Some species of Cordyceps fungi has extra-highly edible and medicinal value. Except for Ophiocordyceps sinensis with high price, fruiting bodies of only three Codyceps fungi, namely Cordyceps militaris, C. guangdongensis and C. chanhua have been authorized as novel food materials by National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China. Among four Cordyceps fungi, C. guangdongensis discovered, industrialized and developed by the team of Professor Taihui Li, shows the closest evolution relationship with O. sinensis. The two Cordyceps fungi have many identical or similar ingredients. More than ten years of research has proved that C. guangdongensis displayed markedly medicinal functions on curing chronic renal failure, improving chronic bronchitis, antifatigue, antioxidant, etc. The new functions of C. guangdongensis on weight loss, lipid reduction and hepatic protection were discovered in this study.
Obesity and related metabolic complication are quite common and show a continuous high incidence trend, seriously affecting people’s health and life quality. In view of this situation, we successfully developed the CGLC with significant weight loss, lipid reduction and liver protection functions, through many formula tests of C. guangdongensis fruiting bodies and various medicine-food homologous raw materials.
In this experiment, a high-fat diet was used for establishing obesity mouse model, and mice in the CGLC group daily received GCLC saline solution. Compared with control group and model group, the results showed that CGLC significantly decreased obesity-mouse weight, improved glucose tolerance ability, reduced epididymis and inguinal adipose indexes (53.51% and 39.28%), and increased brown adipose index (32.58%); markedly decreased the contents of triglyceride (21.87%), total cholesterol (32.91%) and low density lipoprotein cholesterol (52.56%), and improved lipid droplet accumulation and vacuolated lesions in the liver tissue. Meanwhile, CGLC increased the relative abundances of Bacteroides, Bifidobacterium, Alistipes and Muribaculum, and short chain fatty acid contents. Association analysis indicated that blood lipid indicators were significantly negatively correlated with beneficial flora (Bacteroides and Muribaculum) and short chain fatty acids. In addition, liver transcriptome data showed that the expression levels of many genes related to fat and lipid metabolism were significantly different in the CGLC group. The above results suggested that CGLC had significant medicinal functions on weight loss, lipid reduction and liver protection.
Results of current study provide theoretical foundation on application and product development of C. guangdongensis fruiting bodies in food, bio-medicine and healthcare industries. At the same time, it also offers a new dietary intervention method in curing obesity, hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia, fatty liver and other obesity-related metabolic diseases.
Article link: https://doi:10.3389/fnut.2022.1038740.