Ask most shilajit sellers about side effects and you get a shrug and the word “natural”. That’s not an answer. The shilajit side effects people actually report fall into two piles. The annoying ones come down to taste and dose. The serious one is about what’s really in the jar you bought.
We sell the stuff. Read the rest knowing that. But we’d rather you had all of this before you spent R500, with us or with anyone else.
It tastes like tar. Bitter and smoky, with a mineral edge that hangs around for a good ten minutes. The first time we tried it we were braced for something like strong black coffee and got something closer to a burnt tyre. Most people stop noticing inside a week or two. Some never do, and end up handing the jar to a braver friend.
In the medical sense that’s no side effect at all. It’s still the most common complaint we hear, and the reason people quit in the first fortnight. Warm water helps: around 150 ml at drinking temperature rather than boiling, which dissolves the resin properly. Ours measured 97.2 g/100g solubility in water, so if yours leaves grit at the bottom of the cup, look at the resin before you blame the kettle. Some people stir in honey. Others swallow it fast and get on with their morning. If the taste is a genuine dealbreaker, capsules are an option, though you’ll pay more per gram of actual resin. Our view is that they’re the worse buy, and we’ve put the two next to each other in resin versus capsules and gummies.
The next thing people report is digestive: loose stools, a heavy or slightly nauseous feeling, now and then a dull headache on day two or three. Almost every time we’ve followed it up, the dose was the culprit. A pea-sized portion is roughly 0.3 to 0.5 g. People eyeball it, take a lump nearer the size of a marble, and then they’re surprised their gut has an opinion.
Start at half a pea. Give it a week before you go up to a full one, and take it with food if mornings on an empty stomach don’t agree with you. If the upset carries on past that first week at a small dose, stop and speak to a pharmacist or your doctor. A supplement that keeps disagreeing with you isn’t worth pushing through, whatever the internet says about adjustment periods.
This is the section that matters more than the rest of the page. None of it is medical advice and we aren’t qualified to give any. These are the situations where we’d want you talking to a doctor or pharmacist before you buy, and where we’d rather lose the sale than have you guess.
Skip it. There’s no trial data we know of in pregnant or breastfeeding women, and none of the studies further down this page included them. Nobody has shown it does harm either. And nobody has looked, which is the point. No sense in you being the test case. Ask your doctor or midwife and take their answer over ours.
Check with your pharmacist or prescribing doctor first, and take the jar along so they can read the label themselves. Shilajit is a mineral-rich resin, and mineral-rich products can affect how some medicines are absorbed. We can’t tell you which ones, and any shilajit seller who says they can is guessing at your expense.
Ask before you buy. Shilajit carries iron, and our lab report doesn’t put a number on it, because we test for heavy metals and fulvic acid rather than a full mineral breakdown. So if a health professional has told you to keep track of your iron, we can’t hand you the figure you’d need to work with, and as far as we can tell nobody else selling resin in South Africa can either. That’s a question for them, not for us.
We don’t sell it for kids and we wouldn’t. Every trial we cite below ran in adults. If you’re thinking about it for someone under 18, that’s a conversation for a paediatrician, and we’d want you to have it before you order rather than after.
Everything above is about tolerance. This part is about safety, and it’s why we go on about lab reports until people get bored of us.
Shilajit comes out of rock. Rock holds lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury, and raw resin scraped off a cliff face can carry all of it into the jar. Purification is supposed to take that out. But “purified” on a label is only a word, and in 2025 a study in BMC Chemistry analysed six commercial shilajit products and found thallium in five of them (PMID 39827344). Five out of six. Those were products on sale, with labels, presumably with happy customers leaving reviews.
So the strongest safety argument a jar can make is a per-batch lab report from a named laboratory. Marketing copy counts for nothing here, ours included. Ours is batch 250915, analysed by Qarshi Research International, a laboratory accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 and an ILAC member, between 28 November and 8 December 2025. Lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium all came back not detected by AOAC 999.10/11. Fulvic acid measured 35 g/100g by titration. The full report sits on our lab results page, and the testing we do before anything ships is written up in our standard.
Hold us to that as hard as you’d hold anyone else. If a brand won’t show you a batch-numbered heavy metal test, walk away, and that includes walking away from us the day we stop publishing ours. The other tells are in how to spot fake shilajit.
The trials are small and they’re short. The longest we know of ran 48 weeks in 60 postmenopausal women with osteopenia (Phytomedicine, 2022, PMID 35933897). Keller’s 2019 trial in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition ran eight weeks in 63 active men (PMID 30728074). Yadav’s 2026 open-label pilot in Cureus followed 25 healthy young men for 28 days on resin and reported improvements in strength and fatigue, with testosterone unchanged. That last result gets far less airtime than it deserves, given how loudly this category is sold to men in their twenties.
Now the caveats, and we’ll repeat them anywhere. Most of the positive trials used a standardised extract called PrimaVie rather than raw resin, so they aren’t testing the thing in the jar. Some were funded by companies with something to sell. Sample sizes run in the dozens, which makes the evidence thin. Nobody has run a long-term safety study on daily resin across thousands of people, and if a seller implies otherwise, ask them for the paper and see what arrives.
Yes, usually in the first few days, and usually because the dose is too big. A pea-sized portion is about 0.3 to 0.5 g, and people routinely take double that by eye. Start smaller, take it with food, and stop if it’s still bothering you after a week.
We’d say skip it. There’s no trial data in pregnant or breastfeeding women, so the honest answer is that nobody knows, and that call belongs to your doctor or midwife rather than a supplement company.
Most of what gets reported is digestive: loose stools, nausea, a heavy stomach, sometimes a headache. More isn’t better with resin. A 40 g jar at a pea a day already lasts about 100 days, so there’s nothing to gain by rushing through it.
It might, which is why we ask anyone on chronic medication to speak to a pharmacist first. Mineral-rich products can change how some medicines are absorbed. We’re not qualified to tell you which ones, and neither is a label.
Ask a doctor. Every trial we cite ran in adults, so there’s no evidence base for under-18s, and we don’t market it to them.
Buy the smallest jar you can find from a seller who publishes a heavy metal test you can match to the jar. Take half a pea a day for the first week. Ours is the 15 g jar at R500, roughly 37 days at a normal dose, and our lab results page costs nothing to read before you spend a rand. If you’re pregnant, breastfeeding, on chronic medication or thinking about this for someone under 18, have that conversation with a health professional first and buy nothing until you’ve had it.
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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