Few foods have made the leap from kitchen staple to wellness panacea quite as quickly as mushrooms have in the UK. Once largely confined to fry-ups and risottos, mushrooms are now sold as coffees, gummies, powders, shots and capsules, and are often accompanied by claims relating to immunity, cognition, stress resilience and longevity. For nutrition professionals, this rapid expansion raises familiar questions: how do we square traditional, historical use with the current body of evidence, and how well do these products align with what we know about nutrition, physiology and dietary patterns?

Mushrooms are biologically fascinating, nutritionally useful and culturally significant. They also sit at the centre of a fast-growing supplement market that often extrapolates far beyond the available clinical evidence.