Day: November 12, 2025

What happens when you combine two ancient mushrooms with modern vaccines? University of California researchers just found out. My first COVID shot happened to fall on a Friday afternoon. By Saturday morning, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Headache pounding. Body aching. That weird foggy brain where even simple tasks feel impossible. It took three days to feel normal again. And I’m lucky. Some people feel worse. Some people feel terrible for a week. Here’s what bothers me most. About 30% of people say they avoid vaccines specifically because of side effects. Not because they don’t believe vaccines work. Just because feeling miserable for days isn’t appealing. Can you blame them? But what if vaccine side effects didn’t have to be so brutal? What if there was a way to get protection without the punishment? Researchers at the University of California just published something remarkable. They tested two medicinal mushrooms alongside COVID vaccines. The results surprised everyone. People who took the mushrooms had almost no side effects. Same vaccine. Same protection. Completely different experience. And six months later? Their antibody levels were actually stronger than people who didn’t take the mushrooms. This isn’t marketing hype. This is peer-reviewed science published in one of the most respected journals in the field. And it changes how we think about immune support. Let me walk you through exactly what they found. The Study: What They Actually Did The research team was led by Dr. Gordon Saxe at UC San Diego. Paul Stamets, the famous mycologist you might know from Joe Rogan’s podcast, was a co-author. They recruited 90 healthy adults who were scheduled to get COVID vaccines or boosters. These were regular people. Not sick. Not immunocompromised. Just folks getting their shots. The researchers split them into two groups randomly. Half got mushroom capsules. Half got fake capsules filled with rice powder. Nobody knew which group they were in. Not the participants. Not the researchers giving out the capsules. That’s called “double-blind” and it’s the gold standard for eliminating bias. The mushroom capsules contained two species. Agarikon and Turkey Tail. Not the mushroom part you see above ground. The mycelium. That’s the root-like network that grows underground. Think of mushrooms like trees. Most people eat the fruit (the part above ground). But the mycelium is like the roots and trunk. That’s where a lot of the medicinal compounds live. The dosing was simple. Eight capsules, three times per day, for four days. That’s it. They started taking capsules the day they got vaccinated. They continued for three more days. Then they stopped. Four days total. Then the researchers tracked what happened for six months. What Happened: The Side Effect Story The first thing they measured was side effects. Everyone tracked their symptoms for five days after vaccination. Fever. Headache. Fatigue. Muscle aches. Injection site pain. All the usual stuff. Here’s where it gets interesting. The participants fell into two natural categories. Some had never had COVID before and had never been vaccinated. Let’s call them “COVID-naive.” Others had either caught COVID previously or had been vaccinated before. Let’s call them “COVID-exposed.” Your immune system treats these situations completely differently. If you’ve never seen COVID before, your immune system is meeting it for the first time. That’s when vaccines tend to hit hardest. Your body is figuring out what this new threat is. If you’ve had COVID or prior vaccines, your immune system already has some memory. It knows what to do. The reaction is usually milder. The researchers discovered something remarkable when they split the data this way. In COVID-naive people: The placebo group felt terrible on days two and three. Side effect scores shot up dramatically. Headaches. Fatigue. Body aches. The full miserable experience. The mushroom group? Their side effect scores barely increased at all. On day three, the difference was huge. Statistically significant. Not a fluke. By day five, the placebo group was still feeling rough. The mushroom group was basically back to normal. Same vaccine. Same immune protection being built. Completely different experience. In COVID-exposed people: The mushrooms made no difference to side effects. Both groups felt similar levels of discomfort. Why? Because their immune systems were already primed. They weren’t having that massive first-time reaction. There was less inflammation to modulate. This tells us something important. The mushrooms weren’t suppressing immunity. They were modulating the response in people whose immune systems were working extra hard. Think of it like a volume knob on a stereo. If the music is already at a comfortable level, turning the knob doesn’t do much. But if the music is blasting and hurting your ears, turning it down helps a lot. The Antibody Story: Protection That Lasts Side effects matter. But protection matters more. If the mushrooms reduced side effects by weakening the immune response, that would be terrible. You’d feel better but be less protected. The opposite happened. The researchers measured antibody levels at multiple time points. Day three. Day fourteen. Day twenty-eight (or day forty-two for people who got two-dose vaccines). And six months. Antibodies are like soldiers that fight viruses. More antibodies generally means better protection. Here’s the typical pattern after vaccination. Antibody levels shoot up in the first few weeks. They peak around four to six weeks. Then they gradually decline over months. That decline is normal. Your body doesn’t keep maximum antibody levels forever. It’s too resource-intensive. Instead, your body makes memory B-cells. Think of these like a recipe book. They store the instructions for making antibodies quickly if the virus shows up again. Active antibodies are like having soldiers on patrol. Memory B-cells are like having a military academy that can train new soldiers fast when needed. Here’s what the researchers found: In the placebo groups (both COVID-naive and COVID-exposed), antibody levels followed the normal pattern. Up, then down over six months. In the COVID-exposed mushroom group, antibody levels also declined normally. But in the COVID-naive mushroom group? Something different happened. Their antibody levels