Shroom-viche: Can You Eat Mushrooms Raw?

🍄🍄 Mushrooms are delicious deep-fried, roasted, grilled, sauteed, and covered in sauce, but can I eat them raw? 🍄🍄

The short answer is: you probably shouldn’t and why would you want to. Cooking mushrooms does a lot to enhance flavor, improve texture, and kill off any hitchhiking microbes they may have picked up along the way.

More importantly, cooking breaks down chitin, which exists inside mushroom cell walls.

What’s chitin? It’s a fibrous substance that makes up insect exoskeletons, lobster shells, and octopus beaks. Fungi, too!

Humans are incapable of digesting chitin, which means all of the nutritional and medicinal mushrooms remain locked up in the mushroom cells without ever being absorbed by your digestive system.

If you don’t chew them until your jaw hurts, raw mushrooms will pretty much pass through your body without paying up. They’ll provide little beyond dietary fiber.

Start charging higher rent! Cook your mushrooms; reap the nutritional benefits.