Look up your batch

Shilajit has a genuine contamination problem, and the people worried about it are right to be. It is a resin that concentrates what is around it, and the supply chain is long.

Most brands that test at all test the four you would expect — lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium. We add thallium, because published analysis has found it at higher levels in some finished shilajit supplements than in the raw material they were made from, and because almost nobody in this category looks for it. There is no statutory limit for thallium in a food supplement. We test anyway.

What a real certificate has to say

• The laboratory, by name, and its UKAS accreditation number.
• The method — ICP-MS, to a stated standard.
• The result.
• The limit of quantification. “Not detected” is meaningless unless you know what the instrument was capable of detecting.

What we do not print

A harvest altitude. A sourcing story with a village in it. A purity percentage from a cheaper assay dressed up as a better material. None of it is verifiable, so none of it is on our pack.

On the fulvic acid percentage

Ours is stated at a minimum of 50%, which is the same standardisation as the material used in the published human research. You will see 70%, 80%, even higher elsewhere. A higher number on a label usually means a cheaper assay rather than a better extract — and published analysis of the commercial market found only 14 of 25 products contained measurable fulvic fractions at all.