Comment · Fri, June 12, 2026 · ND Owner
Shilajit
Original post in this thread
adobaloba · 4 points
250mg doesn't work, been 2 weeks. Time for 500g, 750 or 1g?
Is this another "everyone's chemistry is different" kind of a thing? Food, no food? Morning, before sleep? Thanks!
What they were answering
Icy_Investigator6967 · 1 points
It’s not authentic Shilajit like it’s supposed to be.
Authentic Shilajit takes 2-3 months in preparation and retains all minerals the natural way while taking out the heavy metals through filtrations that are time consuming. It can never be mass produced.
PrimaVie and many other main stream ones are made in factories where they infuse minerals, standardize percentages, and heat / vacuum dry it. Hence, a pharma reincarnated product with additives, fillers, and preservatives.
R/Shilajit had some really information before the TikTok brands took over. There are even synthetic brands in the market sourced from alibaba where you can get it for $3 a piece and sell it for $35 (like better alt).
One of the users shared this file which was a great benchmark for me to understand Shilajit.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
What do you even mean by this? Primavie is real shialjit resin that has been spray dried to a powder. Traditionally, shilajit exudate is mixed with water, boiled, filtered, and evaporated as one of the primary traditional purification methods. This is just a low tech way to purify things a little bit, but that process can be optimized a lot. That’s what Primavie is, and it’s basically the same process to start out with, that then undergoes further purification. Here is a description from their patent:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6869612B2/en?oq=6%2c869%2c612+
(a) powdering native shilajit exdudate and dissolving it in water as solvent,
(b) filtering the mixture to remove insoluble substances,
(c) evaporating water from the filtrate to obtain a brown viscous residue,
(d) extracting the residue with a hot organic solvent, e.g. methanol, to obtain both a soluble fraction which includes low Mw bioactive phenolic compounds particularly oxygenated dibenzo-α-pyrones, and insoluble shilajit humic substances,
(e) adding dilute aqueous NaOH to the insoluble shilajit humic portion to precipitate polymeric quinones,
(f) acidifying the filtrate below a pH of about 3 to precipitate humic acids leaving a brown acidic solution of fulvic acids,
(g) fractionating said acidic solution by passing it over activated carbon to provide a solution of low-to-medium Mw fulvic acids,
(h) passing the fulvic acid solution through a H+ ion-exchange resin to concentrate the fulvic acids in solution,
(i) evaporating the solution, and
(j) combining the low-to-medium Mwfulvic acids Mw 700-2000, with the low Mw bioactive phenolic compounds in a suitable proportion, e.g. 9:1 by weight.
It's a process that creates a very clean and consistent product, which is how it keeps heavy metals so low. That's a feature, not a bug. As you can see from the patent, these minerals are not added in, they are natively present in the shilajit. It’s also quite clear that it is a very well thought out process, which is not surprising as one of the foremost shilajit researchers, Shibnath Ghosal, is the person who invented this process. A lot of what we know about shilajit from a scientific perspective, is because of the work Shibnath Ghosal did. But acting like using an outdated and less sophisticated purification process is better than a more modern one based in science, purely as an appeal to tradition. Science helps us improve processes and make them better.
You are right in saying that many suppliers are taking soil fulvic acid mixed into vegetable glycerin to trick people. However, that is not what Primavie is. The document you link actually ranks Primavie relatively well, so I am not sure what you are saying here... Also, that ranking document sucks. It gives higher ranking to sun dried?!? Why? What's the scientific basis for that? Also, it give FIVE POINTS for sun dried, but only ONE POINT for lab testing?!? Also, it doesn't rank by the type of testing. It just gives points for having some testing on the site. It's the joke of a document. It was clearly made by Sulaiman Aftabi to make their product look the best. They even link that document on their homepage. Hell, you are probably them, if I am honest. You just keep spamming this shitty misleading marketing document everywhere. Even looking at their site, they don't test for anything of value.
First 4 lanes are the Chromadex reference standard for shialjit. Lanes 4-8 are the current batch of Primavie, lot A. Lanes 9-12 are the current batch of Primavie, lot B. Lanes 13-16 is an older Primavie reference batch. That garbage Sulaiman Aftabi brand isn't even testing for identity...
Here is a UPLC of Primavie showing urolithins
The two most people know are urolithin A and B. However, there are at least 13 identified urolithins. While A and B are in shilajit, the other urolithins are the more dominant peaks. Urolithins are what is referred to as dibenzo-α-pyrones. These are the types of things you have to assay for the presence of to determine if it is real shilajit, not some made up bullshit in a Google Sheet.