How to unlock the secret power of the mushrooms to heal your gut, cut cholesterol and protect your brain | Prof Robin May

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Mushrooms spent decades as one of the most boring ingredients on your plate. Today, they have a reputation as one of the most exciting. Brain protection, gut health, immune support, even longevity. The health claims associated with mushrooms are astounding. So did we discover something new? Were we missing something that was obvious all along? Or perhaps all this excitement is simply unjustified.
In today's episode, we're joined by Professor Robin May, a Microbiologist, Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, and World-Leading Expert on the way that mushrooms interact with our immune system. Robin will help us understand which health claims are real, and which are exaggerated, which mushrooms you should be eating, and how to prepare them to get the benefits. Robin, thank you so much for joining me today.

**Robin May** (1:06)
Nice to be here.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:07)
So we have a tradition here at ZOE, which is very hard for professors, where we ask a quick fire round of questions, and we say you have to give us a yes or a no, or if you have to, a one sentence. You're willing to give it a go?

**Robin May** (1:18)
I'm racing ready.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:19)
All right. Are mushrooms more closely related to humans than to plants?

**Robin May** (1:26)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:27)
Could eating mushrooms help you live longer?

**Robin May** (1:30)
Can I have a maybe?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:31)
Yeah, you can. Do some mushrooms contain vitamin D?

**Robin May** (1:35)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:36)
And finally, what's the biggest myth that you often hear about mushrooms?

**Robin May** (1:40)
I think it's the weirder the mushroom, the better it is for you. Caution against that one.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:44)
Not true?

**Robin May** (1:45)
No, stick to the mainstream, I'd say.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:47)
Is that only because you might die by eating the weird mushroom?

**Robin May** (1:50)
There's quite a lot of risky weird mushrooms out there. So, yeah, if someone's selling you something in a brown packet, would be cautious.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:57)
When I was young, mushrooms were definitely something I ate, but only because my mum liked the taste of mushrooms and she was cooking.
And then more recently, I feel like I'm surrounded by claims that mushrooms can extend your life, improve your immune system, prevent brain ageing, and so on. Now, I love the taste of mushrooms, so any excuse to eat mushroom is good. But my son hates them, so it's not really the taste, it's like the texture. So my objective for this podcast is to come out with compelling arguments for why he should keep eating mushrooms even though he doesn't like them very much.

**Robin May** (2:32)
Right. Okay. Mission in mind. Yeah, I can't change the sliminess, I think, but bad luck.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:37)
You had this crazy answer that a mushroom is more closely related to me than it is to a plant. So what is a mushroom?

**Robin May** (2:45)
So we now know pretty clearly that mushrooms and animals share a more recent common ancestor than plants do. So you think about that evolutionary tree of life, plants branched off earlier than fungi generally and animals did. So hence the answer, we're more closely related to a mushroom than to a plant. Not by much, I have to say that branching still a very long time ago. But actually that explains quite a lot of things I think about mushrooms. If you think, the most obvious thing is they're not green, right? They don't photosynthesize, plants do.
So that tells you already that they're probably not a plant. If you look sort of molecularly, there are quite a lot of other reasons why they are more similar to animals. So for example, some of the machinery that we use to make proteins in our cells, fungi use a machinery that's more similar to ours than the machinery plants make. So there's quite a lot of reasons to be confident that we are more closely related to fungi.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:34)
So you just started to touch on it, but are there other differences between fungi and plants? So does that mean that somehow if I was eating a mushroom, there are therefore genuinely going to be things that I'm sort of eating that wouldn't be in a plant?

**Robin May** (3:51)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So perhaps the most obvious is that plants and fungi both have cell walls, which is why they're rigid, unlike animal cells, we're pretty floppy, but it's made something completely different. So plants are made of cellulose, people might remember that from school. Fungal cell walls are made of a molecule called chitin, which is actually the same molecule that is in the shell of crustaceans, so lobsters or crabs or insects. The crunchy bit, if you step on a beetle and it goes crunch, that is chitin, it's the same molecule in a fungal cell wall. So that's a really obvious one.