail to mention shiitake's ability to bring relief to a variety of diseases that afflict those individuals living in wealthy, industrialized nations. On the one hand, it seems that Jones is attempting to use shiitake as a means of offsetting the effects of bad and unhealthy lifestyle choices. On the other hand, throughout the text, Jones seems to be offering up shiitake as a fungal reservoir of a variety of wonder drugs that can cure everything from high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes to viral diseases such as AIDS