Is Shilajit Safe? The Himalayan Resin on 2026’s Gym TikTok Rests on One Trial of 96 Men – and Lab Tests Keep Finding Heavy Metals
There’s a black tar being eaten in British gyms this summer that oozes out of Himalayan cliff faces, tastes like liquorice left in an ashtray, and sells for about £25 a jar on TikTok Shop. Shilajit is the supplement trend of 2026 that looks least like a supplement – a sticky resin you scrape out with a tiny spoon and dissolve in warm water while trying not to think about what it is. And before anyone swallows the “ancient Himalayan secret” pitch, two questions need answering. Does it do anything? And is shilajit safe – because independent lab analyses keep finding heavy metals in it, including one that’s more toxic than mercury.
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The honest answers are “maybe, a bit” and “that depends entirely on which jar you bought”. Which makes shilajit more interesting than most of what passes across gym TikTok, and considerably more dangerous to buy badly.
Tar from a cliff face
Shilajit is what happens when plant matter gets pressed into mountain rock for centuries and slowly seeps back out as a blackish-brown resin. It’s harvested from high-altitude ranges – the Himalayas mostly, but also the Altai and the Caucasus – and it’s been used in Ayurvedic medicine for a very long time as a general tonic. The modern pitch is more focused: energy, testosterone, fertility, recovery. The active fraction is usually said to be fulvic acid, which typically makes up a decent chunk of a purified extract, alongside dozens of trace minerals picked up from the rock.
That origin story is the whole marketing department. Videos of men scraping resin off a spoon do enormous numbers, and the jars have gone from specialist Ayurvedic shops to mainstream UK marketplaces in about eighteen months. It’s the same pipeline that carried tongkat ali from obscurity to the Holland & Barrett shelf – a Southeast Asian herb then, a Himalayan resin now, the promise mostly unchanged.
But “formed inside a mountain over centuries” cuts both ways. Rock contains what rock contains. Lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium don’t announce themselves in the flavour.
How a resin conquered the algorithm
The trend mechanics are worth a moment, because shilajit is almost perfectly engineered for short-form video in a way that capsules never will be. There’s a ritual to film: the tiny spoon, the slow black stretch of the resin, the swirl into warm water. There’s a gross-out factor that stops the scroll. And there’s a built-in authenticity test culture – creators “prove” their jar is real by checking whether it goes brittle in the fridge, melts in the hand and dissolves without residue, which gives every video a second act.
Those home tests exist because fakes are everywhere. Genuine shilajit is scarce and slow to harvest, demand has gone vertical, and the gap gets filled the way it always does – with boiled-down substitutes, bulked resins and jars that are mostly molasses with a mountain on the label. A fridge test can’t tell you what’s actually in there. Nothing you can do in a kitchen can.
The selling formats have multiplied too: raw resin, dried tablets, gummies, honey sticks, even shilajit coffee. Each step away from the raw scrape makes the product look more normal on a shelf. None of it answers the two questions that matter – dose and contamination – and the gummy version should prompt particular scepticism from anyone who followed the creatine gummies story. Heat and moisture are unkind to active ingredients, and forgiving to margins.
The one trial doing all the heavy lifting
Strip away the anecdotes and the testosterone claim rests, more or less, on a single study. A randomised, placebo-controlled trial published in the journal Andrologia in 2016 gave 96 healthy men aged 45 to 55 either 250mg of purified shilajit twice a day or a placebo for 90 days. The shilajit group’s total testosterone rose by around 20%, free testosterone by around 19%, while the placebo group barely moved.
Taken at face value, that’s a better result than most testosterone supplements ever produce. Tongkat ali’s evidence base is patchier than this. So is ashwagandha’s – and we went through all twelve of those trials yesterday.
But one trial is one trial. It used a specific purified, standardised extract – not the raw resin being scraped off spoons on TikTok – and the branded ingredient in question came from the industry that sells it, which doesn’t make the result wrong but does mean nobody independent has reproduced it in the decade since. That’s the detail I keep snagging on. A genuinely reliable 20% testosterone effect would be commercially seismic; you’d expect a queue of replication studies. There isn’t one. And a 20% rise in middle-aged men, while real on a blood panel, is also smaller than what you’d get from fixing chronic sleep deprivation – it takes hormone levels from “unremarkable” to “slightly less unremarkable”, not from average to athlete.
What the rest of the evidence looks like
Beyond testosterone, the file thins out fast. A small Indian study from 2010 reported improved sperm counts in infertile men after 90 days. There’s a fatigue study suggesting shilajit helped preserve muscular strength after exhausting exercise, run on a few dozen people. There are mouse studies, mitochondria theories and a lot of speculative work on fulvic acid that hasn’t been tested properly in humans.
None of this is nothing. It’s roughly the evidence profile creatine had in 1985 – a plausible mechanism, a few small positive trials, no large independent replications. The difference is that creatine then spent three decades accumulating hundreds of supporting studies, while shilajit’s file has mostly accumulated marketing. It might follow creatine’s path. The base rate says it won’t: most supplements at this stage of evidence stay there forever, because the trials that would settle the question are expensive and the jars sell fine without them.
For comparison, the boring interventions – progressive training, adequate protein, sleep – remain undefeated. We covered how much protein you actually need earlier this week, and none of it comes out of a resin jar.
The claims you can ignore outright
Around the modest evidence sits a halo of claims with nothing under them, and they travel further than the trials ever will.
“Contains 85 minerals” is the big one. It’s probably true, in the sense that mountain sediment contains lots of elements – but your body doesn’t need 85 minerals, has no use for most of them, and several of the ones shilajit reliably contains are the ones you’re trying to avoid. Trace mineral count is geology, not nutrition. Nobody advertises soil this way, and soil has minerals too.
The brain claims – focus, memory, “clearing brain fog” – rest on preliminary lab work about fulvic acid and tau proteins that has never produced a decent human trial. The aphrodisiac framing is borrowed wholesale from Ayurvedic tradition and supported by nothing you could call data. And “shilajit cures altitude sickness” is an old mountaineering folk claim that survives because nobody fact-checks anything said above 4,000 metres.
None of these claims would survive an advertising standards complaint, which is why the careful brands put them in creator videos rather than on the label. The influencer says it fixed his brain fog; the jar says “traditional Himalayan resin”. That division of labour is the whole regulatory dodge, and it works.
So, is shilajit safe? The thallium problem
Here’s where shilajit stops being a harmless punt. A 2025 study in BMC Chemistry analysed commercially available shilajit supplements and found elevated levels of thallium – a metal more toxic than mercury, historically popular with poisoners precisely because it’s hard to detect. Worse, some finished supplements contained more thallium than raw shilajit, meaning processing was adding contamination, not removing it.
Separate spectroscopy work on Himalayan-sourced shilajit has detected lead, arsenic, mercury and copper at levels exceeding World Health Organization limits for dietary intake. Reviews of the wider testing picture are more reassuring on average – most samples come in under permissible limits – but “most samples” is doing heavy lifting when the failures include lead and arsenic, and when the product is something people take every single day. Heavy metals accumulate. A trace over the limit isn’t a problem once; it’s a problem daily for a year.
The UK regulatory position makes this worse, not better. Shilajit is sold here as a food supplement, and under Food Standards Agency rules supplements are regulated as foods, not medicines – which in practice means no pre-market efficacy testing, no licensing, and enforcement that mostly happens after something goes wrong. The £25 jar with the Himalayan sunrise on the label has passed precisely as much independent scrutiny as the seller chose to pay for. Some brands publish proper third-party certificates of analysis showing heavy-metal results for the actual batch. Plenty publish a “lab tested” badge that means nothing at all – the same trick we found when lab tests showed four in six creatine gummies contained almost no creatine. In supplements, the label is a mood board, not a contract.
Who should give it a miss
Some people shouldn’t be anywhere near this trend, and the TikTok videos never mention them. Anyone pregnant or breastfeeding, obviously. Anyone with kidney disease, gout or iron-overload conditions – shilajit is rich in iron and its safety data in these groups is thin to non-existent. Anyone on blood thinners or diabetes medication, where interactions are plausible and untested. And anyone under 25 buying it for testosterone: your levels are almost certainly fine, and no resin will out-perform sleeping before midnight.
There’s also a quieter group: people using shilajit instead of finding out why they’re exhausted. Persistent fatigue has a differential diagnosis – anaemia, thyroid, sleep apnoea, depression – and a GP blood panel is free. Scraping tar into your coffee while undiagnosed is not a wellness routine, it’s a delay.
If you’re buying it anyway
Plenty of readers will try it regardless, so here’s the harm-reduction version. Skip the raw resin entirely – the format is theatre, and it’s where the contamination risk concentrates. Researchers who study this stuff point people towards purified, standardised capsules at around 200-500mg a day, from a brand that publishes a batch-specific certificate of analysis with actual heavy-metal numbers on it – lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium, ideally thallium. If the brand can’t produce that document, that’s your answer about the brand.
Expect to pay £20-40 for a month or two of a properly tested product – noticeably more than the TikTok Shop jars, which is rather the point. Take it with food if it bothers your stomach, and don’t stack it with an iron supplement unless a blood test says you need one; the resin brings its own.
And give it a defined window. The one decent trial ran 90 days, so if you’ve felt nothing by then – energy, gym numbers, anything you could write down – you have your result. Keep taking it “just in case” and you’ve joined the subscription economy, not a protocol. That’s the quiet business model behind most of this aisle: products priced low enough to not cancel, doing too little to notice either way.
My own read, for what it’s worth: shilajit sits in the top tier of gym TikTok’s offerings, which says more about the tier than the tar. One good trial nobody has repeated, a few small signals, and a contamination record that should make anyone pause before daily-dosing unverified mountain sediment. If a British lab ran batch tests on the twenty best-selling shilajit jars in the UK tomorrow, how confident are you that yours would pass?
