What is Poria?,a Humble, but Famous Mushroom, the poria cocos and its widely functional use.

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Poriae cocos General Info and Description.

Poria cocos Extract INCI Name Poria Cocos Extract CAS 168456-53-9 photo picture image Poria is a type of fungus related to polyporus, which usually grows on pine trees. Although it can range in color from white to pale red, the typical color of poria is light brown, with striations on the outer skin. It is relatively soft to the touch, odorless, and has slightly elastic properties. It is usually gathered from the tree, cut into pieces of various length, and dried in the shade before being used medicinally.

 Poria is very widely used in Chinese herbalism. It is traditionally used as a Qi tonic to benefit the internal organs. It is a solid fungus which grows on the roots of old pine trees. It is mildly diuretic and sedative, and is considered to be highly nourishing. It is a mild Shen tonic. Poria has significant immune enhancing ability, similar to the other mushrooms in the tonic class.

 Poria cocos is a very old and widely used herb especially in Chinese medicine. Poria cocos is a solid fungus also known as Fu Ling, Poria, Tuckahoe, Indian bread, or Hoelen, and grows on the roots of old, dead pine trees. Poria cocos has been traditionally used as a tonic to benefit the internal organs. Poria is normally white in color, and also called "white poria". The variant with light red color is called "red poria".
 Poria cocos Extract INCI Name Poria Cocos Extract CAS 168456-53-9 photo picture image

 Hoelen or Poria:Name History

 Hoelen refers to a mushroom cultivated in China on the roots of Chinese red pine trees (e.g., Pinus massoniana and Pinus tabuliformis); it also grows wild on these pines and other conifers, as well as on several hardwoods. Some may wonder why the name "hoelen" is often used to refer to it. This common name comes from the original botanical name~Pachyma hoelen~given by the Dutch botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius, in his book on Indonesian herbs published posthumously in 1741. Pachyma is from the Greek for thick outer skin (pachy-derma); Hoelen is a Dutch surname (Rumphius probably honored a colleague with this naming). Lewis David von Schweinitz, the founder of American mycology (study of fungi), designated hoelen as Sclerotium cocos in 1821, using a genus name devised 30 years earlier to indicate ball-like fungi, and cocos from coconut, describing its form and typical size (see photo of the coconut-like mushroom ball uncovered at the base of a pine tree). In 1822, the Swedish mycologist Elias Magnus Fries named it Pachyma cocos in his book Systematic Mycology.

 One hundred years later, in 1922, the American mycologist Frederick Adolph Wolf identified the mushroom as a polypore and renamed it Poria cocos. His two volume book, The Fungi, became a major resource for the study of mushroom species. However, his revised nomenclature for this mushroom is far from the end of the renaming. The mushroom was designated Macrohyporia cocos in 1979, Macrohyporia extensa in 1983, and then in 1984 it was named Wolfiporia cocos, these genus names separate this mushroom from other Poria fungi (the last version honoring the mycologist Fredrick Wolf); the other species of Poria produce long filaments rather than masses. In the same year (1984) it was further recast as Wolfiporia extensa, the currently preferred botanical name. The species name extensa had been applied to this mushroom back in 1891 by an American mycologist, Charles Peck, and that name was brought forward.

 The first English-language book of Chinese herbs, compiled at the end of the 19th Century, used the botanical name Pachyma cocos, which was the accepted designation at the time.Most of the herb books that come to us from China as English translations are based on books and articles written during the highly active period 1950~1980; the botanical name given in these is Poria cocos, the accepted designation from 1922~1979, so the mushroom is often referred to as poria.But the texts from east relied on the original Dutch designation, since the Dutch greatly influenced east medicine and science, starting in 1639.The name "hoelen" came to American practitioners of Chinese medicine via the Oriental Healing Arts Institute (OHAI), which brought Taiwanese literature to the U.S. in the 1970s.Normally, the OHAI naming system uses the genus name (in this case, it would be pachyma) unless there are other commonly used herbs of the same genus, in which case the species name might be chosen, but there may have been other reasons for selecting hoelen, such as prior use in Chinese literature.Modern Chinese medicine texts, including those written by Western authors, usually relay what is found in the Chinese sources, Poria cocos, without updating to the current nomenclature. Any suggestion that "hoelen" is wrong and "poria" is correct would not be based on full knowledge of the nomenclature accepted today; the common names come to us because they have been frequently used for easy reference.

 As noted, hoelen is a polypore; that is, it belongs to the family Polyporaceae, so-named because the members have many tiny pores. The mushrooms of this family also have the characteristic of not possessing the ordinary mushroom shape (stalk and cap).Poria species are known as wood-decaying fungi producing, for example, "poria root rot." In fact, the common problem of "dry rot" is typically caused by a species of Poria, such as P. incrassata.These mushrooms, and others that grow on trees, contain enzymes (cellulases) that degrade the structural component of wood, cellulose.Wolfiporia extensa eventually damages the pine roots, but it is not as devastating as the fungi that are currently listed as being species of Poria.
 Poria cocos Extract INCI Name Poria Cocos Extract CAS 168456-53-9 photo picture image

 In books of Chinese medicine, the description of the material part of this fungus to be used is the "sclerotium." Sclerotium (plural: sclerotia) is a term that (in modern usage) refers to a dense mass of branched hyphae, which is what makes up hoelen.

 One will sometimes also see reference to an American term for hoelen: tuckahoe. This name was first used in early American literature as a generic reference to edible roots; later, however, it was also applied to describe the sclerotial bodies of fungal origin, and now it is used almost exclusively for that purpose, and especially to refer to hoelen. In Florida, where tuckahoe was routinely collected (growing on several types of trees; it is also found to some extent in other East Coast states as far north as New York), the Native Americans would sometimes use them for food, and so it has also been called "Indian bread." The mushrooms have a low nutritional value, providing some carbohydrate, but virtually no protein. They have also been used as food in China, ground into flour and mixed with rice, then formed into cakes.

 The Chinese name for the mushroom is fuling; the characters are just phonetics applied to the spoken name of the herb, an ancient term. The name may be modified to indicate the locale from which the material was collected; for example, from hoelen from Anwei may be called Anling, and that from Yunnan may be called Yunling. The outer skin of hoelen is called fulingpi (pi=skin), which is separated off and provided as a separate medicinal item, with the reputation of being a good diuretic.
 Poria cocos Extract INCI Name Poria Cocos Extract CAS 168456-53-9 photo picture image

 These mushrooms are only found underground (like truffles).Poria can grow quite large, with a white interior and a dark brown exterior that may develop a mottled appearance like tree bark. Because of its source below the ground and international distribution of the material collected from China, another designation for the mushroom has been "China root."This term has been used for over a hundred years, mainly for this mushroom but also for the rhizome of the plant Smilax glabra, which has a somewhat similar appearance when sliced thin; it is also named after fuling as tufuling. Smilax has a reputation of being a famine food, and like fuling, it is reputed to have the medicinal effect of getting rid of excess dampness. When material was exported under the name "China root," the mushroom has almost always been supplied.

 Another mushroom used in Chinese medicine that grows similarly is Polyporus umbellatus (yieling the OHAI common name polyporus) which has been renamed Grifola umbellata. It grows as a parasite mainly on oak trees (also on Liquidambar trees), and forms a relatively smaller sclerotium compared to Wolfiporia.The grifola sclerotium is the medicinal part used in China.The Chinese name is zhuling (using the same character ling as for hoelen).This mushroom can also send up a substantial, leafy-like, fruiting body (which hoelen rarely does). It has been shown that zhuling does not form a sclerotium unless it is associated with a symbiotic fungus, Armillaria mellea. Another species of Grifola, G. frondosa, for which the large flower-like fruiting body is collected, has recently been popularized as a source of immunologically-active polysaccharides, using the Chinese: huishuhua; hua means flower.

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citations1.What is Poria?,a Humble, but Famous Mushroom, the poria cocos and its widely functional use.

last edit date:2nd,June.2009.