This is known in Mandarin as “fu ling”. It is actually a fungus whose filaments arestored and used as medicine. It has been used medicinally in China for long-termhealth care by consuming it on daily basis (McNamara and Song 1995). TraditionalChinese medicine believes this herb is sweet and tasteless in flavour and neutral interms of properties. One of its main uses is to relieve choking coughs caused byphlegm (Wu and Fischer 1997). It has also been used in various herbal combinationsto treat diarrhoea, kidney inflammation, and gastrointestinal tract bleeding (Huang1998). Poria extract contains triterpene and polysaccharide fractions that have demonstratedanticancer action through the mechanism of down regulation of nuclearfactor-kappa B activity and its signalling pathway, as well as having anti-angiogenesisproperties and inducing apoptosis (Poucheret et al. 2006; De Silva et al. 2012). Thecytotoxicity of poria in formulations against lung cancers has been proven efficient(Leem 2015).
