Check this thread about Aloha Medicinals : http://www.longecity...oha-medicinals/
You cannot get a villa for the price of a shed. The same applies to mushroom supplements. It costs money to grow and process these products.
A good quality product will be more expensive but in return you get verifiable quality, the products were tested for heavy metals and bio-active compounds. You usually get good value for money.
None of these products offer any backup about quality or reliability. No supplement labels, no proof of quality.
They have a low price in common. For that low price you get a non-extracted product that might or might not be the real thing.
Even if it is, you still have no clue what is in it. It will at best be a low level of quality compounds, because in unprocessed mushrooms the levels of beta-glucan and cordycepin are a fraction of what you get in a properly processed extract. The processing removes a lot of useless stuff, thus increasing the percentage of bioactive compounds. By mixing batches of different potency producers can create a constant and standardised quality.
None of these products has that, it 's all marketing talk. You have to take their word for it. They're like like the guy offering you a gold watch for 50 dollars at the bus stop "it's the real thing ! I want to do you a favour, you can trust me!"
If you're serious about taking care of your health it is just silly to waste money on unverifiable stuff from unknown producers that cannot show you a single test report.
Thanks for the link! That cleared things up about Aloha Medicinals. Some Indian seller on eBay also faked a COA and sent it. It was funny to read it - it had so many typos, even a few typos in the name of the species alone...
Well, I understand what you are saying and I actually agree with most of it. However my life situation has gotten so bad that I was homeless once already, and I want to fix my brain before I run out of money again. So I managed to fix my nutrition, and now I'm trying to find the best supplements that I can get for the problems that I've spent days researching and identifying within myself. Main things that I need to fix are dopamine production and MAO activity, followed by increasing norepinephrine production. Followed by Acetylcholine production to a lesser extend, and followed by serotonin and GABA production to an even lesser extend. Since my savings are very, very limited, I cannot afford to spend more than 10eu/month total, for ALL the supplements that I would need. And even that would be a significant amount, so I would prefer even less, but that's not even realistic.
So while I agree with you, I just honestly cannot afford it because I do not want to end up homeless again before I can even attempt to fix my brain.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Nootropics Depot's Cordyceps. They have both a 1:1 and a 10:1 extract. And they use the fruiting body rather than the mycelium. Most Cordyceps on the market use the mycelium, not the fruiting body.
Someone in this thread mentioned that mycelium might be better than the fruiting body (not sure where, I am still in progress of replying). However I've read in other threads that fruiting body is the only way to go if you want the full benefits (including mental ones, which is what I'm after).
As for their cordyceps, as someone else has mentioned, Nootropics Depot is way overpriced, and I definitely cannot afford to spend around 1eu/day (that includes shipping) for just one supplement. I spend that or slightly more on food per day, depending on the day, and I have very limited savings. Also, they don't specify the other bioactives, so basically you'd just be going for the brand here...
Nootropics Depot is sourced from Nammex, and also very overpriced.
As for Vlad's comments above, there is no "faking" a whole dried cordyceps militaris fruiting body, nor is there any reason to fake it. Nobody is adulterating cordyceps militaris like they might wild harvested cordyceps. Cultivated high quality cordyceps is cheap and mass produced. In 2014, China was producing 8,000 tons of Codyceps Militaris annually, expected to exceed 19,000 tons by 2017 [r].
This 2017 study claims: "Cordyceps militaris that can be purchased in the market contains 300 mg of cordycepin per 100 g of total weight on average." That is 0.3% cordycepin on average for cordyceps militaris bought in Chinese markets! There is no reason to waste your money on an overpriced, "standardized product" that is no more potent than what you can buy in a Chinese grocery store.
I agree about the faking part, however the active ingredient content besides cordyceptin might be very low or non existent in cordyceps grown on rice hulls rather than cultivated from larvae, and the "on average" part means that I could be getting a product with either 0.1% or 0.6% - it's a big gamble, and I couldn't resell the mushrooms because they're open nor claim a return, so if they don't increase my MAOI nor dopamine, which means I'd just lose a month of food supply. Then again, same thing can happen with unverified sellers as well...
Nootropics Depot is not specifying anything useful, that would be my reason to look elsewhere. They focus on beta-glucan, which is not a marker for Cordyceps at all.
I have asked them why they did not specify cordycepin and adenosine and received no reply. They also did not want to share a test report. Only the home-made data sheet they have on their website.
The 1:1 or 10:1 is a claim that means nothing as a marker for quality - only percentages of active ingredients really matter IMO.
Let's assume all Cordyceps militaris indeed contains 0.3% cordycepin (which I doubt) like Adaptogen states.
In order to match the 1.2% cordycepin Oriveda is currently claiming it has to be 4 times cheaper, at least.
Oriveda charges $1.35 p/gram, which is almost the same amount of money you'd have to spend with the eBay sellers you mentioned before if you want to get the same amount of cordycepin, assuming there's .3% cordycepin in that. And they charge you for a non-extracted, unspecified encapsulated product.
Only the unprocessed raw C.militaris product is cheaper (about half the price) but that makes sense because no processing / testing / encapsulating was done. You still need to extract the stuff yourself (make tea) which will most likely not yield the same results a professional facility will achieve.
The conclusion is that the price difference is actually minimal. More important for me is that with a properly documented product you have the guarantee you have something useful and safe.
I agree completely about Nootropcis Depot here, and I agree with the home extraction methods probably yielding less efficient results. I would also personally prefer larvae-grown cordyceps instead of rice-grown because I just prefer natural developement. But I can't be picky here. 
If I could find a study about cordyceptin content in a homemade extract from Chinese market bought cordyceps, that would help tremendously - I could then compare it to the claimed numbers by eBay sellers and see what is the most cost-efficient way to supplement them and just go with my gut feeling in the end.
Same story as with Reishi here it seems, very useful supplement that is very hard to get (at least properly), and nearly impossible to be sure if you are on a really tight budget. But we'll see where this thread goes, haha.
LongeCity
