An Interview with Jeff Chilton: A Pioneer of Functional and Psychedelic Mushrooms

Who is Jeff Chilton?

Jeff grew up during a unique time in history in an area that suited him well, whether he realized it at the time or not, which helped shape him into the mycologically-oriented person he is today.

Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, after graduating high school in 1965, Jeff attended the University of Washington. There, he studied Anthropology and Mycology, which he considered ethno-mycology, the study of the historical uses and sociological impact of fungi in different cultures.

Growing up and attending college in the 1960s, a time marked by counterculture questioning, Jeff was exposed to many societal shifts. First, many people his age, after discovering that their government was lying to them, were actively resisting the Vietnam draft. Americans were also fighting for civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental rights. Psychedelics and eastern religion also began permeating society from the fringes inward, and because of all this, consciousness was also changing on a vast scale.

Jeff remembers that consuming psychoactive mushrooms, as opposed to a capsule or tablet of LSD, was a more certain manner of knowing what was being ingested. While at the UW, he was able to read Mushrooms, Russia, and History by R. Gordon Wasson, a book only accessed in the Rare Book Room in the Library.

This book detailed indigenous mushroom practices in Mexico that were still very much alive after 500 years of colonization. What also fascinated him about Mexico were the stories of Maria Sabina and her sacred “magic” mushrooms deep in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico.

His college years gave his life an interesting backdrop, one that led him straight to Mexico after graduation, where he could really dive into ethno-mycology in Oaxaca, where he lived for a year and a half. With a special interest in anthropology and mushrooms, he felt Mexico was the perfect place to further his learning after university.

In 1973, after returning from Mexico, Jeff began work at a large commercial mushroom farm in Olympia, Washington, and stayed there for 10 years. They grew 2 million pounds of Agaricus mushrooms yearly, also producing small crops of shiitake and oyster mushrooms.

“I lived with mushrooms for 10 years. Literally lived with them. I mean, these are huge warehouses full of long beds just completely covered with mushrooms. When you’re growing mushrooms on a commercial scale, you have people harvesting every day of the year, even Christmas, even New Year’s. Mushrooms do not sleep. They are alive and growing.” — Jeff Chilton

After his time working at a commercial operation, he published and co-wrote a book on mushroom cultivation in 1983, The Mushroom Cultivator, A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home. It’s still in print, selling around 5,000 copies per year.

In that same year, he moved to British Columbia with his wife, Janice, and 2-year-old son, Skye, where he started a mushroom spawn business and had a small-scale oyster mushroom farm.

He remembers his time there in the small coastal community of Roberts Creek fondly, as they had their second son, Adam, while both were working on their mushroom farm. Janice sadly passed away in 1999.

In 1989, Chilton attended an international mushroom conference in China. This conference expanded his knowledge of other mushroom species and their use in Chinese Traditional Medicine. As a consequence, he started his nutritional supplement business, Nammex.

Jeff spent the 1990s traveling extensively in China, attending mushroom conferences, visiting mushroom farms and mushroom extract processing businesses, visiting mushroom research stations, and building relationships.

In 1997, he organized the first organic certification workshop for mushroom growers in China, resulting in organic mushrooms becoming available in 2000 with certification by Western certifiers.

He recalls the 90s being dominated by introducing “medicinal” mushrooms, now referred to as functional mushrooms, to the US natural products and herbal supplements industry. He spent this time writing articles, attending trade shows, and joining trade organizations, doing his best to educate businesses and influential people to the world of mycology.

Jeff Chilton’s Psychedelic Research 

Chilton has been cultivating Psilocybe mushrooms since the 1970s, but when he co-authored The Mushroom Cultivator, A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home in 1983, it changed the course of psilocybin mushroom seeking from Mexico to North America.

People now learned that Psilocybe species were growing wild right here in our very own country, specifically in the Pacific Northwest. Meanwhile, The Mushroom Cultivator significantly upgraded the simple mason jar cultivation method popularized by small booklets that spread across the US in the late seventies. This led to a massive increase in Psilocybe cubensis production worldwide.

In 2022, Chilton’s company was issued a Health Canada license that allows it to cultivate Psilocybe mushrooms and possess the controlled substances psilocybin and psilocin.

Their research focuses on cultivating species identified as primarily occurring in Mexico and North America but also in South America, Australia and Africa, but not grown in large quantities (like Psilocybe cubensis) for the commercial market. Interestingly, Psilocybe cubensis is the only species allowed under Oregon’s legal psilocybin model.

Nammex works with 20 different species to determine the optimal cultivation parameters for each, thereby enabling consistent, timely growth.

Each species is also analyzed for tryptamine content, which, over time, can indicate which cultivation methods yield the highest tryptamine content.

The goal is to produce a standardized mushroom voucher specimen for each species, complete with a full analytical profile and consistent tryptamine content. This allows research into speculation regarding the difference between synthetic and natural forms of psilocybin.

Psilocybin research almost always uses a pure, synthetic version of psilocybin or psilocin. What this means is that the psilocybin mainly used in research doesn’t have any other constituents typically found in the whole mushroom form, such as baeocystin, norpsilocin, aeruginascin, and norbaeocystin.

This is great if you are trying to study the effects of psilocybin alone or if you just want to ingest psilocybin or psilocin; however, that’s not what humans have been ingesting for thousands of years. Humans have historically ingested full-spectrum Psilocybe mushrooms.

Not only could this standardized form of psilocybin-containing mushrooms from Nammex be suitable for scientific research, but it will also be available to qualified health care practitioners.

Our friend, Dr. Felix Blei, over at Miraculix, has spearheaded a community-led research initiative to gather data on the differences between Psilocybe species in the entourage effect and potency, which you can be a part of by checking out our interview and joining the psychedelic research yourself!

To understand just how monumental the work Nammex is doing is, one must realize that a number of these species have never been cultivated before, so they’re truly entering uncharted territory, with big goals in mind. Even so, the same mushroom species from two different locations will have a completely different analytical profile, so creating a standardized version is a huge undertaking.

“That’s the focus of our research. It’s learning how to grow that species, then doing a full analytical profile on it, and then being able to offer it to researchers.” — Jeff Chilton

Chilton would also love to see research conducted in Mexico with curanderos and curanderas to discover which species they use, why, and what they’ve come to expect from each one. That would give scientists a much better jumping-off point for examining each species. 

Adulteration and Truthful Labeling in the Functional Mushroom Industry

If Jeff could make any changes in the functional mushroom supplement industry, it would first and foremost be truthful labeling.

“The real concern should be that you’re getting a product that has the compounds in it that give you the benefits and this is the real point. We introduced beta-glucan analysis in 2015 and it has been adopted by the industry as an important quality marker. If your product does not have beta glucans, it is not a functional mushroom, period. And the fact is these (mycelia fermented grain) products do not contain but very small amounts of beta glucan.” — Jeff Chilton

With thousands of research papers like this one demonstrating the immunomodulatory capabilities of beta-glucans, it’s a hard fact to dispute.

When people look to something like psychedelics or functional mushroom supplements, they’re often looking for help, and for many, it may be a last resort.

So what if an elderly person with memory problems wants to take a lion’s mane supplement for memory cognition and neuroregeneration but they end up taking a grain product without the same benefits?

They may think there’s something wrong with themselves because the product isn’t working, which can worsen their situation; plus, their memory isn’t improving, and they’re wasting money on a mislabeled product.

This is what we want to avoid in the mushroom supplement industry’s future. As functional mushroom supplements became more popular in North America, companies began flooding the market with products much like tempeh.

Tempeh is essentially cooked soybeans with fermented by fungal mycelia, a product popular in Indonesia that has made its way to vegan restaurants in America and beyond, often used as an alternative to meat.

Like how mycelium colonizes soybeans to create an entirely new food product, functional mushroom companies began using mycelium-fermented grain as a replacement for the actual mushroom, making it a completely different product yet labeling it the same as real mushroom products.

Curious what the difference is between fungi, mycelium, and a mushroom? Our article Everything You Need to Know About Functional Mushrooms with Louis Giller of North Spore breaks it down for you!

In a society built around consumerism, companies have a lot of money to spend on advertising, so cutting through the marketing hype is especially difficult but equally important.

“What’s happened in the supplement market is companies out there are growing the fungal mycelium on cooked grains, it could be rice, it could be oats, other grains, letting it grow out like tempeh, then they dry it, grind it to a powder, and sell it and call it mushroom. When it’s not mushroom, it’s actually fermented grain. So if you go out to the marketplace today, 50% of the products in the supplement space are these grain products. And when you actually analyze them, they are mostly grain starch with a small amount of mycelium and they get mislabeled.” — Jeff Chilton

Actually, Chilton has been fighting for the FDA to demand proper labeling for a decade now and submitted a 26-page legal brief as a Citizen Petition to the FDA in 2023. You can also see the comments made by Law Office of Bayne & Associates on behalf of Nammex.

Citizen Petitions submitted to the FDA don’t require any action by the FDA, which is why Jeff took it a step further and held a 2024 presentation for ten FDA staff, asking them to review how mushrooms are grown and how other products are grown and labeled. The FDA has yet to make any changes to its policy.

Interestingly, the FDA already has documents stating that companies cannot label mycelium products as mushroom products. It all began in 1976, when Campbell Soup didn’t want other companies labeling their soups made with mycelium as mushroom soups; the FDA agreed and created a compliance document but has not enforced it since.

In a poetic turn of events, Campbell Soup Company was sued in 2021 for having misleading labels, with consumer advocacy groups alleging that the ingredients contradicted the label’s implied health benefits. Campbell agreed to modify their labeling practices, so why can’t functional mushroom companies do the same, and why won’t the FDA make these changes?

What may be the worst part of the whole situation is that these supplement products aren’t even entirely mycelium, with some containing as much as 70% grain starch.

Mushrooms do not contain starch; instead, they produce glycogen as their storage carbohydrates. Plants create starch, which may not seem like a big discrepancy, but this small detail has major implications.

Companies have the freedom to sell whatever product they like, but when companies are selling grain starch products as mushroom products, they’re not only mislabeling, but also adulterating these products, which Chilton considers a classic example of economic adulteration.

“In the time where information is the most available, I feel like misinformation is also at an all time high.” — Jimmy Nguyen

If 50% of the functional mushroom market is flooded with grain starch products, then it takes away half the market from companies that are actually producing genuine mushroom products.

Recommended Reading: The Mushroom vs Myceliated Grain Debate of Functional Mushroom Products with Louis Giller of North Spore

Don’t see Jeff’s desire for truthful labeling confused with a dislike for non-mushroom products. In fact, Nammex just released a 100% mycelium product with zero grain, starch, or filler that is third-party tested and guaranteed to have 1% Erinacine A, which has gained a lot of attention due to its ability to stimulate biosynthesis of nerve growth factor (PubChem). 

Nammex Research and Independent Testing

Using commonly accepted analytical methods, such as an AOAC starch test or a nutritional analysis, the data speaks for itself. For example, a simple colorimetric scratch test shows the absence of starch in mushrooms, but a clear presence in mycelia-fermented grain products. A nutritional analysis also shows that these products have the exact profile of the grain.

Nammex has conducted extensive independent research on the accurate detection and quantification of compounds in various functional and psilocybin-containing mushrooms. In doing so, they’re able to directly compare mushroom products with mycelia-fermented grain products, including beta-glucan content and other constituents.

Their research includes High-Performance Thin-Layer Chromatography (HPTLC), High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), Megazyme β-Glucan Assay (K-YBGL), Iodine–Starch Colorimetric Test, and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR).

These tests determined chemical variability and also enabled comprehensive profiling of both functional and psilocybin mushrooms. Their findings bring the standardization of mushroom products one step closer by elucidating the chemical profiles of various species and the factors that affect them.

Other companies fail to perform rigorous yet straightforward testing, often opting for in-vitro tests that skew results, don’t test their products directly, or test for other “novel” constituents entirely.

The question remains: why wouldn’t they just use proper labels on their products instead of mislabeling them as mushroom products, given that their products have a completely different chemical makeup and unique effects?

You can read the 2015 white paper, Redefining Medicinal Mushrooms: A new scientific screening program for active compounds, for an informative report of Nammex’s functional mushroom research.

Back to the Future: A Call to Reconnect

In the future, we may be able to get to a place where we can say that a specific species of mushrooms works best for a specific ailment, but for now, we’re still dealing with accessibility.

“I personally think that ecstasy and the ecstatic experience may be where the real healing is. What if every cell in your body is dancing to this ecstatic experience? I look back and I think of a lot of the way these things used to be described was death and rebirth. And that’s something you don’t hear about much either, because to a lot of people, it doesn’t sound right, right? But what we’re talking about is spiritual renewal.” — Jeff Chilton

In Jeff’s own opinion, it’s the ecstatic experience that shrooms or psilocybin mushrooms can give a person that can be the most healing. The experience of ecstasy is one characteristic of mystical experience, which has proved to be beneficial in psychedelic experiences (McCulloch et al., 2022).

Typically, opinions come from experience, right? It’s no different with Jeff. He recalls a day last summer when he and his wife Andrea decided to consume some psilocybin mushroom tea. He describes sitting on the beach on their property while they wait for the tea to kick in before walking back up into the forest.

It wasn’t reliving trauma or gleaning insights into their psyche; it was simply existing in the forest while under the influence of their psilocybin mushroom tea that offered the most healing to them.

Finding the base of a few trees to sit down and relax, they just let themselves be. No expectations, just letting themselves go where the journey took them.

It happened to be his wife’s first time trying psilocybin mushrooms and when they sat down, they were sitting in an old growth forest, surrounded by enormous trees that have been there symbolically looking down on us tiny humans for generations.

At the base of those trees, Andrea ended up “experiencing her elders,” something that Jeff admits to never experiencing through his many psychedelic experiences, and they both had a wonderful experience just sitting amongst the stoic green giants and accepting what came to them.

It’s important not to let psychedelic experiences like these fall by the wayside. As humans, we may have a tendency to overcomplicate things, to want to get things perfect the first time, or to do as much as possible to ensure a positive experience, yet sometimes, it might just be as simple as letting whatever comes to come.

What’s it come down to? Good care and good community, two things that our society has been severely lacking, however, if you take a real close look you may be surprised to find that communities are strengthening from the inside.

Ultimately, Jeff Chilton’s hopes for the future center on a collective return to simplicity, nature, and indigenous wisdom. While he is grateful to see the slow melting away of prohibition, he remains deeply concerned about the over-medicalization, patenting, and commercialization of psychedelics.

True healing, in his view, cannot be commodified or gatekept by corporate interests; it belongs to the natural world. Decades after the cultural shifts of the 1960s, Jeff sees our current era as a “second chance” for society to achieve a critical mass of awareness that the hippies tried to accomplish 70 years ago.

Echoing Terence McKenna’s concept of the “Archaic Revival,” he advocates for looking backward to find a healthier way forward, one where we put our phones in our pockets at the dinner table, look each other in the eye, and plug back into the earth.

Today, as he passes the torch of generational healing to his sons who help run Nammex, Jeff’s lifelong mission remains simple yet imperative. In a world vastly different from the 1970s, where functional fungi are finally getting the recognition they deserve, his final parting advice is to eat mushrooms. Or at the very least, make mushrooms a friend.