Confessions of a Co-Founder

My husband, Craig, and I co-founded Eversio Wellness in February 2020, and I have learned a lot on my journey over the last two years as a new entrepreneur in the health and wellness space.  The new knowledge I’ve gained has helped me to change my life for the better.  I have achieved a personal goal of ending a long, unhealthy relationship with an immunosuppressant pharmaceutical that I faithfully took once per month as an injection for 13 years.  That’s 156 injections of an incredibly expensive drug that was designed to treat the symptoms of my disease, rather than address the root cause. The drug was not a cure, but rather something I was told I’d need to take for the rest of my life. The injections resulted in many unwanted side effects and eventually left me inspired to take control of my own health outside the limitations of allopathic (Western) medicine, and to seek care from a system that uses natural remedies to help the body heal itself. I’ve never looked back.

My introduction to the world of natural medicine taught me how to incorporate stress reduction, diet and lifestyle changes, and the inclusion of herbs and nature-sourced supplements with the aim of preventing disease and improving my overall quality of life. My love and fascination for fungi was born out of this introduction and I am so grateful for that.  I am one of those people with a well-tuned connection to my intuition, and the day I took my first capsule of mushroom extract, I knew I had found my medicine.  What I didn’t expect was how deeply I’d fall in love with the kingdom of fungi living all around me that I had never noticed before.

Fungi are critical to the maintenance of our food supply, ecosystems, physical well-being, and even mental health, but they are likely the least known and most misunderstood organisms on Earth. I am fascinated by their intelligence, and I am still like a child on a treasure hunt every time I set foot on the forest floor when out for a mushroom walk, watch our mycologist work in the lab, read current research, or discover a new book on the topic. I just can’t get enough.  To me, mushrooms represent an interconnectivity that our planet and its people are ready to return to after centuries of movement toward disconnection from nature and each other. We are ready for CHANGE and I have no doubt that the future is fungi.

Unfortunately, not everything I have learned about the mushroom supplement industry has been inspirational.  I still see things that I find difficult to accept almost every day.  After experiencing such profound positive effects by incorporating a large variety of mushrooms into my own wellness routine, I wholeheartedly believe in the benefits of these superfoods.  I have seen firsthand how they can help in so many ways from improved immunity, reduced inflammation, stress resilience, increased energy, and better sleep.  However, just like in many other industries, when there is a dollar to be made or an opportunity to cut a corner, some businesses will do just that, and the consumer pays the price while the whole industry loses reputability.

Three things I hope consumers will watch out for when shopping for mushroom products include:

• Dry Labbing: The printing of generalized testing results rather than results for specific batches or ingredients, or not listing any test results at all and claiming that tests are unavailable.

At Eversio we are obsessive about third party lab testing.  We have each small batch of our premium mushroom extracts tested using the Megazyme K-YBGL β-Glucan Mushroom Assay Kit from Ireland. This reliable test was designed for the measurement and analysis of 1,3:1,6-β-glucan and α-glucan in mushroom preparations. We print these percentages right on every label so that you know the exact potency of the mushrooms you’re taking.  We go beyond to also test for secondary beneficial compounds like triterpenoids, terpenes, ganoderic acid, betulinic acid, cordycepin, adenosine, and ergothioneine – because we know these compounds work together to help you feel the difference and experience what these powerful fungi can do.

• Proprietary Blends: We recommend staying away from proprietary blends as they often contain a laundry list of ingredients, but very few that are included in a high enough quantity to be beneficial to the user.

We see this happening a lot with mushroom blends out there that are thrown in with other ingredients at small percentages and give people a false impression of the true value of fungi when they don’t work as promised due to the low dose.

• Inferior Ingredients: This is when companies use the cheapest source of an ingredient to save money. This includes not listing a plant or fungi part (i.e. root, stem, fruiting body, mycelium, growing substrate, etc.) or an extraction standardization.  

Eversio products always list the high extraction ratio (8:1, 12:1, 15:1) used to create the product you’re taking so that you know how much of the actual product you’re really getting in each dose.  This is called the quantity crude equivalent. Products that don’t list these ratios can be assumed to be 1:1 extracts or not extracts at all – just dried and ground delivering only a small fraction of the potential benefits from the medicine locked inside the cell walls of the mushroom fruiting body.

For all supplements, we have learned to stick with brands who are willing to share detailed Certificates of Analysis from reputable, independent third party labs and to steer clear of the least expensive items in any category on the market. High quality ingredients have higher costs that can’t be hidden.  As with all things, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Fungi are no exception.

Be well,

Brandi Garden

Co-founder, Eversio Wellness