Mushrooms have travelled from folklore to lab benches. Not all of them made it with evidence intact For thousands of years, cultures across East Asia and beyond treated certain mushrooms as more than food, using them as tonics for stamina, sleep and resilience, long before anyone could measure inflammation, neurotransmitters, or markers of brain injury in a blood sample (Venturella et al., 2021). The modern story is not that ancient tradition was “right about everything.” It