Why this panel belongs to mushrooms in particular
Fungi are extremely good at pulling metals out of whatever they grow in. That isn’t a defect — it’s a well-documented property of the organism, and it’s the entire basis of mycoremediation, where fungi are deliberately used to draw contaminants out of polluted ground.
The same mechanism runs in a grow room. A mushroom concentrates what its substrate contains. Clean substrate, clean mushroom. Substrate grown on contaminated soil, or a hardwood sawdust with an unlucky provenance, and the fungus does faithfully what fungi do.
This is why a metals panel is more load-bearing here than in most supplement categories, and why “we source premium mushrooms” is not an answer. Sourcing is a story about intent. A metals result is a measurement of outcome.
The four that get measured are lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury, and the usual method is ICP-MS — inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, which is sensitive enough to report parts per billion. When you see ICP-MS in the Method column, the lab used the good instrument.
Two units, two different questions
Before any numbers, the trap that makes COAs incomparable.
mcg per serving answers: how much of this metal do I ingest when I take the recommended dose? It already accounts for how big a serving is. This is the number that maps to you.
ppm — parts per million answers: how concentrated is this metal in the material? It says nothing about dose until you multiply by how much material you swallow.
A product reporting 1.0 ppm of lead in a 30 mg strip and a product reporting 1.0 ppm in a 1,000 mg capsule are not equally exposed, by a factor of about thirty. You cannot compare a ppm figure to a mcg-per-serving figure without doing the arithmetic, and almost nobody doing shelf comparisons does the arithmetic — including, until we sat down with our own documents, us.
Our own two formats report in the two different units, which is why we’re labouring the point.
What our documents say
Two of our five products carry a metals panel. Here is all of it.
Lion’s Mane Capsules, lot 2023-13956 — measured, by ICP-MS
| Metal | Specification | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Total heavy metals | < 20 mcg/serving | 0.3198 mcg |
| Arsenic | < 10 mcg/serving | 0.0913 mcg |
| Cadmium | < 4.1 mcg/serving | 0.0366 mcg |
| Lead | < 0.5 mcg/serving | 0.1652 mcg |
| Mercury | < 0.3 mcg/serving | 0.0267 mcg |
Everything passes, and several by a wide margin. This is the strongest single document in our lineup: real measured values, a named method, and a specification column to judge them against.
Lion’s Mane Capsules, lot B24H001 — a different picture, still passing
| Metal | Specification | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | < 2.75 mcg/serving | 0.22 mcg |
| Arsenic | < 10 mcg/serving | 2.34 mcg |
| Cadmium | < 4.1 mcg/serving | 0.142 mcg |
Same product. Different batch. Arsenic came in at 2.34 mcg against the earlier lot’s 0.0913 mcg — roughly twenty-five times higher. Both are comfortably inside the same 10 mcg limit. Both are passes. Neither document is wrong.
That single comparison is the best argument we can make for why one COA is not a standing quality claim, and we’d rather show it than assert it. If we had published only the first lot’s table and left it up as evidence of what our capsules contain, we’d have been technically accurate and substantively misleading about the batch you might actually receive.
Two other honest notes on that second document. It reports no mercury and no total-metals line, so it’s a narrower panel than the first. And its lead specification is < 2.75 mcg/serving where the other lot’s is < 0.5 — the same product judged against two different limits. We’ve asked our supplier why; we don’t have an answer yet, and we’re not going to guess at one in public.
Mushroom Focus Strips, lot KJ112501 — bounded, in ppm
| Metal | Specification | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | Not more than 3.0 ppm | Less than 3.0 ppm |
| Cadmium | Not more than 1.0 ppm | Less than 1.0 ppm |
| Arsenic | Not more than 1.0 ppm | Less than 1.0 ppm |
| Mercury | Not more than 0.1 ppm | Less than 0.1 ppm |
Read that Result column carefully. Every entry is the specification restated with “less than” in front of it. That is a genuine pass — the batch cleared every limit. It is also the weakest form a pass can take, because it withholds the measurement. Did the lead come in at 2.9 ppm or at 0.02 ppm? The document cannot tell you, and those are very different batches.
Against the Lion’s Mane table, where somebody printed the number the instrument produced, the difference in what you’re able to verify is total.
The other three
The Energy & Cognition Drops, the Reishi Relax Gummies and the Cordyceps Energy Gummies have no metals panel at all. Their COAs are microbiological. There is no result to interpret because there was no test.
The footnote that changes how you should read all of this
At the bottom of the Lion’s Mane document, in the notes, is a line describing when the metals panel is run. It says the heavy-metals programme is to be tested on the first three lots, then annually.
Not every lot. The first three, then once a year.
This is a normal and defensible industry practice — metals arrive from substrate and supply chains that change slowly, so testing every batch for them is often genuinely redundant spend. We are not raising it as a scandal. We’re raising it because it silently redefines what a passing metals panel means: it is evidence about the sampling programme, not about your bottle, unless your lot happens to be one of the tested ones.
Combine that with the 25× arsenic swing above and the conclusion is unavoidable. A metals result is a snapshot from a sampling schedule, not a property of the product. Any brand presenting one as a permanent attribute is overstating what they have — and we have overstated it internally before, which is how we came to write it down.
One more threshold you should know exists
California’s Proposition 65 operates on its own separate lead thresholds, and they are far lower than the specifications you’ll see on a typical supplement COA. So “this batch passed its lead spec” and “this product is below the Prop 65 warning level” are two different questions with two different numbers, and a passing COA does not answer the second one. If you’re in California and that framework matters to you, ask the brand about it directly rather than inferring it from a certificate.
What we do and don’t say
We do not claim heavy-metal tested as a brand attribute. It would be false — three of our five products have no such panel, and that’s the end of the argument.
Per-product, on the two that do, we’ll show you exactly what’s above, including the lot with the higher arsenic and the panel that reports limits instead of measurements. Batch Certificates of Analysis are available on request; send us the lot number on your bottle.
Four questions for any mushroom supplement
- Is there a metals panel at all? For a fungal product this is the panel most worth having, and it’s frequently absent.
- Are the results measured values or the limit restated? “0.1652 mcg” and “less than 3.0 ppm” are not the same kind of evidence.
- What units, and what’s the serving size? Compare ppm to ppm, or do the multiplication.
- How often is this panel run? Read the notes. “Every lot” and “annually” are both legitimate answers, and only one of them is about your bottle.
The general version of all four is in what a Certificate of Analysis actually is, and the limits of the whole exercise are in what a COA doesn’t tell you.