ARTICLE 02
What's Actually Inside Shilajit?
I thought it was fulvic acid and some minerals. I wasn't even close.
After writing about fulvic acid, I thought I finally had my head around shilajit.
Fulvic acid was the famous part. Then there were some trace minerals in there too. Great. I understood it.
Except I didn't.
Because when I started looking at what is actually inside shilajit, the thing that fascinated me wasn't any single ingredient.
It was how all of this stuff ended up together in the first place.
Shilajit isn't a formula somebody invented. Nobody sat in a laboratory and decided to combine fulvic acid with minerals and a collection of organic compounds.
Nature made it.
And that's the part I find fucking incredible.
Caption: Thousands of years of plants, minerals, water, rock and time.
So what's actually in it?
Let's start with the minerals.
Shilajit contains 87+ trace minerals, with its natural mineral profile including things like magnesium, potassium, calcium, iron, zinc, copper and manganese.
But these haven't simply been added to a supplement afterwards.
They're part of something that has been forming naturally for an incredibly long time.
Plants grow from the earth. They absorb material from their environment. They die and break down. Microorganisms get to work. Water moves through mineral-rich rock. Organic material continues to decompose and transform, interacting with the environment around it.
And nature just keeps doing its thing.
For thousands of years.
This is the part that blows my mind
Think about what you're actually taking.
Some of the material that eventually became shilajit started this journey thousands of years ago.
Plants grew, died and broke down. Microorganisms went to work. Water moved through mineral-rich rock. Minerals and organic matter interacted, changed and transformed.
Thousands of years later, you're here, taking a tiny amount of the result.
I mean, how does that not blow your mind?
You're ingesting something nature started creating thousands of years before you existed. Before your parents existed. Before generations of your family existed.
All that plant material, rock, water, minerals and time eventually becoming this incredibly complex natural substance.
Maybe this stuff hits me harder because I've been obsessed with the environment for years. I created a documentary series called Down to Earth because I wanted to understand our relationship with the planet better, how we look after it and what we can learn from it.
And learning about shilajit brings me straight back to that.
We live on this incredible planet that can take plants, microorganisms, water, minerals, rock and thousands of years and create something like this without any help from us.
Humans didn't invent it. We discovered it.
And I think there's something pretty humbling about that. It's another reminder of why this planet is worth understanding and protecting. There is so much happening around us that we're still only beginning to understand.
PLANT MATTER → DECOMPOSITION → MICROORGANISMS → MINERAL-RICH ROCK + WATER → TIME → SHILAJIT
Caption: Nature doing chemistry, over thousands of years.
So what did nature actually put in there?
This is where I started opening the whole thing up.
There's fulvic acid, which we explored in the last article. It's part of a larger family of naturally formed humic substances created as organic material slowly breaks down and transforms.
Then you've got those 87+ trace minerals.
Then there are humic substances, including humic acid and other complex organic material.
There are amino acids.
Fatty acids.
Polyphenols and other plant-derived compounds.
And a much wider collection of naturally occurring organic constituents.
At this point I stopped thinking of shilajit as just another supplement ingredient.
It's nature doing chemistry.
And then I found something I'd never even heard of.
DBPs. What the hell are those?
Dibenzo alpha pyrones.
We'll stick with DBPs.
They're a family of naturally occurring organic compounds found within shilajit, and researchers have become particularly interested in them when trying to understand some of shilajit's biological activity.
This is where the rabbit hole starts getting really interesting, because research around DBPs begins taking us towards things like mitochondria, CoQ10 and the way our cells produce energy.
I'm deliberately not going any further than that here.
Because suddenly we've stopped asking what's inside shilajit.
We're asking what all this stuff might actually be doing.
And that's a completely different question.
Now the band analogy finally makes sense
In the last article, I described fulvic acid as the frontman of the band.
Now I understand why.
Fulvic acid gets most of the attention because everybody knows its name.
But behind it you've got trace minerals, DBPs, humic substances and this enormous collection of other naturally occurring compounds.
That's the band.
And there's something else I found really important.
When researchers conduct human studies using purified, standardised shilajit, they're generally studying the whole extract, not giving people isolated fulvic acid on Monday, DBPs on Tuesday and minerals on Wednesday.
So we can investigate each musician.
But the band is what actually played.
Which leaves me with a much better question
I started this article wanting to know what was actually inside shilajit.
Now I know.
Fulvic compounds. Humic substances. 87+ trace minerals. DBPs. Amino acids. Fatty acids. Polyphenols and a much larger natural chemistry we're still trying to understand.
But that's not the question I'm interested in anymore.
I want to know what happens after I swallow the capsule.
What can my body actually absorb?
What happens to all those minerals?
What does fulvic acid do?
Why are researchers interested in DBPs?
What do mitochondria and ATP have to do with any of this?
And most importantly, why do I feel more switched on when I take it?
That's what I'm looking into next.
NEXT QUESTION
How Does Shilajit Actually Work?
Nature spent thousands of years making it. Now I want to know what happens when we put it inside the human body.