If you've shopped for shilajit online, you've almost certainly seen the claim: "70% fulvic acid." "80% fulvic acid." Sometimes higher. It's become the headline number in the category — the figure brands reach for to prove their resin is the most potent on the shelf.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: those numbers are almost always wrong, and often physically impossible. This isn't a matter of one brand's resin being better than another's. It's a matter of arithmetic and chemistry. Once you understand how fulvic acid is actually measured, the big percentages stop looking impressive and start looking like a red flag.
This is a longer read than most product pages, but if you're spending real money on shilajit, it's worth ten minutes to understand what you're actually buying.
What is fulvic acid, really?
Fulvic acid isn't a single substance like salt or sugar. It's a family of complex organic (carbon-based) molecules formed as plant matter breaks down over long periods. In shilajit, fulvic acid is one of several organic compounds present, alongside humic acid, dibenzo-alpha-pyrones and others, together with a wide range of minerals.
The key word is organic. Fulvic and humic acids are made of carbon. That single fact is what lets us sanity-check any percentage a brand puts on a label — because there's a hard limit to how much carbon-based material a resin can contain, and it's measurable.
The problem: there's no agreed way to measure it
Here's what most shoppers never hear. There is no single, standardised, validated laboratory method for measuring fulvic acid in a food or supplement. Different labs use different methods, and those methods can produce wildly different numbers from the exact same sample.
The methods most commonly used across the supplement trade are older colorimetric and gravimetric techniques. They were largely developed for soils and fertilisers, not foods, and they share a well-documented flaw: they don't just capture fulvic acid. They also pick up minerals, salts, and other organic matter, and report the whole lot as "fulvic acid." The result is a number that can be inflated several times over.
So when a brand advertises "80% fulvic acid," what they usually have is a result from a method that over-counts — not a measure of how much genuine fulvic acid is in the jar.
Why the big numbers are impossible — the simple version
You don't need a chemistry degree to see the problem. You just need to add up.
Some brands publish figures like "80% fulvic acid" alongside "35% humic acid." Add those together and you get 115%. That's already more than the entire jar — before you account for the minerals, moisture and ash that also make up the resin, all of which are real and measurable and take up a significant share.
Two ingredients cannot fill more than 100% of a product. When the numbers on a label add up to more than everything that's in the container, they aren't a measurement of anything. They're an artefact of a method that counts the same material more than once.
The moisture test: the quickest reality check of all
Here's an even simpler way to catch an impossible claim, and it takes about thirty seconds. Look for the moisture figure in the brand's own lab analysis — a full food-chemistry report almost always includes one.
Shilajit resin holds water. It's common for a resin to be around 20–30% moisture when tested. And here's the thing: moisture is water, not solids. If a sample is, say, 24% moisture, then everything solid in it — every mineral, every organic compound, all of it combined — has to fit inside the remaining 76%.
So if a company claims 80% fulvic acid on a resin that its own report shows is roughly a quarter water, the claim is impossible before you even discuss chemistry. You can't have 80% of any single solid ingredient in a sample that's only about 76% solid to begin with — let alone leave room for the minerals, humic acid and everything else that's genuinely there. The water alone rules it out.
It's a useful habit: when you see a big fulvic number, find the moisture line in the same report. The two are often quietly sitting on the same document, contradicting each other.
Why the big numbers are impossible — the chemistry version
The "more than 100%" and moisture points are the easy tells. But there's a second, deeper limit, and it's the one worth remembering.
Because fulvic and humic acids are carbon-based, they can only ever be part of a resin's total organic content — the sum of all the carbon-based material present. And total organic content in shilajit isn't unlimited. When you measure it, shilajit is only partly organic; the rest is minerals, moisture and ash.
Our own resins, tested at an accredited Australian laboratory, measure total organic carbon at roughly a third of the resin. Fulvic and humic acids are built from that organic fraction — they're a subset of it, not something that can exist on top of it. There simply isn't enough organic material present for a genuine fulvic figure to reach anywhere near 80%. A number that high would require far more carbon-based material than the resin actually contains.
Put simply: a claim of 80% fulvic acid isn't just optimistic. It exceeds the total amount of organic material a real shilajit resin can hold.
What a realistic fulvic figure looks like
So what should you expect? When shilajit is analysed using the internationally recognised reference method — developed by the International Humic Substances Society (IHSS), the body whose methods are the accepted standard in genuine humic-substance science — real fulvic acid figures tend to land in the low tens of percent. That's a world away from the marketing claims.
A standardised method for humic and fulvic quantification does exist — it's known as ISO 19822 — but it was developed for the fertiliser industry, and at the time of writing, Australian food laboratories don't routinely offer it for a product like shilajit. That's precisely why we're cautious about publishing a single headline percentage: we'd rather not quote a number we can't stand behind with an accredited, validated test.
How to read a shilajit brand's claims
You don't have to take anyone's word for it — including ours. Here's a short checklist you can apply to any shilajit brand, including the one you currently buy:
- Do the percentages add up to more than 100%? If fulvic + humic + minerals + moisture exceeds 100%, the numbers aren't real. This alone rules out most big claims.
- Check the moisture figure. If the resin is, say, 24% moisture, then everything solid has to fit in the remaining 76% — so a claim of 80% fulvic acid is impossible on its face. The moisture line and the fulvic claim are often on the very same report.
- Which lab produced the fulvic figure, and is it accredited? A dramatic fulvic percentage from a non-accredited lab, sitting next to accredited reports that don't mention fulvic acid at all, tells its own story.
- Is the full report published, or just one impressive line? A genuine certificate of analysis runs to several pages — methods, quality control, the lot. Be wary of a single cropped screenshot of one number.
- What method was used? The recognised reference method comes from the IHSS. Older colorimetric methods are known to over-report.
What we do instead
We test every batch of our shilajit — Himalayan, Nepalese and Altai — at independent, accredited Australian laboratories, and we publish the certificates in full. We report what those accredited tests can actually verify: heavy metals, mineral content and safety. We don't headline a fulvic acid percentage, because there's no accredited method available to us that would make that number trustworthy. When one becomes available, we'll use it and publish whatever it says.
In a category full of impressive-sounding numbers, we'd rather give you results you can check for yourself. You can view our full lab reports here, and if you'd like to understand how our three origins differ, our Himalayan vs Nepalese vs Altai comparison walks through it.
This article is general information about how shilajit is tested and is not health or medical advice. Shilajit is a food supplement, not a treatment for any condition.
