Mushrooms as Medicine with Organic Mushroom Farmer Jeff Chilton

Have you ever heard of medicinal mushrooms, like reishi and cordyceps and chaga? In 1989, today's special guest Jeff Chilton started Nammex, a company that sells medicinal mushrooms to the nutritional supplement industry. His company pioneered this new category and was responsible for educating and introducing these mushrooms to a wide range of businesses, herbalists, and health care practitioners. So if you thought that mushrooms just appeared out of nowhere, you will be very interested in the story that Jeff has to tell.

Though mushrooms are the the newest superfood, Jeff Chilton has been studying and growing them since1969. He studied ethno-mycology at the University of Washington and after graduation spent the next 10 years as a production manager on a farm growing over 2 million pounds of mushrooms per year. During that period, he was involved in the first commercial shiitake mushroom production in the US. But growing choice edible mushrooms was just the beginning of his career.

In the late seventies he founded Mycomedia, which held 4 mushroom conferences in the Pacific Northwest. These educational conferences brought together educators and experts in mushroom identification, ethnomycology, and mushroom cultivation.In the 1980’s he operated a mushroom spawn business and in 1989 he started Nammex. He traveled extensively in China during the 1990’s, attending conferences and visiting research facilities and mushroom farms. In 1997 he organized the first organic mushroom production seminar in China. During this period Jeff co-authored the highly acclaimed book, The Mushroom Cultivator, which was published in 1983.

Nammex was the first to offer a complete line of Certified Organic mushroom extracts to the US nutritional supplement industry. Nammex extracts are used by many supplement companies and are noted for their high quality based on scientific analysis of the active compounds.