The Forest — The Shungite Medium, Chapter 1

The Body and the Field · Chapter summary · from The Shungite Medium by Gary Fong

I opened with a question: has anyone ever heard of someone moving to a cabin in the forest and getting cancer there? Intuitively we know it does not happen. The phrase let's go for a walk in a deep forest is enough to relax the body. I argued the basis of that is physical: a forest contains only naturally sourced electrons.

Japanese scientists put the recognition on paper in the early 2000s and called it shinrin-yoku, forest bathing. They measured people who walked under the trees against people who did not. Cortisol dropped. Blood pressure dropped. Heart rate variability improved. The natural killer cells of the immune system, the ones that surveil the body for cancer, climbed and stayed climbed for weeks after a single weekend in the woods.

From there I laid out the mechanism the rest of the book runs on. The body operates strictly by a flow of electrons. Stop the electrons and the heartbeat stops, brain function stops, cell metabolism stops. A cell is a slushy water balloon full of molecules, and bioelectricity is what assembles them. Every heartbeat, every nerve signal, every muscle movement, every thought is electrical. The sun emits photons, plants build glucose out of them, and mitochondria break that glucose apart and store it as ATP, the battery every cellular process runs on. When the electrons reaching the body come instead from a man-made source it does not recognize, the body answers with oxidative stress, which I treat throughout the book as the primary cause of aging and disease in this electronic age. The chapter closes on a small, very old piece of carbon that does what the forest does.

From the chapter

Life doesn't run on chemistry. Chemistry runs on electrons. In nature, electrons behave really simply. Light hits a leaf, electrons move, carbon dioxide becomes oxygen and sugar. That single process reshapes the planet. There's no force. There's no man-made direction on what happens here. There's no stress. It just flows. And your body works the same way. You are solar-powered. This is not a metaphor. The chain is direct. The sun emits photons. Plants catch those photons and use the energy to build glucose. You eat the plants, or you eat animals that ate plants. The glucose enters your cells. Your mitochondria break it apart and store the energy in a molecule called ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate), the rechargeable battery your cells actually run on. Every cellular process in your body runs on ATP. The glucose came from the plant. The plant built it from sunlight. What happens when the electrons your body is processing are not coming from the sun, but from a man-made source that the body doesn't recognize? The body reacts with oxidative stress, which we will see throughout this book, is the primary cause of aging and disease in this electronic age. For most of human history, synthesized electrons were unheard of.

— Gary Fong, The Shungite Medium, Chapter 1

This is a summary of one chapter of The Shungite Medium: The Groundbreaking Exposé of History's Most Miraculous Stone by Gary Fong, LSH Publishing, first edition 2026, 259 pages. Three chapters are published here complete: What Is Shungite? · The Corporate Sticker · How to Tell Real Shungite from Fake. The reference apparatus is complete too: the studies, the glossary, the bibliography and the endnotes.