Button It, Maitake!

When it comes to food and their nutritional prowess, it seems like the more expensive variety is always the more nutritional option.

Think about it: white or brown and rice? Brown. Wheat or white bread? Wheat. Light or dark leafy greens? The dark kind. Milk or dark chocolate? Dark.

But what about with mushrooms? They vary in price – What’s the deal with them?

Though there are thousands of varieties of mushrooms – most of them poisonous – the most widely used and available mushrooms are the White Button mushroom (less expensive) and the coffee-colored Crimini mushroom (more expensive). In the case of Crimini mushrooms and White Button mushrooms, the more expensive Crimini mushroom does takes top billing as far as nutrition density goes (the other popular mushroom, the Portobello, are actually Crimini mushrooms but allowed to grow larger). But that’s not the case when it comes to comparing the Maitake mushroom with the White Button mushroom.

A study done by the Society of Chemical Industry indicates the White Button mushroom has as much, “if not more,” antioxidants than the more expensive Maitake mushroom, the much ballyhooed fungi that’s quite popular in Japan and often used for medicinal purposes. The study was published in SCI’s Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

White Button mushrooms are particularly dense in the antioxidant ergothioneine. It’s believed that ergothioneine (pronounced “er-go-thee-o-neen”) builds up the cellular activity within the body, serving as a fortification against chronic diseases. While Maitake do have a lot of ergothioneine, it was previously thought that wheat germ and chicken livers took the proverbial cake for best sources to get this antioxidant, but a 2005 study indicates the White Button mushroom has 12 times more ergothioneine.

This is great news if for no other reason other than the economic factor– White Button mushrooms are by far the least expensive variety of mushroom. Further, approximately 90 percent of the mushrooms eaten in this country are of the white button variety, meaning that they’re not likely to disappear from supermarket produce shelves anytime soon due to their high demand.

So even though you’re likely to see the Maitake mushroom dubbed with catchy slogans like “Maitake Magic” and “King of the Medicinal Mushrooms” in web logs and online searches, the latest study indicates that it’s button mushrooms, not Maitake mushrooms, that have the most potent antioxidant punch (Interesting factoid: The antioxidants in a mushroom are not evenly distributed. The bulb has more than the stalk).