Shilajit and Testosterone: What the Evidence Shows, and What to Check First

1. What the one decent trial found

Most herbal test boosters have no human trial at all. Maca has four, and a review that called them too small to settle anything. Shilajit has one worth reading. It is a 2016 randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in Andrologia, run in Kolkata.

The researchers randomised 96 healthy men aged 45 to 55. Half took 250 mg of purified shilajit twice a day. Half took a dummy capsule. The trial ran for 90 days and 75 men finished it.

The results were real, if modest. In the shilajit group, total testosterone rose 20.45% from its starting point. Free testosterone rose 19.14%. DHEA-S also rose. That is an adrenal hormone your body uses as a raw material for testosterone. LH held steady and FSH went up. Those two are the pituitary signals that tell the testes to get to work.

Two things should temper your reading of it. First, testosterone in the placebo group fell over the same 90 days. So part of the gap between the groups is a drop, not a rise. Second, the product tested was a patented branded extract, and the company behind it is named in the paper. One small trial, one site, one branded extract. That is a starting point, not a settled answer.

The newest evidence is fresher but weaker. A preprint posted to medRxiv in July 2026 gave 100 trained men a branded shilajit resin for 90 days and reported better strength and recovery. A preprint has not been peer reviewed. The ingredient maker is on that one too.

2. Does shilajit lower SHBG?

This is the question going round the supplement forums right now, and the straight answer is that nobody knows. The 2016 trial measured total testosterone, free testosterone, LH, FSH and DHEA-S. It did not measure SHBG at all. Neither has any other published shilajit trial.

SHBG stands for sex hormone binding globulin. It is the protein in your blood that grabs hold of testosterone and carries it around. Testosterone stuck to SHBG cannot do much. The leftover portion, the free fraction, is the part that acts on your body. Our guide to the SHBG blood test goes deeper on what moves it.

SHBG matters twice over here. High SHBG can leave you with a perfectly normal total testosterone and a low free one, which is one reason two men with the same number can feel very different. And on most panels, free testosterone is not measured directly. It is calculated from your total testosterone, your SHBG and your albumin. Our free versus total testosterone guide explains why that distinction changes the answer.

The Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline is explicit about that sum. It says clinicians should determine free testosterone “by calculations that use total testosterone, SHBG, and albumin concentrations”.

So if you want to know whether shilajit changed anything for you, SHBG is not an optional extra. It is one of the three numbers the answer is built from.

3. The heavy-metal problem

Shilajit is rock exudate. It spends a very long time inside mountain rock, and it picks up what that rock contains. Some of that is mineral you would happily eat. Some of it is not.

A 2025 analysis in BMC Chemistry tested 13 raw shilajit samples and six commercial supplements for thallium, a heavy metal more toxic than mercury. One supplement delivered 0.095 micrograms of thallium per tablet. Several held more thallium than the raw resin itself. If you are wondering whether a blood test would show any of that, our guide to the heavy metal blood test in the UK explains how metal testing is actually arranged.

The authors put the worry plainly. Levels in some supplements were “higher than in crude Shilajit, raising concerns about the potential health risks associated with long-term consumption”.

Thallium is not the only one. Independent testing of unpurified shilajit keeps turning up lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium. Purification is meant to strip these out. Whether a given jar has actually been purified is a claim on a label, not something you can see or taste.

In the UK, shilajit is sold as a food supplement. Food supplements do not go through the pre-market approval a medicine does. Your practical protection is a batch certificate of analysis showing a full heavy-metal screen. If a seller cannot produce one for the batch you are holding, that tells you something.

4. What to check before you start

If you are going to spend money on this, measure it. The trial ran 90 days, so a 90-day run of your own is the honest version: a baseline before, the same markers after.

The hormone half. These are the numbers that would move if shilajit is doing anything:

• Total testosterone, the headline figure and the one the trial moved
• SHBG, the carrier protein that decides how much of it is free
• Free testosterone and free androgen index, both worked out from total testosterone, SHBG and albumin
• LH and FSH, the pituitary signals upstream, to see whether anything shifted higher up

Our Complete Male Hormones panel (£119) measures every one of those, plus prolactin and DHEA-S, from a home finger-prick sample analysed by UKAS-accredited UK laboratories.

The safety half. If you are taking an unregulated imported resin daily, these are the organs doing the clearing:

• ALT and ALP, two liver enzymes that climb when the liver is under strain (our liver function test guide covers what each one means)
• Creatinine and eGFR, the standard read on how well your kidneys are filtering

Our Thyroid & Vital Organs panel (£159) carries all four, alongside thyroid and cholesterol markers.

Two practical points make the comparison fair. Take both samples in the morning, fasting, at roughly the same hour. Testosterone peaks early and drifts down through the day, which our guide to the best time to test testosterone covers in detail. The same Endocrine Society guideline advises measuring total testosterone on two separate fasting mornings, because the level swings from one day to the next.

Then change one thing at a time. If you fix your sleep, cut the beer and start lifting in the same 90 days, a higher retest tells you nothing about the resin. Those levers move testosterone far more than any supplement does, as our guide to raising testosterone naturally sets out.

A baseline is worth having even if you never buy the jar. It can tell you your testosterone was never the problem, which saves the money and points you somewhere more useful. These tests measure your hormones and give you a wellness picture. They do not diagnose a condition, and a result that looks off is one to discuss with your GP or a qualified clinician.

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