	Article Directory		Article Submission Service		Article Marketing Blog		Publishers		Member Log In

Article Directory :: Health & Fitness Articles

Activated Charcoal

By Ben Mester

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 20Sep2010
Word count: 522
Viewed: 302 time(s)

Get Free Content For Your Site

I've recently been surprised to find that not only does charcoal comes in different types, such as lump charcoal and activated charcoal, but that charcoal is a highly useful medical substance. And here I was just using it for grilling! I had no idea that lump charcoal could be "activated" to use as a filter in water and other things. Activated charcoal is a form of carbon charcoal that has been processed so that it's extremely porous and thus maximizing its ability to absorb hazardous organic compounds that are either dissolved or suspended in air and in water. It's pretty amazing. I had always heard that many water filters used charcoal as a filtration system, but I had never known how it worked, or that there was a special form of charcoal called lump charcoal that could be activated for the specific purpose of water filtration.

Lump charcoal is not the same charcoal you get in a barbecue charcoal bag at your local grocery store. Lump charcoal is made often from hardwood, through a process of flash heating, known as pyrolysis, where the wood is burned very intensely for a very short period of time, removing almost all traces of water and other substances and leaving only the lightweight carbon char behind. Lump charcoal can then be further activated by undergoing a process that makes the carbon more porous and able to absorb chemicals and organic material. But even in its lump charcoal state, it still provides amazing filtration properties. A company in Japan creates lump charcoal from oak hardwood to be used raw, and as is for water filtration. It's either scary or amazing to think that a once growing tree limb can now provide water filtration for up to three months!

Lump charcoal is an amazing substance for water filtration. But it also has many more uses. I was amazed to find in my research that people have actually been using activated lump charcoal for many years as a medical supplement. In the next section we'll talk about how ingesting activated lump charcoal can help cure a number of unwanted symptoms in the human body.

As we discussed earlier, activated charcoal is not at all the same as the charcoal bought at your local grocery store. Don't eat grocery charcoal!! Activated charcoal, however, is perfectly edible and even life saving in certain circumstances! Hospitals have been using activated charcoal to absorb poisons in emergency cases where victims either mistakenly ate something poisonous, or in cases of attempted suicide. The activated charcoal absorbs compounds quicker than anything else and in many cases, has been responsible for saving lives.

But other than that, activated charcoal is also available in pill supplements. Though many of the claims are unverified, proponents of medical activated charcoal claim that the charcoal absorbs toxins and detoxifies them and promotes overall wellness in the human body. Some also claim that activated charcoal supplements have the power to reduce flatulence when taken after meals. Some studies also indicate that activated charcoal actually absorbs fat and cholesterol, and thus can be a major asset in the fight against heart disease.

I hope you enjoyed reading about lump charcoal and all its amazing uses. For more information on charcoal, check out another article on Bamboo Charcoal.

EasyPublish™ this article - publishers click here