[AbiDrew85]

Interesting, I hope to hear more.

Huh? I just verified that one of the major products folks have been using for reishi contains no triterpenes which means no anti-androgen effect and you think there's more? Do you want me to go through and review every single product in Swanson's catalog with them? LOL!

What you think that's the end of the story???, you didn't prove anything.

Or did you miss this?

Unfortunately, it cannot be released to our customers due to a legally binding contract with our manufacturer that prohibits us from doing so. Providing the Certificate of Analysis gives access to proprietary information that can at times be patent protected.

No, I didn't miss that, but I think you missed this:

After reviewing this supplement, we found that it is now only standardized to the percentage of polysaccharides and the amount of triterpenes is not provided.

And perhaps never even knew this:

Extraction determines the therapeutic potency, since we cannot digest non-extracted mushrooms properly.
See this -highly recommended!- link for the details about this.

Therefore extraction is essential for a therapeutic effect, and dual extraction is the best option - it will make both water-solubles and insolubles bioavailable.

Hot water extracts (incl. home made Reishi tea), tinctures and powdered products at best contain only low concentrations of bioactives and the bioavailability is a major problem - if we cannot absorb all "the good stuff" then how can we benefit from it ?

From the link in quote:

The most common and cheapest extraction technique is hot-water extraction: the hot water will 'melt' the chitin and release the water-soluble bioactive components. The highest yield of bioactive ingredients is achieved when a high temperature combined with high pressure (211-373 ºF and pressure up to 50 psi to prevent disintegration of the moleculal structure of the bioactive constituents) is used. As a second step hot ethanol extraction is used in more sophisticated mushroom products: this will release the non-water solubles as well; basically, all bioactives will become bioavailable when this step is also included. Do not confuse this with an alcohol tincture: simply adding mushroom powder to alcohol will not have a lot of effect. Unlike cellulose (herbal products) chitin does not degrade in alcohol.

I don't know where I saw it, but somewhere I saw that triterpenes only become bioavailable with hot ethanol extraction. If I knew where I'd quote THAT to you as well.

In the first quote, Swanson's confirmed this product is only single-extraction standardized to polysaccharides. As THOSE are water-soluble, they clearly used hot water extraction ONLY. That means no triterpenes.