Chaga - for folks that cut white and yellow birch

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peakbagger

Minister of Fire
Jul 11, 2008
8,845
Northern NH
My other hobby is hiking and over the last few years I keep running into folks who flip out on encountering Chaga on old growth white and yellow birch. Its pretty well been picked clean along major hiking trails but out in the woods in birch glades its not that rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inonotus_obliquus
https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs/chaga-mushroom

There is lot of internet hype over the product but when I look for cited medical reports its far less of a miracle as there have been few if any legit studies. Nevertheless, medical science rarely gets in the way of internet hype so there seems to be a demand.

So does anyone set this stuff aside and figure out a way to make some cash off it?. I could probably collect a pack full everytime I head off into the woods climbing mountains with no trails. I think it could be the northern ginseng.

It apparently takes a long time to grow so I rarely see it in regenerated logged stands, usually its in older birch stands at the fringe of where logging harvests on mountains became impractical due to terrain. Yellow birches tend to live far longer than white birches and in general seem to get beat up a lot more so the chaga blooms which grows on damaged spots of the trunk seem to be significantly larger on yellow birches as the trees tend to be older.
 
peakbagger said:
There is lot of internet hype over the product but when I look for cited medical reports its far less of a miracle as there have been few if any legit studies.
Click to expand...
That's because North Americans bow to the pharmaceutical companies and fail to recognize herbalists as they do in Europe. I find it all very interesting as drugs are synthetic versions of what occurs in nature with potency ramped up.
 
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22135889
Int J Med Mushrooms. 2011;13(2):131-43.
Anticancer effects of fraction isolated from fruiting bodies of Chaga medicinal mushroom, Inonotus obliquus (Pers.:Fr.) Pilát (Aphyllophoromycetideae): in vitro studies.
Lemieszek MK1, Langner E, Kaczor J, Kandefer-Szerszeń M, Sanecka B, Mazurkiewicz W, Rzeski W.
Author information
  • 1Department of Medical Biology, Institute of Agricultural Medicine, Lublin, Poland. [email protected]
If you look under clinical summary for Healthcare Professionals, you will see links to studies. Many seem to be from Korea but there is one from the UK when I poked around quickly.
https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs/chaga-mushroom
 
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Lake Girl said:
That's because North Americans bow to the pharmaceutical companies and fail to recognize herbalists as they do in Europe. I find it all very interesting as drugs are synthetic versions of what occurs in nature with potency ramped up.
Click to expand...

And side effects ramped up too.
 
Yes, I know this is an old thread, but I was going to make a thread & searched first & thought this one was a good start. Sometimes old can become new again.

Anybody gotten into chaga?

I had no idea about this stuff until I noticed last year the local craft beer place was making a chaga beer. So then I had to ask myself what the heck is chaga? Now I am seeing it being used & touted big time around here. FIL has been using it for a few months now & swears by it - and he does seem to be more healthy & active. We have lots of birch here, never paid attention but did happen to walk by a growth on Saturday at the very back corner of our lot that somebody else had already gotten to. Almost thinking of starting to get some & try it out, I'm sure I could find a fair amount of it.

(Does anybody know where Lake Girl went? Hope she is OK).
 
I think I found a huge one on the side of a wind fall over winter. Unknowingly I tried to buck and split this log not knowing birch dead fall is usually rotten. The fungus was frozen and rock solid, as was the rest of the rotten log. Several birch dead fall around here have that black growth in some areas, but I assumed there was a fire at some point. This is really interesting.
 
20190525_132710.jpg


The one from Saturday that someone already got to.
 
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I think a lot of it gets collected and very little get used. I run into various folks all the time that grab it on hike or a bushwhack and expect most gets thrown away. I expect if someone is drinking Chaga tea in general their diet may be better than the general population and therefore they can attribute properties to the Chaga. Most of the PR I have seen is similar to many other natural products that are long on hype and short on actual science.

If there was a value to it I could supplement my income as I run into it frequently in the woods. Somewhat like Ginseng roots I expect some folks would rapidly clean out the woods of it.
 
peakbagger said:
My other hobby is hiking and over the last few years I keep running into folks who flip out on encountering Chaga on old growth white and yellow birch. Its pretty well been picked clean along major hiking trails but out in the woods in birch glades its not that rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inonotus_obliquus
https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs/chaga-mushroom

There is lot of internet hype over the product but when I look for cited medical reports its far less of a miracle as there have been few if any legit studies. Nevertheless, medical science rarely gets in the way of internet hype so there seems to be a demand.

So does anyone set this stuff aside and figure out a way to make some cash off it?. I could probably collect a pack full everytime I head off into the woods climbing mountains with no trails. I think it could be the northern ginseng.

It apparently takes a long time to grow so I rarely see it in regenerated logged stands, usually its in older birch stands at the fringe of where logging harvests on mountains became impractical due to terrain. Yellow birches tend to live far longer than white birches and in general seem to get beat up a lot more so the chaga blooms which grows on damaged spots of the trunk seem to be significantly larger on yellow birches as the trees tend to be older.
Click to expand...
We have a guy who lives about five miles north of us who uses his tree stand to get them and yes he sells them.

He sells them to someone in a nearby Adirondack town, I never did ask how much he gets.
 
Did a bit of looking on Kijiji last night out of curiosity. Quite a bit being sold here, and the price usually seems to be around the $20/lb area.
 
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