#240 Benefits of Medicinal Mushrooms like Chaga, Reishi and Lion's Mane - Eric Puro from KÄÄPÄ Health

Eric Puro (0:00)

Before, we were talking a lot about how we used to live in the forest, and we would eat different microbes all the time, and raw meat and whatever, and we were active, we didn't have so much stress from work, we didn't stare at the light all day long. Now we live in mostly illicit cities, and we have these boxes and everything's clean, and everything's bleached out.

So this actually suppresses our immune system.

Siim Land (0:19)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. My name is Siim Land, and today our guest is Eric Puro. Eric is the founder and CEO of Kääpä Health.

Kääpä is a medicinal mushroom company from Finland. They have the highest quality medicinal mushrooms grown in the cleanest environment in the world. Chaga, Reishi, Lansmain and Shiitake are a few of their main products, which I enjoy taking almost every day for their adaptogenic properties. Research shows these mushrooms are also good for the immune system, relaxation and lowering inflammation. You can use the code SiimLand for a 15% discount of all their mushrooms at kääpähealth.com. That's SiimLand at kääpähealth.com.

Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Puro (0:56)

Thank you. Good to be here.

Siim Land (0:59)

Yeah, I'm glad to talk with you.

I'm also always excited to talk about the medicinal mushrooms because they are one of the very common things that people use in the Nordic regions, but they're also not really that known about in the rest of the world. So I'm glad to speak with you again.

Eric Puro (1:18)

Yeah.

Siim Land (1:19)

How did you get into starting a company related to medicinal mushrooms?

Eric Puro (1:27)

Yeah, that's a good question. I think that I was studying a lot of these, let's say, traditional ways to grow mushrooms in the US eight years ago, something like that, maybe even more.

And I was just learning a lot about permaculture and ecology and how all these kind of ecosystems work together.

And I started to realize that not many people knew much about fungi. We need to have fungi there. Okay, what form, what species, what strains, how does it work?

And it was kind of difficult to understand that. So my mushroom interest peaked a lot. And coming from a CEO of this biotech company, we try to approach these problems differently. We try to think about what do these natural systems look like and how can we kind of use nature as a solution based type of idea instead of us thinking up how to create everything. So we started formulating a company. I met a really pretty incredible mycologist.

He's a crazy dude from Austria and moved to Finland. And we were growing shaga mushroom together. And we started talking more and more and realizing that we should probably just start a company and that we looked at the medicinal mushroom space and we saw a lot of companies saying things that were inappropriate. We saw a lot of bad quality coming from China. We saw a lot of lab grown stuff from the US that just didn't have any compounds in it. And we just said, hey, this is there's no reason to lie about anything. You know, actually, what mushrooms do, what we know from the science is amazing. The incredible story. Let's be a really open, honest, transparent company that grows stuff with the best ingredients here from Finland and everything organic and really pure. And let's just let's just make a really good product and see what happens. And that was three years ago, just about. And now, yeah, now the company has over 20 employees and selling it all over the world. So I think people people were looking for that, looking for a company they could trust. Yeah, right.

Siim Land (3:39)

Yeah, that's definitely true. And, you know, you can always like try to figure out a way like that. That's what humans tend to do. Like we try to find out like this magic answer or try to tweak it. But usually like nature or these natural compounds seem to have it figured out.

And especially like this fungi and like the the mushroom kingdom is like a very complex ecosystem. And yet it has been found to have like a lot of medicinal benefits that you get from them.

Eric Puro (4:06)

Yeah.

Siim Land (4:08)

Yeah. But where do like how would you like, you know, where do you put or where do we place the fungi in like the animal kingdom in your opinion?

Eric Puro (4:18)

Weird. The weird place.

I don't know. I mean, I think they they're kind of on their own. I mean, what's interesting about fungi is that the name of our company is Kappa. It's a Finnish word for polypore.