Mushrooms That Influence Heart Health By Affecting Immune System Activities
It all lies with the effect of the beta glucans in those mushrooms.
Shiitake mushrooms are quite commonly used in East Asian cuisine. Their taste and texture can be described as follows:
Shiitake mushrooms are known for their strong, earthy flavor. They’re packed with umami thanks to the amino acid glutamate. When cooked, shiitake caps have velvety, meaty texture, while the stems can be tough — or pleasantly chewy, if cooked long enough.
Nutritionally, the same article states that:
Shiitake mushrooms are a good source of dietary fiber, copper, selenium, manganese, protein, iron, and B vitamins such as pantothenic acid. Like other mushrooms, shiitakes can be a good source of vitamin D if exposed to sunlight.
One other fancy nutrient that the shiitake mushroom also contains is the 1,3–1,6 beta glucan. Oats and grains do contain beta glucans of the 1,3–1,4 variant (the numbers represent which carbon atoms are linked to which carbon atoms, and that’s another technical story altogether).
But what we do need to know is that the 1,3–1,6 beta glucan contains more biological activity than the 1,3–1,4 beta glucan, hence the two types of beta glucans are different in terms of their ability to support biological functions within the body.
Traditional Chinese medicine has also looked at the use of reishi mushrooms (lingzhi) as a herb that could support human health and has been so described as the “mushroom of immortality”. These, too, contain the 1,3–1,6 beta glucans that function similarly to the shiitake mushrooms.
Which is why the popular opinion is that the 1,3–1,6 beta glucans from these mushrooms can help to support one’s immune system, but not so much for the 1,3–1,4 beta glucans from grains.
When consumed in sufficient bulk (whether of the 1,3–1,6 or the 1,3–1,4 variant), they will exert a strong influence on the body’s ability to absorb sugar and promote the reduction of fats in the blood.
And that’s why soluble fibre is one of the recommendations by the United States Food and Drug Administration for preventing heart disease. Most grains contain a lot of the 1,3–1,4 variant, and that’s how it works.
But of course, the 1,3–1,6 variant exerts more biological activity than the 1,3–1,4 variant — they are able to provide, according to this article:
antitumor, antibacterial, antiviral, anticoagulatory and wound healing activities.
The 1,3–1,6 variant also “constitutes the cell wall of some pathogenic yeasts and bacteria, and strongly contribute to microorganism recognition and clearance”, according to this article.
Therefore, these guys are what we can call immunomodulators — they modulate, i.e. they adjust or keep in proper proportion the ability of the immune system to respond to infection or injury. They do so by signalling macrophage cells to act, and we do know of the importance of the macrophage in the immune system:
The Importance Of The Macrophage In The Immune System
The macrophage is one of those immune cells in our body that does quite a fair bit of things without us thinking about it. We’re exposed to so many microbes and virues in the environment on a daily basis, and some of them can penetrate through the skin and mucosal barriers that act as the first line of defence to those foreign invaders:
Now, macrophage activity is also key to maintaining the effectiveness of efferocytosis, a process that helps to keep the size of atherosclerotic plaques under control within the human body:
Efferocytosis And Its Oft-Unstated Role In Artery Clogging.
The word “efferocytosis” isn’t one that is frequently thrown about these days. Most heart disease patients would not have heard of this word before, because rarely is it (if ever) discussed by their doctors.
But of course, we do need to understand how atherosclerotic plaques can form within our own arteries. It exists as a dynamic equilibrium process, similar to how our bones maintain bone mineral density or our joints cartilage maintaining a strong structural support.
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Just that in the case of plaque formation, there is an imbalance in the dynamic equilibrium process between plaque formation and plaque destruction such that the equilibrium favours plaque formation.
We’d need the macrophages to eat away at the plaques before they start to form serious arterial blockages - but these blockages are such silent killers that we don’t know when they’ll actually appear.
And of course, when these macrophages aren’t behaving as they ought to be behaving, it won’t be rocket science as to why so many heart disease patients are facing a higher probability of death by a COVID-19 infection. Their ability to clear out that infection depends on how well the macrophages in their bodies are operating.
So of course, we can see that the macrophages are an important player in the mechanism leading to heart disease.
The macrophages also do contain the dectin-1 receptor, which can be stimulated by the 1,3–1,6 beta glucans. According to this article:
β-glucans are captured by the macrophages via the Dectin-1 receptor with or without TLR-2/6. The large β-glucan molecules are then internalized and fragmented into smaller sized β-glucan fragments within the macrophages. They are carried to the marrow and endothelial reticular system and subsequently released. These small β-glucan fragments are eventually taken up by the circulating granulocytes, monocytes or macrophages via the complement receptor (CR)-3. The immune response will then be turned on, one of the actions is the phagocytosis of the monoclonal antibody tagged tumor cells.
It is important to note that they do not kill the cancer cells outright. Rather, they stimulate the macrophages to conduct phagocytosis, or the digestion and destruction of the cancer cells.
This same phagocytosis process is necessary for the killing of any virus-infectd cells within our bodies, and even in cell renewal in our bodies via autophagy.
In fact, efferocytosis also “involves recognition and engulfment by phagocytes”, hence the ability of the immune system to conduct phagocytosis is extremely crucial for allowing efferocytosis to proceed normally for the reduction of atherosclerotic plaque sizes from within.
And there we can see how intricately the immune system is tied to heart health. When we can add in 1,3–1,6 beta glucans that support immune functions in our diet, we may not only be strengthening our own immune defences against viral infections — we may also be protecting our heart and how it functions physically!
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