Chaga Mushrooms: Perfect for Tea, and Superstars as Supplements

Chaga mushrooms (or inonotus obliquus) are the latest and greatest superfoods to enter the health and wellness world. Primarily being used in eastern medicine over the last several thousand years, they’ve only recently grown to be recognized and “trendy” in the health and wellness world.

But make no mistake. Adaptogenic mushrooms like chaga are the real deal. They offer boosted energy, increased focus, stress relief, better sleep, and more. Today, you can find them more easily than ever with a wide variety of supplements available, including:

• Teas

• Powders

• Gummies

• Capsules

• Coffees

Each of these offers a complementary experience to pushing your daily nutritional values to the next level, and creating new, reliable support while staying organic. You can even match up chaga with other adaptogenic mushrooms to take your journey a step further.

Lion’s mane mushroom is one of those superstars that also has been blended into teas and coffees for immune support, while additionally offering added focus and increased energy.

However, today we’ll just hone in on the chaga mushroom in teas, its various applications, and how it has become an effective supplement to try. Additionally, we’ll take a quick overview of each health benefit you can expect with chaga tea, as well as the best way to get the blends into your diet fast.

 

What Are Chaga Mushrooms?

Nope, they're not brownies, unfortunately. Chaga mushrooms are what’s called adaptogenic, or “functional” mushrooms. These mushroom are prime for increasing the vitamin, protein, and beta-glucan support for quality functional value you get through your typical day without adding a ton of preservatives or sugars.

In the past, indigenous cultures were using these mushrooms in teas for all kinds of medicinal purposes. This rooted in their cold climate growth patters, as their burnt-up firewood appearance (also known as conk) were found on scattered birch trees in climates like Canada, Siberia, and Russia. Conk being easy to find has allowed these beta-glucan rich mushrooms to be widely recognized for their health benefits. As it becomes common knowledge, the chaga mushroom’s reach has extended beyond the northern hemisphere and prospered into global use.

Even with this exposure and growth, you might not be on the average grocery store shelf, but a handful of organic shops will certainly carry them if you’re looking for them at a local spot. You can get them in supplement form, raw, dried, or anything in between. Gummies are even widely available today.

The main benefits you can expect to enjoy with any old chaga powder or mushroom gummy are:

• Antioxidant support

• Immune system boosting

• Inflammation resistance

• Proactivity over diseases, cancer properties, and other ailments

Inonotus obliquus didn’t exactly catch on in the health and wellness world, so you may have heard of chaga before, just never known what it was exactly. Luckily, there’s decades worth of research surrounding medicinal mushrooms now that’s widely accessible in seeing the most impactful applications it has today.

Modern Health Benefits of Chaga Tea

Chaga tea makes finding peace and staying healthy simpler than ever. For most supplements, you need a bunch of additives and blending up of different vitamin extracts to get strong health benefits. Fortunately with chaga, this little superfood brings all.

1. May Boost Your Immune System and Fight Inflammation

Your immune system is the foundation that makes or breaks so many different ailments in your day. With chaga mushrooms, a strong foundation of polysaccharides (inontus obliquus polysaccharides) allows you to elevate resistance with antiviral and inflammatory support which balance out and regulate cytokine production which creates white blood cells stimulation, elevating their communication and expediting how your body responds.

This support is fantastic for keeping yourself protected from autoimmune diseases and infections like:

• Celiac disease

• Multiple sclerosis

• Psoriasis

Autoimmune ailments can be detrimental to your daily function, so being proactive about oxidative stress and inflammatory support can make a significant change in how your body reacts to ailments overall. Chaga teas and chaga mushroom extract options a great place to get started with that, and can also provide long-term solutions for disease prevention as well.

2. May Prevent and Fights Cancer

Chaga has been recognized for anticancer, antitumor properties in eastern folk medicine for several thousand years, but now has the science to back it up. These mushrooms have been linked to slowing lung and breast cancer cell development, along with cervical in one study. This is fantastic progress for providing support to the body for reducing cancer cell impact fast (in one study, this was observed as antitumor activity in colon cancer), while free radical scavengers in chaga mushroom could be preventative to damage as well.

While most of these studies have been conducted on animals, their results are promising for offering human support as well.

Overall, getting chaga in for proactive support is a great start to decrease your likelihood of developing dangerous ailments and diseases. Trying a tea or raw mushroom might be a simple place to start, while powders and gummies could be more convenient to prep your body with ease.

3. May Lower Blood Sugar

Cardiovascular health requires proactivity at all ages. Type 2 diabetes is always at risk of developing, and needs to be protected with quality habits like daily chaga supplements.

In a handful of animal studies, lower blood sugar levels have been observed after consistent chaga mushroom use. Lowering blood sugar is a tough ask for most dietary supplements, and being able to do so entirely with only minimal risk of side effects. While you should be aware of them if you have any blood thinning medication or have blood clotting issues, mushroom nootropics are

This strengthens the versatility of the mushroom as a natural nootropic, and demonstrates other areas that there can be drastic improvement in daily function with when preparing chaga tea or supplements in your diet.

4. May Lower Cholesterol

Cholesterol can be a problem for any of us regardless of diet. Luckily, regular chaga use plays a major role in both type 2 diabetes and blood sugar regulation, which has been thoroughly researched in animal studies that validate the betterment of “good” cholesterol (HDL) being helped with increased antioxidant levels, and the suppression of LDL cholesterol (or “bad” cholesterol levels).

This tandem of health benefits could be a quick boost to your daily function and feeling at your best. Additionally, pairing it up with a good diet is always a good idea, and looking at other medicinal mushrooms for further antioxidant, blood pressure and functional support (like lion’s mane, for example).

Together, each of these support areas combines for a quality daily supplement option. Now it’s just time to find a part of your schedule where you can work in chaga teas or other forms of the mushroom.

When Should I Drink Chaga?

Mornings

As a starter for your day, chaga mushroom tea and coffee are a quality place to get started with adaptogenic mushrooms. With most blends, you can get a bit of caffeine in your day still with mushroom alternatives to regular coffee beans.

Cutting that caffeine content down a good amount and still having a productive morning while feeling great is a solid place to start with chaga support. As you go, you can even start to implement other adaptogenic mushrooms in like cordyceps and lion's mane.

Cold and Flu Season

Flu season can be really tough to get through. When you get a cold, sometimes you just can’t shake it. Someone in the office or classroom just keeps bringing it back, and you can’t ever get out of the rut that it leaves you in.

Be proactive with flu season. Elevate your self-care and boost your nutrition through chaga supplements that streamline getting daily values with ease.

Afternoons

Getting through the middle of your day can be a bit tougher when you don’t have the nutrients or functional support you need. Everyone hits that wall, and if caffeine just isn’t doing the trick anymore, adaptogenic mushrooms might be the answer. Of course, chaga isn’t the best mushroom to give a try for that kind of support. Cordyceps, lion’s mane, and others are more of the brain-boosting superfoods you might want to give a whirl.

Fitness

Fitness-fiends are always looking for an edge. Adaptogenic mushrooms are a good place to give yourself a quality, organic route to improved. Chaga has been linked to boosting your natural stamina well, endurance, and overall oxygen flow.

However, athletes on Team Troomy in mushroom-powered wellness might benefit a bit more from higher-performance mushrooms for energy and focus, like cordyceps and lion’s mane mushrooms.

Evenings

As a supplement to wind down with, chaga can get you into the perfect space you need in order to rest comfortably every night. Your immune system support, body’s adaption to stress, and relaxing is so much easier with the quality of sleep you start getting consistently.

Additionally, you can naturally power your cardiovascular health with improved sleep, as your risk of heart disease can greatly diminish with regular sleep habits.

If you do want a bit of sleep support, the reishi mushroom is a fantastic second pairing to push that wind-down portion of your day into a sleepier one.

Does Chaga Tea Make You Sleepy?

In short, chaga tea won’t make you feel sleepy in the slightest, but it will get you better sleep. Actually, it’ll have an almost counteractive reaction to the majority of users, as the mushroom relaxes and stabilizes the body naturally.

Think of chaga tea as a sister to chamomile, peppermint, and other teas you might be trying now. Chaga creates a very similar wind-down path for your daily needs, as it has also been linked to quality sleep health and reduced anxiety. 

Will Chaga Tea Keep You Awake?

Mushroom coffees are going to be the main blends you want to lookout for keeping you up. These are the ones that might add to your wind down time, and can be harder to get acclimated with in regular use. Make sure you take note of the blend's focus for functional support, as some teas and coffees have different benefits they're pursuing.

Fortunately, you won’t have to worry about caffeine or getting the jitters with chaga. Most blends won't contain caffeine, and if you're making it yourself, you really don't have to worry.

 

How Do I Make Chaga Tea?

If you are looking for a challenge or simply haven't found a chaga tea blend you like, you can absolutely blend up chaga teas on your own. It is a process, though. Most folks elect to pick up grab-and-go supplements, but here's a few guidelines to get started with your own chaga tea blend.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups of hot water

• 4 chunks of chaga (6oz. a piece, ideally)

• Ginger, cinnamon, vanilla sweetener/vanilla bean or cacao (optional)

• Honey (optional)

• Strainer (tool)

• Coffee grinder (tool)

Recipe:

Step 1: Start with a quick rinse and preparing of the mushroom. Always want to be extra cautious with insects surrounding cooking with mushrooms, and readying it for optimal drying. 

Step 2: Dry out the mushroom over the course of a few days outdoors, keeping it out of sunlight as much as possible.

Step 3: Once you’ve dried it out over those few days, it’ll become soft and frail over the next few weeks. At the third or fourth week, you should be able to have the mushrooms ready to pop into your mushroom tea.

Step 4: Break up the mushroom (into about 6.oz pieces) and use four to grind up for your daily blends. Then you can start experimenting with different additives to your tea and find the perfect spices to pop into your morning or afternoon cup.

Overall, making your own tea is a really compelling process to give a whirl on your own. It lets you put a little elbow grease into making your own supplements for the day, and also start seeing real health benefits.

Unfortunately for some, this process can be extremely time consuming (and expensive!) . Raw mushrooms aren't always easy to find, and the extra work/care for them is a lot of extra work. A whole wealth of extra steps you could be avoiding with just your usual tea blends.

Chaga coffee’s another route, but loads of folks have actually started switching to mushroom gummies.

What are Mushroom Gummies?

Mushroom gummies combine all the greatness of chaga mushroom extracts, and pack them into fruity, delicious, and compact little gummies. In contrast to tea and coffee blends, mushroom gummies offer:

• Fruity and delicious flavors
• Caffeine and added-sugar free blends
• Extended shelf lives
• Wallet-friendly solutions
• Customized around your needs

Together, each of these components combine for a quality daily supplement that is unique to each mushroom. Chaga, for example, can be quickly boosted in for immune support function and helping your body destress, while lion's mane will amp your focus and cordyceps will boost your energy.

At Troomy, we've made each of our starting-five gummy blends use each of these mushrooms to help a different. Luckily, it's easier than ever to get started.

Final Thoughts on Chaga, and Getting Started with Troomy Nootropics Today!

Overall, the chaga mushroom is an outstanding daily supplement you can boost into your day today. It could quickly reshape your immune system’s effectiveness, build natural defenses for inflammation, proactively protect from disease, and more.

Chaga’s a perfect pairing with the rest of its sister medicinal mushrooms as well, like lion’s mane, reishi, cordyceps, and turkey tail. Each one offers a wealth of natural benefits to complete your health and wellness, and creates a quality option for you to pursue functional support without synthetic nootropics or loads of caffeine added to your diet. It can even up your fitness, your vacation plans, or anything in between with work, class, and life at home.

The best way to get started is a quick mushroom gummy for blasting into your day. Our Daily blend at Troomy offers zero caffeine or added sugars in our routines.

So why wait? Find your "True Me" with Troomy Nootropics today!

DISCLAIMER: None of the above claims have been reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Speak to a healthcare provider if you have questions about implementing chaga into your diet today.