Crypto News: Bw Reads: The shilajit dilemma

Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today Adam Popescu writes about the supplement shilajit. Studies suggest MAHA’s hottest Himalayan testosterone booster holds real health benefits, but the supply comes with a mountain of worrisome questions. You can find the whole story online (free) here.

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Shilajit (pronounced SHE-la-jeet) is sticky, smelly, possibly full of heavy metals and rodent droppings, and, to find it in nature, you have to climb a mountain. Depending on who you ask, this tarlike black mineral, mostly found in the Himalayas, is either a natural wonder drug or the closest thing to modern snake oil.

Stirred in pea-size portions into warm water or milk, shilajit has been used for thousands of years in Tibetan and Ayurvedic Indian medicine to treat everything from broken bones to impotence. According to legend, the likes of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan took it to gain an edge on the battlefield. Modern studies suggest its rich quantities of fulvic acid help liver function and testosterone. There are also hints that it might hold vascular benefits for people with dementia.

On Instagram and TikTok, looksmaxxers and wellness warriors alike are hawking pills and tonics supposedly filled with shilajit resin as easy ways to boost your biceps or brain. Among the biggest fans are members of the Make America Healthy Again set who deeply distrust the medical system, but others just want to get swole. For many on their way down the rabbit hole into the manosphere, once they’ve passed GLP-1s and Chinese peptides, it’s time to graduate to shilajit. (Joe Rogan swears by the stuff as a sort of natural steroid.) North America now accounts for more than one-third of the $221 million global market for shilajit products, which has more than doubled since 2018.

Although the real stuff may very well carry health benefits, thousands of lightly regulated supplement brands now say their shilajit is sourced from some of the world’s highest peaks, a claim that strains credulity. So-called pure shilajit resin costs hundreds or thousands of dollars for a small bottle, yet Target stocks “100% Himalayan shilajit” gummies for $9.99, and Erewhon sells Shilajit Palmers for $8. (Neither company responded to a request for comment.) Bloomberg Businessweek headed to the Himalayas to get a closer look at the supply.

Shilajit rock. Photographer: Morup Namgail for Bloomberg Businessweek — Raw shilajit gathered from the cliffs, where it grows in honeycomblike structures.

On India’s mountainous border with China and Pakistan, where it can take days to adjust to the elevation, medicine men known as amchis gather, process and prescribe shilajit, which grows freely on cliffs in honeycomblike structures. At least, it used to. Now that many more people are looking, “you have to go higher and higher to find it,” says Smanla Jigmet Singey, a 68-year-old amchi who climbs to 16,000 feet in India’s northern extreme. “We call it the sweat of the mountain.” He tightens the belt of his wool robe and points at a cloudy peak, a near-vertical ascent bound to leave even the fittest athletes in need of a towel.

Trailing the amchis (and steering around the occasional pile of yak dung) is Tashi Gyaltsan, 35, the co-founder of supplements seller Ladakh Naturals. During spring and summer, temperature swings loosen shilajit from rocks, and it grows or oozes out of the stone like sap. But on a steep mountain face, those rocks are often far from arm’s reach, and it can take a village to get a few hundred grams, using ropes, pulleys and 19th century matchlock rifles. “It doesn’t drop to the ground because it’s so sticky,” Gyaltsan says. When the terrain is too steep, “the amchis shoot it with the local gun to get it down. Sometimes, they use dynamite.” These extreme methods make shilajit climbs extra risky and deadly falls common, according to Jikmet Nurbu, founder of the mountaineering company Majestic Ladakh.

Paldan Dadul, farmer with his helper Padma Rigzin. Photographer: Morup Namgail for Bloomberg Businessweek — Shrinking supplies and global warming have made shilajit foraging more dangerous and the quality of the goods more questionable, according to local mountaineers and foragers.

Gyaltsan says foraging has grown significantly more dangerous over the past two decades, as shilajit has been steadily commercialized and global warming has made parts of these mountains both less isolated and less predictable. “It’s become harder to find than a snow leopard,” Gyaltsan says. “Now people have to collect from very high places” because “almost nothing is left.” Overforaging has hurt shilajit quality, too, he says. The best shilajit is known as gold grade and can even be eaten raw. “But what you get in the market is the lowest quality.”

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