Heavy metals 

Shilajit comes out of rock, and rock holds whatever the ground it formed in held. Lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic are not added by anyone — they arrive with the material. That is why this is the first thing we measure and the first thing we publish.

The numbers are milligrams per kilogram: a thousandth of a gram, in a kilogram of resin. For scale, a kilogram is two thousand daily doses.

Three of them have a legal maximum set by the European Union — lead, cadmium and mercury. The measured value and the maximum sit side by side in the table above, so you can see the distance yourself. Arsenic has no maximum set for food supplements. We measure it anyway and publish what comes back.

The ± is not a mistake. Every real measurement has a range, and the laboratory states how wide it is. A number published without one has been tidied up for you.

Microbiology

If you read "<10" and it worried you, read this first: it means nothing was found.

Ten is the smallest number this method can see. When a laboratory finds nothing at all, it does not write zero — it writes "less than 10", because that is the honest limit of what the test can detect. Zero is a claim no measurement can make.

cfu means colony-forming unit. The laboratory takes the sample, spreads it on a growth plate, keeps it warm for several days, and counts whatever grows. On this batch, every count came back below what the method can see.

Salmonella works differently. It is not counted — it is searched for, in a full 25 grams, and reported as found or not found. It was not found.

This gets tested because the resin is harvested by hand and dried in open air, a long way from here. Something could get in on the way. On this batch, nothing was found.

Water activity — 0.65

Water activity is not how wet something feels. It measures how much of the water present is available to microorganisms. The scale runs from 0 to 1.

Bacteria need roughly 0.90 and above. Ordinary moulds need roughly 0.80. A small group of dry-tolerant moulds and yeasts can work down to about 0.61. Below 0.60, essentially nothing does.

At 0.65 this resin sits inside that last narrow band. Which is exactly why we measured the microbiology as well.

The mould count came back below the limit of detection. So did the yeasts. An environment that barely supports growth, and nothing viable present to attempt it.

Shilajit resin draws moisture from the air, so water activity rises in a jar that is opened every day. That is why the label says keep it dry and closed, and why this number is measured on every batch rather than once.

No law requires anyone to measure water activity. We publish it because it is the number that decides whether mould has anything to work with — and because it is the number that changes once a jar is opened.