Archives: Materia

Round rather than oval, greyish-brown, and covered in a fine down that makes it feel faintly like suede. Set beside haritaki, the difference is obvious in the hand and almost invisible in a photograph — which is why so many suppliers’ images have the two the wrong way round.

What it is

Terminalia bellirica, family Combretaceae — the same genus as haritaki, which explains the shared chemistry and the shared cautions. In English, beleric myrobalan.

A large deciduous tree across the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. The fruit is a nearly spherical drupe, two to three centimetres, distinctly downy.

Like its relative, it’s tannin-rich, and like its relative it has a long industrial history in tanning and dyeing.

What the tradition says

The least individually celebrated of the three triphala fruits. It appears in the classical compendia, but rarely stands alone the way haritaki does — its significance is largely as a component.

It has a stranger cultural history, though. The hard nuts of the vibhitaka tree were used as dice in ancient India. The tree appears in the Mahabharata, in the story of Nala, and it carried an association with gambling and misfortune — in some traditions it was considered inauspicious to sleep beneath one.

None of which has any bearing on what’s in the fruit. It’s simply a much better fact than “revered for centuries,” and it’s true.

What the research shows

Sparser than for either of the other two. Some laboratory work on its tannins and on gallic and ellagic acid content. Very little human clinical research on the fruit in isolation, partly because it’s rarely used in isolation.

Most of the research that mentions bibhitaki is actually research on triphala, where its individual contribution can’t be separated out.

Evidence: very limited. Little human research on this fruit alone. Most available data concerns triphala as a combination.

Safety and suitability

The cautions for haritaki apply here, for the same reasons — same genus, same tannin chemistry.

Tannins impair iron absorption. Separate from iron-containing supplements or meals by a couple of hours. Take particular care if you’re anaemic or pregnant.

Speak to your GP or pharmacist first if you are pregnant or breastfeeding; take medication for diabetes; take any prescription medication.

Not for prolonged continuous use without advice.

Nothing on this page is medical advice.

How it’s prepared

Fruits are dried and the pericarp milled, stone discarded.

Ours: ⟨SUPPLIER: process⟩

Where ours comes from

⟨SUPPLIER: region, wild-harvested or cultivated, season.⟩

Batch certificate published on the sourcing page.

References

⟨TO COMPLETE: constituent analysis for T. bellirica; note the absence of standalone human trials rather than padding with triphala studies.⟩

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Dried, it looks like a small blackened date — three centimetres or so, deeply wrinkled, with five ridges running its length. It’s hard enough to need a hammer. The taste is overwhelmingly astringent, the sensation of unripe fruit taken to an extreme, and it dries the mouth almost instantly.

That astringency is tannin, and it’s the reason this fruit has two entirely separate histories.

What it is

Terminalia chebula, family Combretaceae. In English, chebulic myrobalan.

A large deciduous tree, reaching thirty metres, growing across the Indian subcontinent and into Southeast Asia. The fruit is a drupe — yellowish-green ripening to brown, ovoid, ribbed.

The second history: haritaki has been used for centuries in tanning leather and dyeing cloth, for exactly the same chemistry that makes it astringent to taste. Its tannins bind protein. That’s not a colourful aside — it’s directly relevant to the safety section below.

What the tradition says

Harītakī holds unusual standing in Ayurvedic literature. It’s discussed extensively in the classical compendia and, unlike most single substances, is treated as significant in its own right rather than only as a component.

It also crosses traditions. In Tibetan Buddhist iconography the Medicine Buddha is conventionally depicted holding a branch or fruit of myrobalan — this fruit. The same plant carries weight in two systems that developed largely separately, which is a genuinely interesting fact about the plant’s reach and tells you nothing whatsoever about its pharmacology.

You’ll often see the Sanskrit glossed as “the one that carries away disease.” Treat that the way we treated shilajit’s “conqueror of mountains” — a translation shaped by what people wanted the word to mean.

What the research shows

Laboratory work on Terminalia chebula is extensive, largely because tannin chemistry is well studied and the fruit is rich in chebulinic acid, chebulagic acid, corilagin and gallic acid.

Human clinical research is much thinner. Small trials, mostly short, mostly unreplicated, several from a narrow set of centres. The gap between the volume of laboratory literature and the volume of clinical evidence is wide here, and it’s worth naming, because a page can cite forty studies and still be telling you very little about what happens when a person swallows a capsule.

Evidence: limited. Substantial laboratory literature, sparse human clinical data. The two are not interchangeable.

Safety and suitability

Haritaki has a laxative effect in many people, particularly at higher intakes. We’re stating that as a caution rather than a benefit — it’s a physiological effect you should be aware of before taking it, not something we’re offering.

Tannins impair iron absorption. This is the direct consequence of the tanning chemistry above. If you’re iron-deficient, anaemic, pregnant, or taking iron supplements, separate haritaki from iron-containing food or supplements by a couple of hours, and speak to your GP.

Speak to your GP or pharmacist first if you are pregnant or breastfeeding — traditional sources themselves counsel caution in pregnancy; take medication for diabetes, as blood glucose effects have been reported; take any prescription medication, given tannins’ capacity to bind and reduce absorption of other compounds.

Not for prolonged continuous use without advice. Tannin-rich preparations are not intended for indefinite daily consumption.

Nothing on this page is medical advice.

How it’s prepared

The fleshy pericarp is used; the stone is discarded. Fruits are dried, deseeded and milled. Some preparations specify particular stages of ripeness, and classical sources distinguish between fruits collected at different points.

Ours: ⟨SUPPLIER: whole fruit powder or extract, ripeness at collection, drying method⟩

Where ours comes from

⟨SUPPLIER: region, wild-harvested or cultivated, season.⟩

Batch certificate published on the sourcing page.

References

⟨TO COMPLETE: tannin–iron absorption literature; a systematic review of T. chebula human trials, noting how few there are.⟩

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In the summer, on certain rock faces in the Himalaya, a dark resin seeps out of cracks in the strata. It softens in the heat, runs slowly, and hardens again as the temperature drops. Local collectors have gathered it for centuries, working the high passes in the short window when it appears.

That substance is shilajit. It is not a plant, and this is the first thing worth saying about it, because almost everything sold in the wellness aisle is. Shilajit has no Latin binomial and no botanical family. It has a geology instead.

What it is

Shilajit is a humic substance — an exudate formed within rock strata over a very long period, from compressed plant material altered by pressure, temperature and microbial activity. The precise mechanism is still debated in the literature, and anyone who tells you otherwise is more confident than the evidence allows.

What it contains is better established: fulvic acid and humic acid as the principal fractions, alongside dibenzo-α-pyrones and a spread of trace minerals absorbed from the surrounding rock. Fulvic acid is the marker compound most commonly used to grade it commercially.

It appears under different names across its range. Shilajit is Sanskrit — from śilā, rock, and jatu, exudate. Rock-exudate, more or less literally. You will often see it translated as “conqueror of mountains” or “destroyer of weakness”; these are marketing glosses rather than translations. In Russian and Central Asian sources the same or similar material appears as mumijo, in Urdu as salajeet.

Raw shilajit is not consumable. It comes off the rock mixed with mineral debris, plant fragments and whatever else the strata contained — which is why every tradition that uses it also specifies how to purify it first. That process matters more than the sourcing, and it’s covered further down.

What the tradition says

Shilajatu appears in the classical Ayurvedic compendia, where it is grouped among the rasayana — a category of preparations associated with longevity, vigour and the restoration of the body over time. Rasayana is not a pharmacological classification and doesn’t map onto a modern one; it describes a role within a system of thought that also encompasses diet, routine, sleep and the seasons.

The Charaka Samhita is notably extravagant about it. The text asserts there is no curable condition that shilajatu cannot address.

We report that because it’s in the text, and because it tells you something real about the standing the substance held. We are not endorsing it. A first-millennium compendium making a sweeping claim is a historical fact; it is not evidence, and the gap between those two things is the whole reason this library exists.

What the classical sources are more useful on is process. They are specific about purification, insistent that unpurified material shouldn’t be taken, and detailed about the seasons and conditions for collection. On the practical questions, the tradition has held up considerably better than on the therapeutic ones.

What the research shows

Honestly: not much, and less than the marketing around it suggests.

The published human research on shilajit consists largely of small trials — typically a few dozen participants, run over weeks rather than years. Several come from a narrow group of research centres. A number are funded by manufacturers. Some report findings on measures including fatigue, altitude tolerance and hormonal markers in men.

What’s missing is the part that matters: large, independent, replicated trials. Without those, individual positive findings are a reason to keep looking, not a basis for telling you what this will do.

There is also a specific problem with the evidence base that gets very little attention. Because fulvic acid content varies enormously between commercial products — analyses have found differences of several orders of magnitude across products sold under the same name — a trial of one preparation tells you comparatively little about another. Two capsules labelled “shilajit” may have very little in common. That is a real limitation on generalising any of this research, including the favourable studies.

Evidence: limited. Small human trials, several industry-funded, little independent replication. Product variability further limits what can be generalised.

⟨TO VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING: pull the three or four most-cited human trials, check sample sizes, funding declarations and preparation used, and cite them individually in the references below. Do not publish this section with general statements alone — the specificity is the point.⟩

Safety and suitability

This is the section that matters most, and the one most shilajit pages don’t have.

Contamination is a genuine and documented problem. Because shilajit forms in rock, it takes up whatever the rock contains. Commercial products have been found carrying lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium; a 2025 analysis detected elevated thallium across several processed supplements. Purification reduces this. It does not reliably eliminate it, and purification quality varies enormously between producers.

This is not a reason to avoid shilajit. It is the reason to only ever buy it with a batch certificate from an accredited laboratory, and to check that the certificate covers heavy metals specifically. Our own testing regime is set out on the Sourcing and Testing page, with certificates published per batch.

Never take raw or unpurified shilajit. Material sold as “raw,” “wild-collected” or “straight from the mountain” as a selling point is describing an unfinished product. The tradition is unambiguous about this and so is the contamination data.

Not suitable during pregnancy or breastfeeding. There is insufficient safety data, which is a reason to avoid rather than a reason to assume it’s fine.

Speak to your GP or pharmacist first if you have haemochromatosis, thalassaemia, sickle cell disease or any other condition affecting iron handling; have gout or raised uric acid; take prescription medication of any kind.

Stop and seek advice if you experience any unexpected reaction.

Nothing on this page is medical advice, and it isn’t a substitute for speaking to a qualified professional about your own circumstances.

How it’s prepared

The traditional process is called shodhana — purification.

Raw material is broken up and soaked, usually in water or a herbal decoction. The soluble fraction is separated from rock debris and insoluble matter by filtration, often repeatedly. The filtrate is then reduced, traditionally by sun-drying, into a resin or dried into a powder.

The point of this is straightforward: separate what’s wanted from what came off the mountain with it. Repetition matters, and so does the medium used for soaking — different classical texts specify different decoctions.

Modern manufacture varies. Some producers follow essentially the traditional process at scale; others use solvent extraction and spray-drying, which is faster and produces a more consistent standardised powder but a materially different product from what the classical texts describe. Neither is wrong. But they are not the same thing, and a page that blurs them is being careless.

How ours is made: [SUPPLIER: purification method, medium used, number of cycles, duration, drying method. Also whether resin or standardised extract, and if extract, the solvent.]

Where ours comes from

[SUPPLIER: collection region and altitude. Whether wild-collected or purchased through intermediaries. Season of collection. Name of processing facility and its certification status.]

Every batch is tested by an accredited laboratory for heavy metals, including thallium, microbial contamination and fulvic acid content. Certificates are published in full and linked from the specimen label above — not summarised, not “available on request.”

We publish the analytical method used for fulvic acid alongside the figure. Different methods return substantially different numbers for the same material, so a percentage without a method attached doesn’t mean very much.

References

⟨TO COMPLETE: classical citation for the Charaka Samhita passage, with chapter and verse and a note on which translation. Three to four human trials with full citation. The 2025 thallium analysis. A review paper on fulvic acid variability in commercial products.⟩