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This is the last product on my list, and it’s a bit different from everything else I’ve written about, in more ways than one. NUTRILIC 10 Mushroom Coffee, 40 servings — instant Arabica and micro-ground coffee blended with reishi, lion’s mane, maitake, chaga, black fungus, tremella, cordyceps, shiitake and ginseng extract is very new to my routine, and I want to be upfront that I treat it as an occasional alternative to my regular coffee, not a daily supplement.
What mushroom coffee actually is, and what it isn’t
Mushroom coffee blends regular coffee with extracts from various functional mushrooms that have their own individual research histories — lion’s mane and cognition, cordyceps and exercise performance, reishi and immune function, and so on. The honest picture, though, is that the doses in a product like this are typically far below what’s used in the actual clinical research on these mushrooms. The foundational lion’s mane study, for example, used 3 grams of dried powder daily over 16 weeks — a teaspoon of mushroom coffee containing a blend of ten different extracts isn’t delivering anything close to that per mushroom. This product also doesn’t specify extraction ratios, or whether it’s using fruiting body or mycelium extracts (a genuine quality difference, since the two parts of the mushroom concentrate different active compounds), which makes it hard to know exactly what you’re getting of each ingredient.
I don’t say this to talk the product down — I still think it’s a pleasant, interesting twist on a daily coffee, and there’s nothing wrong with drinking something because you enjoy it and it might be doing some good, rather than expecting it to replace a targeted, clinically-dosed supplement. I just don’t want to oversell it the way a lot of “10 mushroom” marketing tends to.
A safety note worth taking seriously
There’s one point I think is worth being genuinely clear about, more so than a token disclaimer: chaga, one of the ten mushrooms in this blend, has documented case reports linking long-term, heavy consumption to kidney problems, specifically oxalate-related kidney damage. This isn’t a reason to avoid chaga entirely, but it is a good reason to treat a product like this as something you have occasionally rather than as your daily coffee replacement, and to be particularly cautious if you have any history of kidney stones or kidney disease.
Why I picked it up, and how I use it
This is a genuinely new addition for me, and I’ve deliberately kept it as an occasional swap rather than a habit — partly out of general moderation, and partly because of the chaga point above. Some of the individual mushrooms in this blend do have reported benefits in their own right, and I enjoy it as a change from my usual coffee, but I’m not going to pretend I have months of tracked experience with this one the way I do with most of the others on my list.
How I take it
Occasionally, as a stand-in for a regular cup of coffee, rather than daily.
Should you try it?
If you like the idea of a novelty coffee with some genuinely interesting ingredients, and you treat it as an occasional variation rather than your everyday cup, I think it’s a fun thing to have in the cupboard. Just go in with realistic expectations about the actual mushroom content at these doses, and keep it occasional rather than a daily habit, particularly given the chaga safety point.
