Our certificate of analysis runs to a page of numbers, and the number everyone looks at first is the one that tells you the least. Fulvic acid, 35 g/100g. Every shilajit brand quotes a figure like that, ours included, and on its own it’s close to meaningless. What decides whether the page is worth anything are the smaller parts around it: the lab’s name, the accreditation behind it, the method printed beside each result, the dates, and the batch number tying the paper to a single production run. So here’s the whole thing line by line, using ours as the worked example.
A shilajit lab report has to answer four questions before you look at a single result. Who tested it, what they tested, when, and under whose accreditation.
Ours names Qarshi Research International, with testing carried out between 28 November and 8 December 2025. A named laboratory, a date range you can query, a lot number that exists on the jar itself. Much of what gets passed around as proof in this market is missing at least one of those three: a cropped screenshot with the letterhead missing, a table typed into Word, a year instead of a date. Those are decorations, not documents. Ours sits on our lab tests page if you’d rather read along with the real thing open.
ISO/IEC 17025 is the international standard for testing laboratories. Accreditation to it means an independent assessment body has been through the lab’s methods, calibration records, staff competence and data handling, then keeps going back through audits and blind proficiency samples, where the lab gets sent material with a known answer and has to get it right. It’s the difference between a room with instruments in it and a laboratory.
Two things it isn’t. It’s not approval of anyone’s product, ours included, because the standard covers the testing rather than the thing tested. And it’s not blanket: accreditation is scoped to named methods, so a lab accredited for heavy metals by one technique isn’t automatically accredited for everything else on its price list.
ILAC membership is the part almost nobody bothers to explain. The International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation runs a mutual recognition arrangement between national accreditation bodies, and South Africa’s member is SANAS. When the body behind a laboratory signs that arrangement, a result issued in one member country carries in the others. That’s why a test run on Himalayan resin in an ILAC-linked lab can be taken seriously by a buyer in Durban. Without that chain, an accreditation logo on a PDF is just a logo on a PDF.
Four rows on our report read not detected: lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium, all by AOAC 999.10/11. That’s the result we wanted. But it needs a qualifier, and the qualifier is the detection limit.
Every analytical method has a floor, the smallest amount the instrument can reliably see. Not detected means the lab found nothing above that floor. It doesn’t mean the sample contains zero atoms of lead. Which is why the floor itself carries the information. Say one report reads not detected with a floor of 0.01 mg/kg, and another reads not detected with a floor set fifty times higher: same two words, two very different sentences. Ask for the limit of detection or the limit of quantification if a report doesn’t print it.
Then there’s the phrase you’ll meet on other reports: below limit, or complies. That usually means something was detected but came in under a legal maximum. Also a fine result. A different result. One says the instrument saw nothing, the other says it saw something acceptable, and a brand that blurs the two is telling you how it handles the rest of its claims.
One more thing: a report only covers what was ordered. Kamgar and colleagues, writing in BMC Chemistry in 2025, analysed six commercial shilajit products and found thallium in five of them. Thallium isn’t on the standard four-metal panel, and it isn’t on ours either. We’d rather say that out loud than let a clean page imply a test we never ran.
Our fulvic acid result is 35 g/100g by titration. That second half of the sentence does more work than the first.
Titration methods oxidise the sample chemically and work backwards from how much oxidising agent got used up, which sweeps in a broad pool of oxidisable organic matter and reports it as fulvic acid. ISO 19822 takes a longer road. It extracts in alkali, drops the humic fraction out with acid, then puts what’s left through a resin column to separate true fulvic acid from the other organic material that came along for the ride. Run both on the same resin and the ISO number usually lands lower, because it excludes things the titration counted.
Same jar, two honest numbers, and only one of them comparable to a rival brand quoting the same method. Ours is the titration figure, and titration is the more generous of the two. ISO 19822 is the stricter test, and it’s the one we’d rather this market moved to. A fulvic percentage printed without its method is marketing rather than data, and if we could change one thing about shilajit labelling in this country, that’s the change.
Genuine raw resin generally measures between 15 and 35 per cent fulvic acid depending on the assay, so a label shouting 60 or 80 per cent is describing a standardised extract or a method it won’t name. Independent testing in the United States found fulvic acid per serving ranging from under 7 mg to over 2 200 mg across shilajit products on sale. Same category, a 300-fold spread, and every label looked confident.
Ours reports solubility in water at 97.2 g/100g, measured gravimetrically. Gravimetric means somebody weighed things: dissolve a weighed sample, filter it, dry the residue, weigh again. So 2.8 g in every 100 didn’t go into solution. That’s the row we watch hardest, because resin scraped off a cliff face arrives with sand, plant matter and rock dust in it, and purification is the business of getting that out. Our testing standard covers what happens between the mountain and the jar.
Moisture and ash aren’t on ours, but you’ll meet them on other reports. Moisture is water content. A resin carrying a lot of it goes soft sooner, and you’re paying resin prices for water by weight. Ash is what’s left once the organic material has been burned off, so it’s the inorganic fraction as a percentage. Acid-insoluble ash is the part that won’t dissolve even in acid, mostly silica and sand, which makes it the closest thing to a dirt reading.
What ash never does is count minerals. It’s a weight of residue, not a list of elements, so a report like ours can’t support a mineral count on a label. Those numbers come from somewhere else, usually a competitor’s label.
Batch 250915 is the batch shipping now, and it’s the number at the top of the report we publish. A report that is not issued per batch is describing resin you didn’t buy, and the whole exercise collapses.
Shilajit is a natural material collected in lots, and lots vary. Different site, different season, different purification run, different numbers. That’s why reports are issued per lot rather than per brand, and why a company still showing a 2023 PDF against jars filled last month is showing you history. Check the test date falls after the manufacture date too. No lab can describe resin that didn’t exist yet.
Six things, then, on any report anyone sends you:
If a seller fails more than one, our guide to spotting fake shilajit covers the checks you can run at home before you spend anything.
On its own, no. Two words, no cost attached, no way to check them. What means something is a report tied to a lot number, naming the lab, the dates and the method behind each result, published where anyone can read it.
Buy from someone else. An honest seller has the PDF in a folder and sends it the same day, because publishing it was the point. Excuses about confidentiality, supplier agreements or “the lab is still finalising it” have been running for years in this market.
Not if the accreditation behind it is recognised. A lab whose accreditation body belongs to ILAC produces results the other members accept, so geography matters far less than the accreditation chain. A local report from an unaccredited lab is the weaker document.
Because the tests we ran don’t produce one. We measured four heavy metals, fulvic acid and solubility, and those methods return exactly those numbers. A mineral count would mean printing something our report can’t back.
No, and the two questions are separate. The report tells you what’s in the jar and what isn’t. Whether shilajit helps you is a different body of evidence, and it’s a thin one. The 2016 trial in Andrologia ran 90 days in 75 healthy men aged 45 to 55 (PMID 26395129). A 2026 open-label pilot in Cureus gave resin to 25 healthy young men for 28 days and reported strength and fatigue improvements, with testosterone unchanged. Most of the positive work used a standardised extract called PrimaVie rather than raw resin. The samples are small, some trials were funded by manufacturers, and the evidence base is limited. Our questions page goes through what we do and don’t say about it.
Find the lot number on whatever shilajit you already own, then ask the seller for the report carrying that exact number. If nothing comes back, that’s your answer. Ours goes the other way round: it’s published whole, methods and all, and the 40 g jar it belongs to is R999 with free delivery in 1 to 3 working days. Read the report first. That’s the order we’d want it in if we were the ones buying.
The full document sits on our certificate page, and how it got there is set out in how we test. The shorter version of what to check before you pay is in how to spot fake shilajit.
A complementary product, not a medicine. Pregnant or breastfeeding women, and anyone on chronic medication, should speak to a health professional first.
We publish the full laboratory report for the batch shipping now, with the method named beside every result. Read it in full.
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