Batch 250915 went to Qarshi Research International, a laboratory accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 and an ILAC member, between 28 November and 8 December 2025. Here’s everything that came back, method and all.
| Tested | Result | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | Not detected | AOAC 999.10/11 |
| Arsenic | Not detected | AOAC 999.10/11 |
| Mercury | Not detected | AOAC 999.10/11 |
| Cadmium | Not detected | AOAC 999.10/11 |
| Fulvic acid | 35 g/100g | Titration |
| Solubility in water | 97.2 g/100g | Gravimetric |
The scanned certificate itself is on our lab tests page. Publishing it is the most expensive decision this business has made, and we don’t mean the lab invoice.
Plenty of jars get sold as lab tested shilajit in South Africa. Very few come with a document you can read, issued per batch by a laboratory the seller names. That gap is where most of this market lives. We closed it, and it’s cost us in ways the invoice never showed.
Three things, and none of them is the lab bill.
We can’t change supplier quietly. What we’ve published ties us to one source of resin, and resin from a different seam or a different purification setup won’t give the same numbers. Swap, and the figures on the site stop matching the jar, which anyone holding one can check against the label. Changing supplier now means fresh testing, new paperwork and an announcement. A brand that publishes nothing can switch on a Tuesday and never mention it.
The testing repeats on every batch. A report from two years ago describes resin that sold out two years ago, which is the quiet trick behind a lot of “lab tested” labels: one test, done once, referenced forever. We write the process up on our standard. Short version: nothing leaves the building until its own results are back.
And a bad result becomes our problem in public. If lead came back detectable next time we’d have to scrap that lot, say why, and take it on the chin in front of everyone already reading our results. A brand testing privately gets to choose which results you see, which is the real value of private testing to a seller. So read “we test our product” with no published document as marketing rather than fact. Ours included, until you’ve opened the file.
One opinion you’re welcome to argue with. Publishing one set of results and never updating them is worse than publishing nothing, because it buys trust the brand has stopped earning.
You’ve seen the number on other jars: a specific mineral count, or a slightly different one, depending which jar you pick up. Ours doesn’t carry it and never will, for a dull reason. Our certificate doesn’t say it. The laboratory tested heavy metals, fulvic acid and solubility. Nobody counted minerals, so we don’t have a count to give you.
We could lift the figure off a supplier’s marketing sheet, which is where most of them come from. Then the first person to ask which laboratory did the counting catches us with nothing to send. Printing a method beside a number only works if the follow-up question has an answer.
The same rule covers anything we might say about what shilajit does in your body. If it isn’t in the lab results or in a named study, it stays off our pages. Mineral counts sit near the top of the list we run on other people’s jars, written out in how to spot fake shilajit.
Mostly because the labels you’re comparing it against describe something else. Genuine raw resin usually measures between 15 and 35 per cent fulvic acid depending on the assay, so a jar claiming 60 or 80 per cent is either a standardised extract in resin’s clothing or a number from a method nobody names. Ours is 35 g/100g by titration, top of the honest range and below half the shelf.
That costs us sales. Someone comparing two jars on a phone sees 35 against 80 and does the obvious sum. But we’d rather lose that comparison than win it with a figure we couldn’t defend if a chemist asked.
Method matters more than shoppers realise. Titration and spectrophotometric methods can land on quite different values from the same resin, which is how two honest laboratories end up disagreeing and how a creative one produces a marketing number. Independent testing in the United States found fulvic acid per serving running from under 7 mg to over 2 200 mg across shilajit products. Labels aren’t measurements.
Less than the internet promises, and enough to stay interesting.
The trial everyone quotes is Pandit 2016 in Andrologia, a randomised controlled trial in 75 healthy men aged 45 to 55 who took 500 mg a day of purified shilajit for 90 days and finished with total testosterone about 20 per cent above placebo and free testosterone about 19 per cent (PMID 26395129). Read the population before you read the result. What it means for anyone outside that group is your call, not ours.
Now the study the hype accounts skip. Yadav 2026, an open-label pilot in Cureus, gave resin to 25 healthy young men for 28 days and reported strength and fatigue improvements with testosterone unchanged. We sell the stuff and we’re still pointing you at it, because it’s the honest answer to a question our inbox gets weekly. Keller 2019, in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, sits between the two: 63 active men on 500 mg a day for 8 weeks retained strength under fatigue, with a lower collagen-breakdown marker in one subgroup (PMID 30728074).
The caveats belong in the same breath. Most of the positive work used a standardised extract, PrimaVie, rather than raw resin like ours. Samples are small, some research was funded by a manufacturer, and the evidence base overall is limited. Anyone quoting these numbers at you without that paragraph attached is selling.
Contamination is the better-established finding. Kamgar 2025 in BMC Chemistry analysed 6 commercial shilajit products and found thallium in 5 of the 6 (PMID 39827344). Our testing doesn’t cover thallium, so we can’t tell you ours is clear of it. It covers the four metals in the table above, by AOAC 999.10/11, and that’s the honest edge of what we know.
Tested, and you can read the report before you spend a rand. What we publish is the laboratory’s scan rather than our summary of it, so the method sits beside every figure for you to check yourself.
It means the method used, AOAC 999.10/11, didn’t pick up lead, arsenic, mercury or cadmium in the resin we sent. That’s one result by one method, not a promise about every jar we’ll ever fill, which is why the next one gets its own test.
Every one, before it ships. Each batch gets its own report, which is the only version of “lab tested” that still means anything once a product has been on sale a while.
Because nobody counted them. The testing covers heavy metals, fulvic acid and solubility, so those are the figures we quote. If a jar prints a mineral count, ask that brand which laboratory did the counting and see what comes back.
Checking a lab report takes two minutes: the laboratory’s name, the batch number and test date, a method printed beside every figure. Run that on us, then on the next brand you’re considering, and see how few survive the third step.
If ours holds up for you, the 15 g jar at R500 is about 37 days and the sensible first buy. The 40 g jar at R999 runs roughly 100 days and works out at R25 a gram, mid-market per gram despite a high sticker price. Delivery is free nationwide, tracked, 1 to 3 working days from Durban.
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.
See the certificate
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