Six human trials, and one of them found nothing. That’s roughly the whole serious evidence base for shilajit benefits. Strange thing for a company selling shilajit to lead with. We sell a 40 g jar at R999, and if you’re handing over that kind of money you should see the research before you see the checkout.
What follows is every study we cite: the journal, the year, who took part, the dose, how long it ran, and a PubMed link for each one. Where the sample is 25 people, or the funding came from someone with a product on the shelf, that’s in the same breath as the result.
Sorted by year, not by how well it suits us.
| Study | Who took part, dose, duration | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Biswas 2010, Andrologia | 28 subfertile men, 90 days | Sperm count up 61%, motility improved |
| Pandit 2016, Andrologia (RCT) | 75 healthy men aged 45 to 55, 500 mg a day of purified shilajit, 90 days | Total testosterone up 20%, free up 19% against placebo |
| Keller 2019, JISSN (RCT) | 63 active men, 500 mg a day, 8 weeks | Kept more strength under fatigue, lower collagen-breakdown marker in a subgroup |
| Pingali 2022, Phytomedicine (RCT) | 60 postmenopausal women with osteopenia, 48 weeks | Dose-dependent preservation of bone mineral density |
| Kamgar 2025, BMC Chemistry | Laboratory analysis of 6 commercial shilajit products | Thallium found in 5 of the 6 |
| Yadav 2026, Cureus (open-label pilot) | 25 healthy young men, resin, 28 days | Strength and fatigue improved, testosterone unchanged |
That’s it. That’s the pile. Now the detail, because the summary row is usually where supplement marketing stops.
Keller 2019, in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, gave 63 active men 500 mg a day for 8 weeks and then fatigued their muscles on purpose. The men taking shilajit held on to more of their strength than the placebo group did. There was also a lower collagen-breakdown marker, but that one turned up in a subgroup rather than across the whole trial, and a subgroup of a 63-man study is a small number of people to hang a claim that size on.
The longest study anyone has run is Pingali 2022 in Phytomedicine. Sixty postmenopausal women with osteopenia, followed for 48 weeks, with bone mineral density better preserved on the higher dose than on the lower one. Dose-dependence is worth something, because a result that tracks the amount taken is harder to write off as noise. Of the six papers here, that’s the one we’d keep if we had to bin the rest. But the finding belongs to those 60 women and it stays there. It tells you nothing about a 30-year-old’s bones, and anyone quoting it at a 30-year-old hasn’t read past the abstract.
Pandit 2016, in Andrologia, sits underneath most of the shilajit advertising you’ll see in South Africa. It was a randomised controlled trial: 75 healthy men aged 45 to 55, taking 500 mg a day of purified shilajit for 90 days. Total testosterone came up about 20% and free testosterone about 19% against placebo.
Read the population line again. Forty-five to fifty-five, all of them healthy at the start. Nobody in that room was 24 and training six days a week, so the trial says nothing whatsoever about what happens to a 24-year-old training six days a week. When a brand runs that percentage next to a photo of a young guy under a barbell, they’ve either not read the paper or they’re counting on you not reading it. Our money’s on the second one.
Biswas 2010, also in Andrologia, followed 28 subfertile men for 90 days and reported sperm count up 61% with better motility. Twenty-eight men. One narrow group, one paper, and we include it for completeness rather than for strength.
Yadav 2026, an open-label pilot published in Cureus, gave resin to 25 healthy young men for 28 days. Their strength and fatigue measures improved. Their testosterone didn’t move.
Two things follow from that. Open-label means everyone knew what they were taking, so the strength and fatigue results carry the usual expectation problem: people who know they’ve taken something tend to push a bit harder. Blood work doesn’t have that problem. Blood has no idea what it was promised, and in 25 healthy young men over 28 days it stayed exactly where it started.
So the loudest claim in our own industry, the one that sells most of the shilajit in this country to men in their twenties and thirties, has now been tested directly in men that age and came back flat. We’re putting that on our own website, under our own product, with our own name on it. It’s a small unblinded pilot, so it isn’t the last word either. But it’s the closest thing we have to a direct test, and pretending it doesn’t exist would make everything else we tell you worth less.
We still sell the stuff, obviously. What evidence exists points in a consistent direction, and our own batch comes back clean on the metals that matter. But limited is the accurate word for six small papers, and we’re not going to swap it for a better one.
Quite a lot, because a benefit you can’t safely take isn’t a benefit. Kamgar 2025, in BMC Chemistry, analysed six commercial shilajit products and found thallium in five of them. Thallium is not something you want turning up in anything you swallow every morning.
Which is the argument for reading the lab results before you read a benefits list. Ours is batch 250915, analysed by Qarshi Research International, an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited lab and an ILAC member, between 28 November and 8 December 2025. Lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium: not detected, by AOAC 999.10/11. Fulvic acid: 35 g/100g by titration. Solubility in water: 97.2 g/100g, gravimetric. Every number carries the method that produced it, which is the whole point, and how we test explains why we picked each one.
One number is worth arguing about while you’re there. Genuine raw resin usually measures somewhere between 15% and 35% fulvic acid depending on the assay, so a label promising 60% or 80% is either describing a standardised extract or using a method it hasn’t named. Usually it’s the second one. Independent testing in the United States found fulvic acid per serving ranging from under 7 mg to more than 2 200 mg across shilajit products on sale. That’s the range hiding behind one word on a label, and it’s why we wrote how to spot fake shilajit.
People write to us. They tell us about afternoons that don’t fall apart at three o’clock, about gym sessions that feel less like wading, about January mornings when the resin has gone soft in the Durban humidity and they want to know if it’s ruined (it isn’t, put it in the fridge). We like those emails. We keep the 4.9 Google rating on the site because it’s true.
None of it is data. Anecdote doesn’t get more reliable by being repeated, and we’d be doing the same thing we’re criticising if we stacked customer quotes next to a trial abstract and let you assume they were the same kind of thing. The studies are above. The reviews are reviews. Both are worth reading, and only one of them was controlled.
Between 28 days and 48 weeks, depending on the study. Yadav 2026 ran 28 days in 25 healthy young men, Pingali 2022 ran 48 weeks in 60 postmenopausal women. If you’re trying it yourself, eight weeks is a fair test. Write your training numbers down before you start, because nobody remembers them accurately eight weeks later.
500 mg a day in both Pandit 2016 and Keller 2019, using a standardised extract. Our serving is a pea-sized piece of resin, about 0.4 g, which is why a 40 g jar runs to roughly 100 days. Different preparation, so it isn’t a like-for-like match with the trial dose, and we won’t pretend it is.
One study of the six included women: Pingali 2022, 60 postmenopausal women with osteopenia, over 48 weeks. Everything else here was done in men, most of them middle-aged or athletic. So the honest answer for a 32-year-old woman is that nobody has properly tested it.
Not according to the research, which mostly used a standardised extract in capsule form. Resin gives you more grams per rand and you can see what you’re buying, which are the real arguments for it. “The trials prove resin works better” isn’t one of them, and we’re the ones selling resin.
Most of what shilajit gets sold for. Across these six papers the measurements were strength under fatigue, bone density in one group of women, fertility markers in one group of men, and hormone readings in two age groups that came back differently. Sleep, mood, skin and focus were measured by nobody here. People do write to us about some of those, and a mailbox isn’t a measurement.
Read the lab report before you read anyone’s list of shilajit benefits, ours included. It takes two minutes. Ours is published in full, with the method printed next to every number. And if a brand you’re comparing us against can’t show you the same thing, that tells you more than any benefits page will. If the paperwork holds up, the 40 g jar is R999, which is R25 a gram and about 100 days at a pea-sized dose, delivered free anywhere in the country in one to three working days. Anything we haven’t covered, mail us and we’ll answer it in writing.
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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