From the time a coffee cherry is harvested and processed to the time a cup of coffee is poured into your mug, an extraordinary amount of waste is created — and when you add it all together, global coffee consumption is responsible for more than 23 million tons of waste annually, according to sustainability researcher Gunter Pauli.

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Among that heaping pile of waste are hundreds of thousands of pounds of wet coffee grounds. What if that didn’t all have to be waste, though?

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Back in 2015, our guest Julian Mitchell and his co-founder Ryan Creed discovered how to grow gourmet mushrooms from waste coffee grounds. Immediately, they saw an opportunity to reverse this waste problem and turn it into something positive by creating Life Cykel, a biotechnology company focused on creating products and services that improve both human health and planetary harmony.

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So, not only is Life Cykel converting coffee waste into mushroom farms (and teaching others how to do the same thing), they’re also creating some incredible products from these high-quality functional mushrooms. We’ve talked about the incredible health benefits of mushrooms on the show before, but now we can get those same benefits knowing that we’re actually reducing the total amount of waste polluting our planet.

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That’s a win-win in my book, and that’s why I’m excited to be supporting Life Cykel’s mission. If you want to add mushrooms to your biohacking routine, you can use the code “LUKESAVE20” to get 20% off at lifecykel.com.

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Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Creating the future of food
• The most nutritious strains of mushroom
• Why it’s so difficult to grow mushrooms (as many aspiring trippers have learned)
• What you need to know if you want to grow your own mushrooms
• An incredible new documentary, Fantastic Fungi
• Why mushrooms aren’t plants — they’re part of their own kingdom
• Can we get contaminated from mushrooms grown on coffee grounds?
• How to choose high-quality mushrooms
• The dual-extract process that Life Cykel uses to get the medicine out of the fungi
• How to identify whether your mushroom-based products are using high-quality mushrooms
• Why I use a variety of different mushroom-based products in addition to Life Cykel: Four Sigmatic, Longevity Power, and Real Mushrooms
• Researching the supply chains of the products that you use
• How different functional mushrooms can be used in your biohacking tool belt
• Why Lion’s Mane is the closest you can get to a psychedelic mushroom (without tripping)
• Mushroom biotechnology applications for a healthy planet beyond growing mushrooms

‍More about this episode.