The Finnish functional mushrooms helping burned-out Brits

The health benefits of functional mushrooms are becoming increasingly mainstream – with wellbeing podcasts and publications awash with evidence of their virtues.

After suffering burnout alongside various physical health issues, Superoom founders Roxanne Pryor and Brooke Hitching both experimented with using functional mushrooms to ease symptoms.

Pryor in particular sought out mushrooms rather than take a long list of prescription drugs being offered to her by medics, culminating in the suggestion she should take antidepressants

Pryor said: “Burning out having been in a high pressure job in finance and every time I went back to the doctor I was given a new prescription. I didn't want to take something that was going to change the structure of my brain and something where I felt like I could potentially be dependent on this for life.

”I started looking into journals and trying to figure out what could I take that's natural so I could get off all this long list of prescriptions and essentially just try and heal my body from the inside out. And that's essentially how I landed on functional mushrooms.”

“I started working with a functional health practitioner at the time that was in the US because this was long before functional mushrooms were a thing.”

Pryor said the cost of importing the mushrooms from the US was costing £1,500 a month.

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The products Pryor was taking were also powder and capsule based, which meant not only inconvenience and mess, but also she found that she was having to take large quantities to get the dosage she needed.

This led to Pryor researching liquid functional mushrooms, but soon realised that sourcing high quality liquid was not straightforward.

After much research she came across a supplier in Finland, which she explains is the perfect environment for cultivating the highest grade functional mushrooms.

“Finland has the cleanest air and the cleanest water and then on top of that the harshest conditions so what that actually means is that the harsh conditions stimulate the mushroom to produce a high level of bioactive compound.”

“So if we just take the lion's mane as an example, the lion's mane contains hericenones and erinacines. That's the active bioactive compound. That's what helps your brain regenerate because it introduces nerve growth factors. So it's essentially all tied to the individual compounds that are found in the mushrooms that you can't find anywhere else in nature. That's what's responsible for the benefit.”

Despite the boom in functional mushrooms the industry is completely unregulated, leading to a deluge of products on the market which ultimately may contain very little in terms of vital ingredients.

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Often brands have dubious ways of measuring what the product actually contains in terms of beneficial ingredients.

“None of that really makes a difference if ultimately what you're taking is dust. What you need is a high level of bioactive compound and that's the sort of work and the research that we've been doing is to identify the quality of the mushroom,” Pryor said.

Pryor says this is why people often try mushroom products and find they have no benefit.

And thus Superoom was born – a liquid only functional mushroom brand manufactured using only the highest quality mushrooms from Finland.

We tried the products as the Independent as part of writing this article and found two in particular had quite clear results – the Reishi and the Cordyceps blends. Reishi is calming and anti-anxiety, whereas Cordyceps is marketed as an energy booster or pre-workout.

Pryor said this chimes with the feedback they have received from clients, in particular the Reishi users who are taking it for sleep and have been reporting vivid dreams: “The reasoning behind it is because you're in REM for longer. So your brain actually remembers when you wake up. Usually you dip in and out quite quickly.”

The lion’s mane formula for focus, memory and mood was found to be very beneficial with brain fog associated with the menopause with a colleague tester, and Pryor said it has also been popular with clients diagnosed with ADHD: “We found with our neurodivergent community that are taking it, that when we ran out people were saying ‘no, no you can't run out, you don't understand, I'm not taking my my medication’ – it got scary.”

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Hitching added: “ It's just it's giving you so much power over exactly how you want to live your life and deal with the onslaught that we all deal with, and finally you've got an edge, you've got a capability now and it just gets so exciting once you start taking the products.

“You start thinking what do I want to do? How do I want to be at the gym? How do I want to sleep? What do I want to build and create? And that's very much where me and Rox initially came together. We met in Cape Town in 2020, bonded over burnout stories and toxic ex-bosses and she introduced me to Reishi – I had been burning out running my own agency and that was it, my first best night's sleep basically and I was sold from then.”