Does Shilajit Actually Raise Testosterone? Inside the 90-Day Study on

Q: Does shilajit have side effects?

Most people tolerate purified, standardized shilajit well at studied doses. The bigger risk isn't a side effect from the shilajit itself so much as contamination risk from poorly purified products, since raw resin can carry heavy metals. It can also interact with medication for blood pressure, blood sugar, or thyroid conditions.

Q: Is shilajit good for men specifically?

The clinical evidence that exists, a 2016 testosterone trial, was tested in men 45 to 55, which is part of why it's marketed heavily toward men. That doesn't mean it has no relevance for women, just that the human trial data on testosterone specifically comes from a male-only sample.

Q: How long does shilajit take to work?

The only human trial with a clear timeline measured results at 90 days, not sooner. There isn't published data showing what happens at 30 or 60 days, so 90 days is the realistic timeframe to judge it by.

Q: What's the difference between shilajit and tongkat ali?

They work through different mechanisms. Shilajit's effects are tied to fulvic acid and mineral content, a more indirect, cellular-level pathway. Tongkat ali has a more direct relationship with testosterone, backed by a meta-analysis of five randomized trials. They're not redundant with each other.

Q: Is it safe to take shilajit every day?

The 2016 trial tested daily use for 90 consecutive days without reporting serious adverse events. Long-term data beyond 90 days is limited. Anyone with a diagnosed medical condition, especially involving blood pressure, blood sugar, thyroid function, or iron overload, should check with a doctor before daily use.

In 2016, researchers gave 38 men purified shilajit for 90 days and measured their hormones against a placebo group. This is what the study actually found, what the ingredients that usually ship alongside shilajit are backed by, and the claims we looked for and couldn't verify.

Key Takeaways

In the one existing human trial (38 men, 90 days, 500mg/day purified shilajit), total testosterone rose 20.45%, free testosterone rose 19.14%, and DHEAS rose 31.35%.
That trial was funded by the manufacturer of the extract it tested and hasn't been independently replicated yet — real evidence, but not a settled fact.
The extract ratio on the label matters: standardized, purified shilajit is a different product from raw resin, which can carry more heavy metals like thallium than the purified extract.
Shilajit's mineral/fulvic-acid mechanism is different from — and complements — ashwagandha (cortisol), tongkat ali (a more direct testosterone lever, backed by a 5-trial meta-analysis), and sea moss (iodine).
Shilajit isn't for everyone: skip it if pregnant or breastfeeding, and check with a doctor first if you're on blood pressure, blood sugar, or thyroid medication.

Total testosterone

+20.45%

day 0 → day 90

Study size

38 vs. 37

shilajit vs. placebo, completers

Duration

90 days

500mg/day, double-blind

Funding

Industry

extract manufacturer

In 2016, a team of Indian researchers put 38 men on 500mg of purified shilajit a day for 90 days, compared them against 37 men on a placebo, and measured what happened to their hormones. Total testosterone rose 20.45%. Free testosterone rose 19.14%. DHEAS, a hormone the body converts toward testosterone, rose 31.35%. The placebo group's testosterone didn't hold steady either. It went down.

That's a real result from a real trial (Pandit et al., 2016, published in Andrologia), and it's the single most-cited piece of evidence behind every "shilajit benefits" roundup and "shilajit boosts testosterone" claim online. It's also one study, on 38 men, funded by the company that makes the exact extract being tested. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them matters if you're deciding whether shilajit is worth taking on its own, or worth combining with the ashwagandha, tongkat ali and sea moss it usually ships with.

Here's what the research on shilajit and testosterone actually says, ingredient by ingredient, with the numbers, the caveats, and the claims we went looking for and couldn't verify.

What Is Shilajit?

Shilajit is a blackish resin that seeps out of rock in high-altitude mountain ranges, mostly the Himalayas, during the warmer months. It forms over centuries as plant matter breaks down under pressure between rock layers, and what comes out is a mineral-dense, tar-like substance loaded with fulvic acid and dozens of trace minerals.

Raw shilajit isn't what goes into a capsule, though. It has to be purified first, and how that purification happens says a lot about what you're actually taking.

It's less like boiling water off a pot and more like refining crude oil. The patent behind PrimaVie, the purified shilajit extract used in the 2016 testosterone trial (US Patent 6,869,612), lays out the real process: raw resin dissolved in water, filtered to remove rock debris, evaporated to a thick residue, then extracted with hot methanol. From there it's treated with an alkaline solution to strip out compounds you don't want, acidified to precipitate out the humic acids, run through activated carbon to isolate the fulvic acid fraction, and concentrated through an ion-exchange step. What comes out the other end is roughly 65-70% fulvic acid, standardized to be about the same from batch to batch.

That standardization is the difference between a shilajit supplement that means something specific on the label and one that's just "shilajit powder" with no way to know how concentrated it actually is.

Close-up of raw, dark shilajit resin on a piece of Himalayan rock before purification.

How Shilajit Is Thought to Work

Most of what shilajit is credited for comes down to fulvic acid, which makes up somewhere between 60% and 80% of the purified compound, according to a 2012 review in the International Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (Carrasco-Gallardo et al.). Fulvic acid molecules are small, around 2 kilodaltons, and that size does a lot of the work.

Fulvic acid molecules are small and reactive enough to bind onto minerals and escort them across the gut wall, roughly the way a keycard lets a visitor through a door they couldn't open on their own. The mineral doesn't get absorbed any better on its own merits. It gets absorbed because something small enough is carrying it through.

The same review reports an ORAC antioxidant score of 50 to 500 Trolox units per gram for shilajit, which it states is higher than noni or blueberries by that measure. It also includes lab data from a hippocampal cell culture study using a shilajit-based formulation: treated neurons grew new processes at more than double the rate of untreated cells (43.0% versus 18.0%), and the processes that did grow were more than twice as long (39.6 micrometers versus 17.4).

That's a real finding, and it's worth being clear about what it isn't. It's cells in a dish, not a person. In-vitro results are where good hypotheses start, not where a supplement claim should end. Nobody has run the human equivalent of that test, for obvious reasons.

The Testosterone Study, in Full

Here's the study behind the headline, in more detail than most articles bother with.

Pandit and colleagues recruited healthy men aged 45 to 55, randomized them to either 250mg of purified shilajit twice a day (500mg total) or a matching placebo, and ran the trial double-blind for 90 days. Ninety-six men were enrolled; 38 finished on shilajit and 37 finished on placebo.

At day 90, the shilajit group's numbers looked like this: total testosterone rose from 4.84 to 5.83 ng/mL, a 20.45% increase. Free testosterone rose from 15.36 to 18.30 pg/mL, up 19.14%. DHEAS, a hormone precursor the body converts toward testosterone, rose from 145.09 to 190.57 µg/dL, up 31.35%. All three changes were statistically significant (P<0.05), against both baseline and the placebo group. FSH rose significantly as well. The placebo group's testosterone declined over the same 90 days.

Hormone change at day 90, shilajit group

Percent change from baseline, 500mg/day purified shilajit, 90 days (n=38 completers)

All changes P<0.05 vs. baseline and vs. placebo. Placebo group's testosterone declined over the same period (exact figure not reported). Source: Pandit et al., Andrologia, 2016.

What we didn't cite

A specific figure circulates on other sites claiming this study showed testosterone rising from "398.8 to 474.91 ng/dL." We read the actual paper. That number isn't in it anywhere, in any unit. The real result is 4.84 to 5.83 ng/mL. We're not repeating the invented version just because it sounds more precise.

Two things worth knowing before you weigh those numbers. First, the trial was funded by Natreon, the company that manufactures PrimaVie, the exact extract tested. That doesn't make the data wrong, but it's the kind of detail that belongs next to the numbers, not buried in a methods section nobody reads.

Second: one study, 38 completers, a single dose and duration, in one narrow age range, funded by the extract's manufacturer, is real and statistically significant. It isn't the same as "shilajit raises testosterone" as a settled fact across every dose, every age, every person. It's the best human evidence that currently exists, and it points in one direction. It hasn't been independently replicated yet.

Why the Extract Ratio Matters

Shilajit forms inside rock, which means it can pick up whatever the rock is holding, including heavy metals. That's not hypothetical. A 2025 study in BMC Chemistry (Kamgar et al.) tested shilajit samples for thallium and found up to 0.226 µg/g in raw, natural resin, and up to 0.5 µg/g in commercial shilajit supplements already on the market. The commercial products, in other words, sometimes carried more thallium than the crude resin they started from.

What we didn't cite

Several sites reference a "2015 study" and a "2018 study" finding lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium in shilajit supplements. We looked for both. Neither has a findable author, journal, or DOI. We're leaving them out entirely rather than passing along a citation that might not exist.

This is why the extract ratio on a label matters more than it sounds like it should. A standardized 30:1 extract, purified and tested the way the patent process above describes, is a fundamentally different product from raw resin scraped off a mountainside and ground into a capsule with no purification step at all. It's the difference between gasoline with an octane number printed on the pump and gasoline with no number at all. You're trusting one of them a lot less.

How strong is the evidence behind each claim?

Graded by study design, not by how confidently a product label states it

Bar length reflects study design (meta-analysis > single RCT > in-vitro), not effect size. Sources listed at the end of this article.

Flat-lay of raw shilajit resin, ashwagandha root, tongkat ali root, and dried sea moss, the four ingredients in the formula.

Shilajit Alone vs. a Full Stack

Shilajit covers the mineral and cellular-energy side of things. It doesn't do much for stress, and on its own it's a less direct lever on testosterone than an ingredient built specifically around it.

Four ingredients, four different legs of the same relay, instead of one ingredient running the whole race alone.

Ashwagandha's job is the stress side. A 2019 randomized, placebo-controlled trial (Lopresti et al., published in Medicine) gave 60 adults 240mg a day of a standardized ashwagandha extract for 60 days and measured a 23% drop in serum cortisol, against a 0.5% increase in the placebo group (P<.001).

Tongkat ali's job is testosterone, more directly than shilajit's mineral-driven mechanism. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis (Leisegang et al., in Medicina) pooled five randomized trials, roughly 232 men total, and found a statistically significant increase in serum testosterone, strongest in men who started out hypogonadal. A meta-analysis of five trials is a sturdier form of evidence than any single study, including the shilajit one above, because it's harder for one funding source or one unusual sample to skew the result.

Sea moss's job is iodine and trace minerals, which shilajit alone doesn't supply much of. A 2020 risk-assessment study (Darias-Rosales et al.) measured Chondrus crispus, the species of Irish moss most sea moss supplements use, and found an average of 3.86mg per kg dry weight of iodine, enough that a 4-gram daily dose supplies roughly a quarter of a child's daily iodine requirement.

Ingredient	Dose	Extract ratio	What it targets	Key study
Shilajit Extract	400mg	30:1	Minerals, cellular energy, testosterone	Pandit et al., 2016
Ashwagandha Root Extract	100mg	30:1	Cortisol / stress response	Lopresti et al., 2019
Tongkat Ali Root Extract	100mg	300:1	Testosterone (direct)	Leisegang et al., 2022 (meta-analysis)
Sea Moss Extract	100mg	20:1	Iodine, trace minerals	Darias-Rosales et al., 2020

None of these four ingredients substitute for each other. That's the actual argument for a stack over a single-ingredient bottle: not that more ingredients automatically means more effective, but that each one is doing a job the others don't.

Dosage and Safety

Shilajit isn't for everyone. It can interact with medications for blood pressure, blood sugar, and thyroid conditions, according to Banner Health's guidance on safe use. Children, people who are pregnant or breastfeeding, and anyone with hemochromatosis (a condition involving excess iron) should avoid it.

The 2016 testosterone trial tested 500mg a day of purified shilajit for 90 days in healthy men 45 to 55, and that's the dose and duration with actual human data behind it. If you're taking a combination product, the standardized extract ratio on the label matters more than the total milligram count. A bigger number on a poorly-standardized product doesn't necessarily mean more of what actually matters.

If you're on any prescription medication, particularly for the conditions above, talk to a doctor before adding shilajit to your routine.

A man in his forties carrying groceries up the stairs with energy at the end of the day.

A refined scoop of purified shilajit resin, the primary ingredient in Soleu Nutrition Shilajit Complex

Soleu Nutrition Shilajit Supplement Complex

400mg 30:1 shilajit, 100mg 30:1 ashwagandha, 100mg 300:1 tongkat ali, 100mg 20:1 sea moss. One vegetable capsule daily, 30 servings a bottle.

See current price & details

Frequently Asked Questions

Does shilajit have side effects?

Most people tolerate purified, standardized shilajit well at studied doses. The bigger risk isn't a side effect from the shilajit itself so much as contamination risk from poorly purified products, since raw resin can carry heavy metals (see the section above). It can also interact with medication for blood pressure, blood sugar, or thyroid conditions.

Is shilajit good for men specifically?

The clinical evidence that exists (the 2016 testosterone trial) was tested in men 45 to 55, which is part of why it's marketed heavily toward men. That doesn't mean it has no relevance for women, just that the human trial data on testosterone specifically comes from a male-only sample.

How long does shilajit take to work?

The only human trial with a clear timeline (Pandit et al.) measured results at 90 days, not sooner. There isn't published data showing what happens at 30 or 60 days, so 90 days is the realistic timeframe to judge it by rather than expecting a change in the first week or two.

What's the difference between shilajit and tongkat ali?

They work through different mechanisms. Shilajit's effects are tied to fulvic acid and mineral content, a more indirect, cellular-level pathway. Tongkat ali has a more direct relationship with testosterone, backed by a larger body of trial evidence (the 2022 meta-analysis above). They're not redundant, which is why formulas often include both instead of picking one.

Is it safe to take shilajit every day?