Shungite is neither rock, crystal or tar. Its mass is comprised of approximately 98% carbon by weight. An amazing characteristic is that it, like its cousins shiliajit and mumio too contain amazing structures called fullerenes.
Shungite acquired its name due to having been first discovered quite near the Shunga village, in Karelia, Russia an area that which considers itself to be its own Republic and that borders Finland.
Like a lot of things that are not well understood, shungite has a lot of legend, lore and mystery surrounding it. We will endeavor below to cut through the hype and fairy tales to get down to the science behind it, whether it works and whether it should be something you should consider using.
Can You Eat Or Take Shungite?
The answer to that is NO. Below as we develop our conversation into describing other substances that contain fullerene that you can ingest as supplements, we will show you which ones you can ingest and their benefits.
As for shungite itself, no, you cannot ingest it. The composition of it would be quite similar to the effects as if you ate glass. No, no matter what you may see elsewhere, do not ingest shungite.
What Is Fullerene?
To begin to understand shungite intimately you first have to understand what fullerenes are and what they can do.
Fullerenes are allotropes of carbon whose molecules can be connected by either a single or double bond which form a partially closed structure that resembles the hex shaped wiring of chicken wire. They form hollow ball like structures that look as if you wrapped the chicken wire around a ball and then took the ball out and just had the hollow wire ball left.
They also take the hollow shapes of tubes, cones or similar structures. These structures are incredibly small usually between 20nm and 80nm (consisting of just a couple hundred atoms in many cases) and can play an amazing role in health when used properly.
What Benefits Does Fullerene Have?
Fullerenes are not just found in shungite, they are also found in what you could call the eatable kissing cousins to shungite known as shilajit and mumio. Many people think that shilajit and mumio are the same thing, but they are not.
Both are dense carbon structures like shungite, but both differ uniquely in that; shilajit is a tar that formed during several of the early earth periods such as the cretaceous period from the decomposing matter from both flora and fauna. Mumio is from the same matter, but has for the most part retained at least some of its primordial ooze tar like substance and has not yet fully solidified.
They are incredibly trace mineral dense and both also contain fullerene. It is this commonality with shungite that makes them similar in some ways or cousins as we referred to them earlier.
As far as science knows so far, fullerenes whether contained in shilajit, mumio or shungite should be basically the same as they are the same under observation and analysis.
However, while shilajit and mumio can and have been ingested for thousands of years according to literature, shungite should not be taken into the human body no matter the delivery mechanism. Shungite has a myriad of other uses as we will discuss below, but ingesting it is just not one of them.
Now that we have that covered, we can talk about the internal and external benefits of fullerene and how it can dramatically impact your life.
Since fullerene can be found in both mumio and shilajit, you can use either or both of them to ingest orally consumable fullerene. As we have spoken of previously, never ingest, take or consume shungite.
To get fullerene into your system use mumio or shilajit. Yes, we know we said that before, but we want to hammer that point home for your safety.
The Benefits Of Fullerene
In this section of the benefits of fullerene we will cover the benefits that may be derived from ingesting it as a supplement. In a future section when we speak of the benefits of shungite we will speak only about the external benefits of using it as a healing stone and other such uses and whether they are true, practical or not.
1. Detoxification, Poison, Radioactive Material And Free Radical Elimination
The nearly closed balls, cones, tubes and other shapes of fullerene lends itself to being a perfect collection trap. It has been shown in research to trap free radicals, radio isotopes, harmful chemicals, poisons such as food poisoning and more.
Then as it is excreted from the body in the urine or feces it thereby eliminates these substances which helps to dramatically clean and detox the body.
This one benefit cannot be overstated. It’s literally amazing in the way that it works.
Two examples are, 1 study showed it prominence in eliminating radiation when laboratory mice were injected with chemical radioactive material. Then fed fullerene extract added to their diet. The fullerene trapped and removed nearly all of the radioactive material from their systems.
If the scientists had continued to feed the mice the fullerene extract, we would hope that all of the radioactive material would have been removed, but after the initial does of fullerene, they didn’t give them anymore.
A second study showed that fullerene extract nearly completely neutralized food poisoning in humans. The researchers supposed that it removed the poison in the same manner as it did the radioactive material in the aforementioned study on mice, but they didn’t test the waste to see if the poison was in the waste separately or trapped inside the fullerene.
This would have been a logical step, but it looks as if they may have lacked the testing equipment needed to perform such testing.
There are many other research papers showing how fullerenes remove harmful agents from the body. One in particular showing how it does the same for free radicals is also an amazing study because the day-to-day implications for human health are off the charts.
The research on fullerene is still in its infancy and we are sure that many other marvelous benefits of a similar nature will be found.
2. Fullerenes Can Produce Singlet Oxygen In Extremely High Quantum Yields
We promise we will break this down in a moment into its simplest form. But for now; “Singlet oxygen is an electronically excited form of oxygen and is a strongly electrophilic molecule produced in tissue as a result of dismutation of superoxide radical.”
What this means is: fullerenes have the ability to basically ‘stimulate’ oxygen into transforming into its singlet form which is insanely neutralizing on radicals such as both free and oxidative radicals.
This is to say that; it can help oxygen transform into a very powerful scavenger that picks up radicals (agents that destroy your body by stealing electrons) and neutralizes them or renders them unable to do harm.
Normally the amount of singlet oxygen that the body produces is miniscule at best as it’s a rather energy intensive process that the body must see a potential net gain from in order to initiate.
However, when fullerenes are ingested it would appear to donate an energetic transfer that starts the singlet oxygen production.
This is amazing news because any increase in singlet oxygen production could dramatically increase the removal of some of the most stubborn to remove and hard to manage radicals produced in the body.
3. Fullerenes Appear To Aid In The Protection Of Telomeres
Telomeres are the structures at the end of your chromosomes that end cap them and protect them from both damage and coming apart at the seams.
Fullerenes somehow appear to be able to add to the telomere cap length. It is not yet fully understood how they do this. Hypothesis run the gamut from donating genetic material to removing specific compounds from the body that damage the telomeres. The full mechanisms of which need a great deal of further study.
However, since fullerene has shown to neutralize all sorts of other harmful agents in the body, it would stand to reason, at least on its face that they are working in a similar fashion by removing that which harms telomers thereby allowing them uninterrupted repair.
This would seem to make sense, however, do note that this is just out own hypothesis here at HealthGetters.
The Benefits Of Shungite
Are all the benefits that people constantly espouse deriving from shungite only from the slight amount of fullerene in it?
Can fullerenes on the outside of the body have any effect?
These are the questions that need to be answered.
There are literally thousands of testimonials for shungite worldwide, are they of merit or have they been debunked as some would say?
Shungite should only be used externally as we have mentioned before. So, can the bracelets, body stones and necklaces have any real benefit?
In a purely physiological sense no, it would not have any benefit, and this is why many researchers have debunked it, but are they looking in the right areas?
Physiologically, if you wanted shungite to protect you from radiation, electromagnetic fields or similar body negative energies then you would have to develop a crème or similar with sufficient shungite in it to apply to the body to block these energies.
This is what would make sense on the surface.
But, what if shungite works in a similar fashion to other known repellents such as insect repellents and other electromagnetic repellents, in that it creates a proximity field that deters the other energy from entering its field.
The reason we say this is not that we are into hocus pocus type health products, or those that are unproven. But when something has thousands of years of testimonials and spontaneous healings etc. And then is proven later to have a powerful compound in it that does all these things when used orally, we like to at least investigate that.
After scouring the science archives there are literally no published studies looking for these types of methods of shungite activity that we can find.
There are websites debunking it, not research papers per say, just opinion pieces, which does not satisfy our need to know if it does or doesn’t work.
They do these types of studies all the time with cell phone radiation shields that the government uses.
They also do them with solar radiation and nuclear radiation shields. So, we feel that it’s about time that similar studies were performed on shungite.
People wear shungite ‘jewelry’ in dozens of countries around the world some of the most popular being:
Shungite Necklaces
Shungite Bracelets
And using Shungite Stones
If any of these do work as thousands of people claim, then they must somehow be blocking these harmful energies from bombarding us when they are near us.
So,
Can Shungite Block EMF, Radiation And Others?
Some would say no, it doesn’t or that it can’t.
But let’s take a look at a simple product that we would say that most of us have used at one point or another in our lives, sunscreen.
How Does Sunscreen Really Work?
Well, to look at it correctly we need to know what heat is.
Heat is molecules, particles and other elements that have been stimulated to move faster than the other ‘elements’ around them.
So, when you get a sunburn you are literally being bombarded by fast moving molecules and other materials that are abrasing (sanding you could say) your skin. This abrasion damages the skin cells, blood rushes to the area, you turn red and the damaged skin cells peel or fall off.
Sunscreen simply blocks those fast-moving molecules and other matter so that they never make contact with your skin.
So, who is to say that shungite is not doing something similar with energy fields that we already know exist?
This is something that needs a tremendous amount of further study.
But, for now, let’s say that it cannot be debunked because it simply has not been studied in the right way.
At the least this is an open topic. However, with so many testimonies over centuries of use and scientific data that it does contain fullerene, it’s leaning towards shungite having properties that we are not aware of and that somehow do actually work.
Sources:
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