11 min readIN A GLASS-WALLED conference room overlooking downtown Chicago, I watch my friend Sarah Chen unwrap what looks like a chunk of black road tar. The 35-year-old marketing director carefully scoops out a pea-size portion of the goop with a tiny metal spoon, drops the substance into hot water, and watches it dissolve with an inky swirl. The smell hits immediately. Earthy, pungent, slightly metallic, awful.
“It’s basically drinking dirt,” Chen tells me, grimacing as she knocks back the murky liquid. “But supposedly dirt that makes you superhuman.” Chen works for a Fortune 500 company, has the dense build of a CrossFitter, and occasionally runs untimed half-marathons for fun on weekends. She’s never been one for wellness trends, claiming that her medicine cabinet contains Advil and multivitamins, nothing more.
Yet here she is consuming a substance that looks like something from a horror movie. Chen told me she saw shilajit advertised as an energy booster on social media and, because she’s been feeling overworked to the point of exhaustion, needed to try the supplement for herself. Just as a lot of other people are doing right now.
Shilajit has exploded, transforming from a niche Ayurvedic cure-all to a multimillion-dollar global industry in just five years. The worldwide shilajit market, already valued at $163 million in 2023, is expected to reach almost $385 million by 2033.
Shilajit slingers are marketing their supplement as everything from a testosterone booster to a brain enhancer to an anti-aging miracle. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, consider that the very name “shilajit” means in Sanskrit “conqueror of mountains and destroyer of weakness.”
And the market is cutthroat. During interviews I conducted with shilajit-selling companies for this article, I was told that competitors’ products were fake and low-quality and contained adulterants like coal tar, charcoal, fertilizers, or molasses. Which only made me wonder: If every company’s shilajit is the only shilajit worth buying, is any of the stuff worth buying?
The battle over shilajit market share isn’t just about fighting dirty. It’s so ruthless that some brands have taken to blatant consumer manipulation to gain an edge, including using deepfakes of Elon Musk himself to help push product.
As shilajit’s popularity booms, government oversight groups and health experts are raising concerns. They warn that shilajit marketers overstate the supplement’s benefits and understate its dangers. As holistic health practices—and the ancient natural remedies that come with them—begin to take hold in America, shilajit stands to make supplement companies mountains of money. But at what cost?
One Supplement to Rule Them All
THE STORY OF shilajit reads like ancient lore. For more than 4,000 years, villagers in the Himalayas have scaled cliff faces during the summer months to scrape resinous, raw shilajit as it oozes from meteor-like rocks heated by the sun. In traditional Ayurvedic medicine, a holistic approach to health that leans on naturally derived substances, shilajit is classified as a rasayana, a rejuvenator, recommended for everything from diabetes to sexual dysfunction—and has been for centuries.
After harvesting, shilajit can undergo processing and purification and is then packaged in stout tubs, often jet-black, sometimes with Popsicle-stick dosage paddles included. Consumers then dissolve the viscous tar into a hot liquid (or, for the raw dogs, consume it straight up), though you can also find shilajit in dropper or capsule form.
The composition of shilajit is genuinely complex. The resin itself contains more than 85 minerals. Fulvic acid, shilajit’s primary active component, has antioxidant properties. Listen to any number of shilajit sellers on social media and you’ll hear about the substance’s many virtues. A 2024 post from influencer Troy Casey (@certifiedhealthnut) lists the following benefits: boosts energy, reduces fatigue, supports brain health, promotes heart health, lowers blood pressure, enhances immune function, increases testosterone and fertility, improves nutrient absorption, reduces joint pain and inflammation, and provides anti-aging benefits.
Traditional Ayurvedic practice recommends taking shilajit daily. Classical texts like the Charaka Samhita describe the compound as a rejuvenator for ongoing use. People from Nepal and northern India have traditionally consumed shilajit as part of their diet, with children often taking it with milk at breakfast. The mountaineering Sherpa people, known for their extraordinary high-altitude endurance, claim shilajit as a dietary staple.
So why is it only recently that shilajit has taken off in America? You could trace the modern shilajit boom in the U.S. in part to one man and one specific podcast episode. On January 9, 2023, as the world was adjusting to post-vaccine COVID life, Andrew Huberman, PhD, dropped an episode of his massively popular Huberman Lab podcast titled “Developing a Rational Approach to Supplementation for Health & Performance.”
The episode touched on several supplements from the holistic wellness world—ashwagandha, tongkat ali, a shrub called Fadogia agrestis—all of which were commercially available, though still fringe, and bubbling up in the social media world.
Shortly after the midpoint of the podcast episode, Huberman delivered a few lines about shilajit supplements that would go on to echo through online wellness circles in the years that followed: “There are certain supplements, things like shilajit…which mainly has the active ingredient fulvic acid, which is known to, for instance, increase things like FSH, follicle-stimulating hormone.… It’s pro-fertile and in males can make for more sperm production or more motile sperm. FSH is also going to indirectly increase testosterone in males. It’s known to increase libido in both males and females. So things like shilajit can indeed augment multiple hormones and support multiple hormone systems.”
Huberman’s backing of shilajit’s alleged ability to enhance sexual prowess hit at a confluence of two major trends. Due to the pandemic, supplement demand was booming. Add to this a growing interest in testosterone—Google searches for the term climbed during COVID as testosterone replacement therapy became more common. With millions of subscribers hanging on Huberman’s every supplement recommendation, his quasi-endorsement sent optimizers and average folk alike clicking to buy shilajit by the jarful.
Except that, as with many of the supposed benefits swirling around shilajit, a closer look reveals a darker truth.
The Shady Science—and Real Threat—of Shilajit
TO HIS CREDIT, Huberman did cite shilajit research in his 2023 supplement-centric episode. To support his claims about shilajit’s testosterone-increasing powers, he referenced a 2016 study published in the journal Andrologia.
That study enlisted 96 healthy men and asked them to take a purified shilajit supplement for 90 days. Twenty-one participants dropped out; the rest were divided into supplement takers and placebo takers. The remaining 38 in the shilajit group experienced an average increase of 20 percent in total testosterone—a not insignificant amount. But the study was funded by Natreon, a New Jersey–based Ayurvedic supplement company that manufactured the shilajit extract used in the research.
In addition to Huberman’s pro-shilajit clip, social media accounts also frequently cite a 2010 study that appeared to show improvement in infertile men’s sperm counts. But the sample size was a tiny 35 participants, and (surprise!) that study was also funded by Natreon. In the independent research world, there’s no clear scientific consensus about what shilajit can do—if anything.
“Literally every study that’s been done on [shilajit] that has a positive outcome is at least fully or partially funded by a supplement industry,” says Layne Norton, PhD, a nutrition researcher who debunks pseudoscience via his @biolayne social channels. You also won’t find too many negative studies on shilajit—outside of one area.
In 2025, the journal BMC Chemistry published a study in which researchers assessed 18 samples of raw shilajit and shilajit-containing supplements for thallium, one of the most toxic chemical elements. The EPA actually goes as far as to classify the heavy metal as a “priority contaminant” because of its mutagenic and carcinogenic properties.
You’re not supposed to consume more than 0.19 micrograms of thallium daily in order to limit your risk of cancer, organ damage, or nerve damage. All of the samples tested in the 2025 study contained about 0.2 to 0.5 micrograms of thallium per gram. And none of the products tested disclosed heavy metal content on their labels.
Other peer-reviewed studies have found lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium at high levels in shilajit products, often exceeding WHO and FDA limits. Health Canada, the nation’s governing body for public health, banned specific shilajit products after studies found dangerous heavy metal levels. Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration has issued warnings against shilajit supplements.
Yet products continue to flood the American market with minimal oversight. Which means that potentially dangerous shilajit products can make it to consumers relatively unimpeded—but also that health claims around the supplement can go unchecked.
Part of the reason is that shilajit is sold as a dietary supplement, so it doesn’t undergo premarket FDA approval the way pharmaceuticals do. That said, the FDA can respond post-market to safety issues, labeling accuracy, and claims made by manufacturers. One of the more recent-ish cases was in 2017, when the FDA warned Healthy Nutrition Group LLC for claiming that its shilajit products could treat or prevent cancer, diabetes, depression, high blood pressure, and kidney stones—claims it could not legally make for a dietary supplement.
“In Ayurvedic or herbal medicine, the way you process something impacts its safety and effectiveness,” says Lamees Hamdan, MD, an integrative medical doctor. “I don’t believe many shilajit-selling companies have—or could afford—Ayurvedic practitioners on their panel, and the FDA certainly does not have the bandwidth to carefully monitor all Ayurvedic supplements.”
To affirm the quality of their shilajit products, many companies advertise that they use “standardized extraction” to pull the tar-like substance from the rock. Some use water extraction, others use alcohol, some use sun-drying. But some of these mountainsides are located in regions with varying degrees of industrial pollution.
Shilajit companies respond to these heavy metal concerns by slinging mud. They argue that their supplements are “purer,” that you shouldn’t trust “just any brand,” and that their extraction methods are better and therefore less toxic than those of their many competitors.
The brand Paras Ayurved, for example, brags on its Insta: “Not all Shilajit is real. Learn the simple tests to identify pure Shilajit and choose authenticity over imitation.” And not “real” could mean that a product is synthetic or a counterfeit concoction made up of who knows what.
All of this aggressive advertising can lead to consumer confusion—and that’s before you even factor in that some companies are blatantly deceiving the public.
The Elon Effect
PERHAPS NOTHING CAPTURES shilajit marketing’s absurdity better than a deepfake endorsement from the world’s richest man.
In March 2023—a few short months after Huberman’s supplements podcast—a clip of Elon Musk began to circulate on Facebook in which the Tesla CEO appears to say, “There’s this stuff called shilajit, I think, and it’s supposed to be an antiaging remedy, a hair-loss remedy, and the most powerful source of energy for our body. I get mine from a company called Natural Rems—they are amazing.”
While it’s true that Natural Rems sells shilajit, multiple fact-checking organizations have confirmed that Musk never said anything of the sort. The videos use actual footage from Musk’s TED talks dubbed with AI-generated audio. Similar clips have emerged from shilajit sellers like Armi Supplements, and variations have appeared on YouTube and Instagram.
The Federal Trade Commission has issued warnings about fake celebrity endorsements in supplement marketing, and during 2017 the FTC hit marketers with a suit that resulted in a $179 million settlement. Yet despite these enforcement actions, no U.S. governing body has cracked down on shilajit sellers who build AI dupes to trick consumers out of their cash. And with prices as high as $333 for a 28-day supply, the incentives are real. (Sourcing, procuring, and manufacturing shilajit is expensive, especially if you want “the best,” as many companies argue.)
Big money, freedom from punishment—if the supplement industry is the Wild West, the shilajit market is the no-holds-barred gunfight at the O.K. Corral. And if the chaos continues, experts are worried that more people are going to get hurt.
Yes, more.
Should You Shilajit?
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES HAVE been warning about the dangers of heavy metals in Ayurvedic products beyond shilajit for more than two decades. A 2004 CDC investigation documented 12 cases of lead poisoning from Ayurvedic medications across five states between 2000 and 2003. The FDA currently warns consumers that unapproved Ayurvedic products containing harmful levels of heavy metals “may cause heavy metal poisoning” and a range of health problems such as “high blood pressure, kidney injury, fatigue, gastrointestinal distress, and neurologic symptoms.” The agency recently tested one Ayurvedic product, Rheumacare, and found high levels of lead, mercury, and arsenic.
In Reddit’s /Ayurveda forum, users swap stories about shilajit’s gnarly side effects. “Took shilajit for the past 2 days. Severe headaches, serious stomach pain, and even pain in other body parts, like my feet,” one user wrote. “Literally freaking out.” That commenter added that they’d experienced stomach problems the previous year too, but “thought it was just a coincidence back then.” Another user reported diarrhea and weakness. A third described an elevated heart rate and anxiety after just one week of using the supplement.
All these complaints might not be coincidental. Abnormal heartbeat, abdominal pain, diarrhea, weakness—all of these are symptoms of heavy metal contamination, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Also curious: Many of the pro-shilajit responses to Redditors’ complaints mirror marketing strategies deployed by shilajit’s manufacturers to promote their product over others’. Get “organic” shilajit. Stop buying “cheap” shilajit “filled with toxic heavy metals.” Your shilajit is probably “fake”—“molasses and honey or worse fertilizer,” says one. Shilajit’s proponents on Reddit call the supplement a “godsend.” “Best supplement I have ever taken imo. Increased libido, physical strength, a mild high, great for sleep.” As for the symptoms, some users on Reddit chalk those up to “detoxing,” claiming the active ingredient fulvic acid was flushing toxins from the body. Keep going, they urge. Push through.
But let’s say you score a shilajit product that’s low in contaminants. The amount of fulvic acid you consume isn’t even a lock. When the independent supplement review organization ConsumerLab analyzed eight popular shilajit brands in 2024, it found that fulvic acid amounts varied by 32,000 percent, from 6.9 mg to 2,206 mg per serving.
Yes, some shilajit products do undergo third-party certification by the likes of reputable companies like NSF. That testing ensures that what you’re taking contains safe levels of heavy metals and that the ingredient amounts listed on the label are actually in the supplement.
But also know that no major medical society endorses the use of shilajit—regardless of purity. Health care providers like the Cleveland Clinic warn of shilajit’s potential interactions with diabetes medications and blood pressure drugs. Not one independent expert I interviewed for this article recommended shilajit supplementation for any reason. And the independent scientific consensus is clear: More research is needed before anyone can legitimately tout even the most modest benefits of shilajit, while its contamination risks are very real.
“As with most things, your body needs a ‘rainbow’ of healthy ingredients in order to function optimally,” says Dr. Hamdan, the integrative medicine doctor. “You cannot just rely on one ‘miracle herb.’ ”
My friend Sarah Chen is conflicted. I followed up with her two months after I witnessed her slug down that dose of dissolved shilajit. She’d gone through half her supply and was underwhelmed but remained hopeful.
“I'm still taking it, but only because I bought four jars at once to take advantage of a promo,” she told me. “If something’s happening—good or bad—it hasn’t happened yet. I’ll keep taking it until I’m out, because I’ve got a sunk cost here.” She paused. “I guess I still want to believe there’s some all-natural wonder drug out there. Doesn’t everybody?”
That said, Chen says she isn’t planning to buy any more shilajit.
Prop styling by Allison Ritchie
Oliver Lee Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He’s written for The New Republic, Vox, and The Atlantic.
