Podcast 494: The Power of Shilajit

MARTIN: Greetings. This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast podcast, life-enthusiast.com and with me today is Rehmannia Thomas. Rehmannia is the founder of Supertonic Herbs, a Chinese tonic herbs specialist. You may have heard the previous podcast that I did with Rehmannia. Well, today, a very interesting story. There is a book. Welcome, Rehmannia.

REHMANNIA: Hey there. How you doing, Martin? Good to see you.

MARTIN: Good. I’m really thrilled to know that you actually have put to paper all the research you have done into Shilajit.

REHMANNIA: Yeah, I wrote a book about it.

MARTIN: Yeah. What’s the subtitle there?

REHMANNIA: Shilajit, The Resin Of Life.

MARTIN: Of life.

REHMANNIA: Pretty much straight to the point.

MARTIN: Like, we’re not mincing the words here. We’re going all in.

REHMANNIA: Yeah. Yep. Right to the core.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, okay, so I guess we don’t want to give it all away. We want people to want to read the whole book. Right.

REHMANNIA: An interesting thing about Shilajit is that I think you can really get it in a nutshell because the discussion is very clear about what it is. Yet, you could study the ramifications and the details forever, and it’s wonderful.

MARTIN: Actually. Maybe we should try and explain, this is a tonic, right? This will lift everyone in every possible way. Right?

REHMANNIA: Yeah. In my lineage of Chinese herbalism, we refer to them as tonic herbs, which means, it’s an old Greek word meaning when you tonify, you’re tuning the strings of your instrument into harmony. So they actually kind of knew about the idea of everything needing to be in harmony. Well, Shilajit comes from the Ayurvedic tradition, not the Chinese, so it’s from India. But it is considered the same. It’s quantified the same. It’s termed, “Rasayan” which means the same thing as a tonic herb. It’s overall uplifting to work holistically on the entire organism, both mind, body and spirit. And this is probably the top rasayan tonic substance in the world.

MARTIN: Yeah. I’m thinking in the terms of, it’s loaded with minerals, the main ingredient being fulvic, which when you look at that, that’s a very complex molecule, but it seems to be expressed as every single element of the entire table of elements. Right?

REHMANNIA: Yeah. The humic acids I refer to are the very, very smallest molecules that occur in soil. They’re broken down to that point through many, many years or maybe eons of microbial activity and other geothermal, everything else that involves… It started out as a forest somewhere. The trees falling, the limbs falling, animals, their bones, the insects, the fungi, everything as it breaks down, we refer to that as detritus falling. And that creates, winds up breaking down a great soil.

MARTIN: So this is just pure leaves. It’s not just, hey, we have the poop and the insect and the animal, the works. It’s all in their entire blueprint of life in some way, right?

REHMANNIA: That’s right. Yeah. I don’t think you could ever really attain a really powerful humic substance just from monocropping farms, like someday a million years from now, when they discover the topsoil of this current day, they’re not likely to find a lot of humic acids in there. And so this came from, we were blessed by the ancient gods of biology to have had a very complete ecosystems that were on this earth for millions of years. And they came and went. Some of it is broken down in peat bogs.

And then when tectonic or earth, there’s floods and earth is covered, soil running cover up though, it becomes layers inside the earth of those ancient peat bogs of all of that forest. But Shilajit is different, it’s kind of a quintessence of that kind of development and outcome. And that’s what we’re going to try and explain, right?

MARTIN: Yeah. This is actually geographically specific, right?

REHMANNIA: Very much so, yes. Geospecific to a very, very limited range of atmospheric and tectonic relationships.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, of late, Shilajit has been on many people’s lists. Like, I keep getting calls, my Shilajit is the best. We have the pure stuff, I promise you. Others are not that great, but we are.

REHMANNIA: Yeah, you just hit it. I mean, once you know about Shilajit, say online you’re looking, you start getting this plethora of these advertisements from just common people going: “Man, this is the best Shilajit in the world!” This guy’s not an expert or anything. I’ve traced a few of those down. Now, again, briefly we talked about humic acids or fulvic acids. Fulvic acids are, we’re going to discuss this throughout the discussion, but they’re what Shilajit’s standardized to as fulvic acids. They’re the smallest molecules, in soil.

MARTIN: Right. Yeah. This is sort of like the Vitamin C in oranges or orange juice in oranges. You want to know the standard core of it. Right?

REHMANNIA: Yeah. The standardization of the quality of the quantity, really, of Vitamin C in an orange. Yeah. Well, we’re looking at that with Shilajit, and that’s how we standardize it. So these guys come online, and here’s the funny thing about it, always going: “Everybody else’s is fake except mine!” Right? You’re like, wait a minute, the other guy is saying the same thing. And he’s saying the same thing, you know? Well, I went to one of them and just said, okay. And he said: “ We got six COAs.” That means a certificate of analysis to determine the quality of it and determine the amount of fulvic acids in particular, you should always look for. And we’ll go back to that in a little bit. But they say we have the highest quality Fulvic Acid. So I tracked down their website. No COA on there.

Eventually, I see a photograph that shows their COA laying on a table next to the product. Take a screenshot of it and blow it up. And I can see very, very vaguely that it’s like 4.3% fulvic acids in this product.

MARTIN: Okay. So that’s a lot of filler.

REHMANNIA: Yeah. That means that only 4.3% of it is actual Shilajit.

MARTIN: Right? Yeah, and 95% filler.

REHMANNIA: Rock dust and sand and resins and who knows?

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, the Shilajit that I have encountered in the past was very tar-like. Like you would need some kind of a mini scoop to scoop a teeny bit of it. Because, of course, that stuff is so intense, you only need a little bit.

REHMANNIA: Yeah.

MARTIN: But anyway, it was in a little thing that’s like a skin cream jar with a very thick paste in it.

REHMANNIA: Yeah. Very, very dense and intense black paste. So, yeah. Let’s go to the structure of what it is. It does emit from very high mountain ranges. It oozes out in spring when the warm weather occurs and the rocks fissure up there. And it’s a unique phenomenon that we mentioned earlier in geology because it’s only found in new high mountain ranges between about 8 and 10,000 ft.

MARTIN: Okay.

REHMANNIA: And then at that time in spring, when the rocks fissure this black tarry ooze comes out. Now, the way that it was discovered was there were people in India about 2,000 years ago, and they noticed these monkeys and also mountain goats and the monkeys were considered very smart species of monkey. And they would be seen going up and climbing way up in there to eat this stuff. So then eventually people said, well, let’s try that. So they had a little bit and they came to call it ‘Conqueror of Mountains, Destroyer of Weakness.’ That is the long term for Shilajit. But then the Sufis and the Sherpas and the, the more the like, the leaders of the Indian society kind of locked it up. So we only heard about this with the rise of the Internet. I found out about it around 2002 and started researching it then.

So what it is is this black tarry stuff that comes out of the mountains and the quality of ranges, it varies with different mountain ranges. It’s found primarily in the Himalayan mountains. It’s found in the Altai Mountains of Russia, on the border of Mongolia and China. Right there, a very pristine mountain range is where I get mine. It’s supposedly found in the Grand Tetons.

The Native Americans used it, they called it Medicine Rock. It’s found in the Andes. But the Indians, the people of India, were the primary researchers and users. And in Russia, a lot of research in China as well.

MARTIN: Yeah, I remember actually in Russia it’s called Mumio, Right?

REHMANNIA: Yes, Mumio is its name in Russia.

MARTIN: Yeah, I remember that from back in Europe.

REHMANNIA: That’s right, yeah. Because the Europeans use that name more so about it. Yeah. But it was an obscure substance for people who are really inside of the scientific world somewhat in biology, it is used in soil restoration. And so then it has to be filtered and steamed and broken down to get any, any rock, little piece of rock and sticks and everything out of it. And by the time it’s done being processed, it’s this black tar. And they put it in this little jar and you buy this little bitty, like 2 ounce jar of it for like 100 bucks. But like you were saying, though, it’s difficult to work with. You have to use a little spoon. You get about, you know, the amount it would fit under your pinky nail to use.

MARTIN: Matchbox, I mean, match tip, there you go.

REHMANNIA: And then, and then it’s. It dries hard in there and it’s very hard to get out. And it can, it can also stain the teeth over time.

MARTIN: Yeah, it’s quite intense.

REHMANNIA: So what I did was I came out with a powdered version of it in capsules, which I found is a lot easier to use. But before we go any further with that, let’s look at what it is. Okay, so this stuff comes out of the mountains. Modern research has looked at it and determined that it’s the humic remains of ancient rainforests. All right, so let’s look at the timeline of this and we can get some insights into the age and the origin of Shilajit. Okay, so in regarding the Altai and Himalayan mountains, they were a recent mountain chain that was formed when the subcontinent of India collided with the continent of Asia. And that forced these mountains up. They are still rising today, that continent is still crashing into,

MARTIN: Right. Yeah. I think the initial contact was about 50 million years ago, so it’s probably 35 million that the highest mountains would be. Right?

REHMANNIA: Yeah. Well, the initial contact would be where the Shilajit was ensconced in the rock as well. This would have been happening over tens of thousands or millions of years that the continent kept colliding at something like nine meters a year. Nine meters a century, I think.

MARTIN: Yeah.

REHMANNIA: And then as the mountains began to rise, what appears, and most logically it appears, is that, and I talked about this in my book, I’m really not sure anyone else has, but I used logical deduction here to say that there must have been rainforest on both of those coasts, because here we are in a a tropical equatorial area and a very fertile area for life. And when they crashed into each other, there had to have been indigenous forests on the coast. So then as the mountains started to rise up, some of those forests could have been entombed, enrolled into the stone, to the tectonic. And that would explain why you have within tectonic rock, which is rising, existing sedimentary rock that was on the bottom of the ocean. It’s loaded with seashells and other stuff.

It’s in the top of mountains. This is called tectonic rock, not sedimentary. That’s where the Shilajit is found, which means it was there originally and got pushed up along with that first rock, those first rock formations that went up. This indicates then that we have a pure ancient primordial ecosystem with all of its elements, the water systems, peat bogs, everything rolled in and up in these high mountains where it got preserved. And the method of preservation happens to be with the fulvic acids. So as soil breaks down in any forest or peat bogs in particular through microbial activity and atmospheric and other pressures and water and other, it breaks down into smaller molecules over time until it breaks down to the smallest molecules called humic acids. Once it’s at that phase, it becomes the food for the other microorganisms and plant roots in the entire ecosystem. This is feeding future ecosystems, this stuff. And we are,

MARTIN: Yeah, I know, I find that Humic Acid in general is beneficial for the digestive system. Like, it supports the microbiome in the gut really, really well.

REHMANNIA: For sure. Absolutely, you’re right. And so we have the breaking down of it into humic acids. Now humic acids are again the small molecules. But then fulvic acids are the very smallest known of that class of humic acids there. Here’s the interesting thing, many interesting things, one of them is that by the time the soil breaks down to the level of humic acids or fulvic acids, it just stays there. It doesn’t continue to break down into any earth.

It doesn’t deteriorate, doesn’t decelerate in anything. It is the quintessence of that forest, like you said earlier, with potentially every single element could be present of all of the 125 elements, except possibly the gaseous elements or whatever, but the mineral, the carbon elements, all that and metallic could be present in these fulvic acids. And they become the food for all the microorganisms that work their way back up the food chain and all the tree roots and everything. And they don’t deteriorate further. They stay preserved at the level of the Fulvic Acid. So here we have a rainforest that was locked into the mountains inside, preserved from no new detritus falling, no new plant leaves, no animals falling into it. Preserved in its original state, broken down the fulvic acids and then remaining there for possibly 35 million years, because that’s where the mountains had risen from at that time.

And so it’s possible that we have with pure Shilajit, which we start to get into the quality here in a sec.

MARTIN: Right? Yeah, let’s get to the stuff that you have actually found. Well, you have tested many, right?

REHMANNIA: Pure Shilajit is found in those regions. And it is a very, very powerful substance that provides us with all of the missing elements that we’re not getting in our diet. We’re not getting Cobalt and Boron and stuff like this in our diet. And they are found, interestingly in some of the research that I looked at, all of those elements are found in miraculously healthy ratios for human health. So for instance, mercury is present, but in a ratio that’s actually healthy, like a very homeopathic ratio. But then if we look at our COA’s and if we see it’s over, as so much of Shilajit is, in the certificates of analysis. If you look at them online, you’ll find the mercury and the cadmium and the Iron and the lead are over the ratios that you want. But actually when they’re under those ratios at homeopathic levels, they are beneficial for health, they act as antimicrobials and other stuff. And they are found in those ratios in Shilajit, which is miraculous because we are the result of an ecosystem. And Shilajit is the food of the ecosystem.

MARTIN: Right. Goes to follow that this is actually the ultimate reduction of an entire forest.

REHMANNIA: Yes, absolutely.

MARTIN: And it’s well, 50 million years ago, or give or take a few. The planet was very vigorous. I mean, this is about 15 to 20 million years after the extinction event for the dinosaurs.

REHMANNIA: Right.

MARTIN: So there had to have been a huge amount of renewal on the planet. Things were very different.

MARTIN: I’m speculating that the life force on the world was very strong.

REHMANNIA: Absolutely. Yeah, the plants had a lot, the soil had a lot of what we call diamagnetism, it helped plants grow up. That’s why the trees are so tall. It’s a levitative energy that’s in diamagnetism. It surely contains all that stuff that would assist blood circulation in the body, the distribution of nutrients.

MARTIN: Right. Well, so we take it because we want to increase the overall mineralization of the human body.

REHMANNIA: Yeah.

MARTIN: Which is awesome in the sense that an undermineralized body would be vulnerable to invasion, to parasitic or whatever else, threats from within. When you’re fully mineralized, you’re very resilient. Right?

REHMANNIA: Yes. And those minerals that we mentioned, they’re dangerous. When they reach high levels, they actually become very much friends of the parasites. They all get along because they acidify the blood and the parasites, that’s where they live. They’re all contributing to that acidification of our blood, of our bodies inside. Wow.

MARTIN: Let’s go over some of the chapters you put into the book. Just so we tell people what they’re going to read about once they read it.

REHMANNIA: Well, in the process of writing it, I just came across some fascinating information in the ancient vedas. There seems to be Vedic literature about Shilajit, which I don’t necessarily want to give away as a beautiful part of what that is, but you’ll find out.

MARTIN: No, no, don’t give it away. Give me the chapters.

REHMANNIA: But it appears that the ancient Indian people knew about it and they wrote about it in the Vedas regarding Brahma creating it for the sake of future life and all that. I discovered all that. And then primarily was working with a doctor from India named Siddhnath Gaushala who wrote the original book that was translated to English, which is now out in print, was called Shilajit in Perspective. And he had some fascinating discoveries regarding a particular metabolite that’s found in seashells called dibenzo alpha pyrone. And I don’t want to get too detailed in this discussion and all that, but dibenzo alpha pyrone in the seashells that are found in high rock strata play a role in the unique formation of Shilajit. And that’s in this discussion. It’s fascinating stuff. And then I looked into the benefits. Every single research paper I looked at, which you can verify this too by going to the National Institutes of Health and Medline, and all of these links to all of these studies.

Pretty much every researcher concludes that Shilajit appears to be a panacea that benefits all aspects of our health. And so I laid out some of them in my book. And then, it’s minor discussions on humic acids and other things without getting crazy. This is pretty much a patent. You don’t have to be a scientific scientist to get into this. It’s a biogenic regulator, like you said earlier. It’s a regulator of our homeostasis. Bioavailable mineral source, yes. Premier adaptogen, helping us adapt to stress, replenishing the adrenals, rejuvenation, combating the effects of aging. Anti-ulcerogenic, anti digestive stress effect.

MARTIN: Right. Which means, of course, just about anything that could go wrong will be less wrong when we have this on board.

REHMANNIA: Yeah. Or the brain nervous system function.

MARTIN: Yeah.

REHMANNIA: Look what’s happening to our hormones. I mean, the hormone disrupting chemicals that are everywhere. We need help on this. When our body synthesizes various hormones itself, it will reject the xenoestrogenic molecules that like to act like hormones. This stuff’s getting very important for our future health. Pain relieving, anxiety, anti-anxiety, cognitive function, physical performance for athletes, on and on. This is something that is for everybody. It’s a gift for the world coming to us at a time. And that’s what some of that ancient Vedic literature that I found alluded to that, that it comes to us at a time when we need it, in all nature. We could use Shilajit, I remember one person telling me that if we were used judiciously, which we’ll get into, that you could potentially refertilize our entire planet with Shilajit.

MARTIN: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I mean there are these sources of just coarse humic that are packed in 25 pound bags for gardeners, right?

REHMANNIA: Yes.

MARTIN: So at least at that level, it’s a fantastic fertilizer.

REHMANNIA: Absolutely. All humic acids. There’s something called leonardite that you can get is, it’s from an ancient peat bog that was buried under strata and they dig that out and use it in farms. Shilajit is a quintessential version of that and can also be used in very, very small amounts to make your garden bloom, to your animals. And so let’s discuss quality for a little, for a minute.

MARTIN: Yeah. I was just thinking, I mean since you have done this research, you probably have a good handle on what’s good and what’s perhaps best.

REHMANNIA: Okay. So again, going back to those, all of those claims from the other Shilajit purveyors about quality, if you’re looking to buy Shilajit, you can go to those sites and look at their COA. If they’re not, if their COA isn’t, again, it means certificate of analysis of chemistry and the bio product. And it shows you the microbiology and the harmful metals where they’re at. But it should be standardized to fulvic f-u-l-v-i-c acids. That’s the standardization. Now if the website does not readily show that COA, do not buy it.

They’ll say in their stuff they have COAs but don’t buy it. Because sometimes they make you email them and they send it to you. Why don’t they just have it showing on their website, right? And so that’s already a kind of a sign. But when I was researching this book and Dr. Ghoshala and others at that time felt that the average Shilajit, or the highest quality Shilajit usually rate was somewhere between about 27% and about 50%.

MARTIN: Fulvic acids, what I understood about 50% would be high quality, right?

REHMANNIA: Yes, it would be. And the rest were certain kinds of resins from various plants that existed in that area back then. A kind of cactus that produced a resin. So when I got my COA done, my prerequisite for writing this book was to find the best. I said, well, if I’m going to find the best, I have to research it to the point where I can actually write a book about it. In that process, I put out some early versions of this book that are available used online. Don’t buy it. It’s wasn’t complete when I wrote it way back, like 10 years ago, I published an early version. Don’t worry, this is a good one. But when I did that, then people knew that I had written this book. So I started being contacted by purveyors, saying: “I’ve got the best.” I said, okay, show them your COA, they sent it. People try to fool with me. People sent me stuff that looked like salt and clay together. I mean, unbelievable, and of course, their picture shows the black stuff, and you get it, and it’s just gray. And there’s ORMUS and there’s quality in that. And so, I couldn’t be fooled. And eventually I was like, look, I can’t be fooled. If you’re going to play this game with me, you’ve got to send me the purest thing you can get. Eventually these folks from the Altai Russia.

MARTIN: Yeah. I think I would like to point out, just to the listener here, that you’ve been at this now for 25, 30 years now.

REHMANNIA: Distinctly.

MARTIN: Yeah, it’s, you develop a sense or you develop a skill of knowing what is or isn’t good quality. Like, you just work with it. At some point you turn from apprentice to master and so when you say this is the real thing, it’s backed up by 30 years of learning how to tell the thing apart. Right?

REHMANNIA: Yeah. There’s a lot of bits to my answer to you on that, but yes, and even says in my lineage of early Chinese medicine called classical Chinese medicine, it says when you’re going to do pulse reading, you got to do 10,000 before you can really make a decision. You know what you’re doing, and then it even says in formulating herbal combinations that once you’ve reached a certain degree of perfection, you’re invited to start using your intuition as well, because your empirical knowledge is now at a stage where your intuition can start to help you. But you can’t rely on that early on. You’ve got to go with, you know.

MARTIN: Yeah, but the hunches you get are based on solid learning of many years.

REHMANNIA: Yeah, right. So. And then at the same time, I also know how to talk to purveyors, so that to say, look, don’t mess with me, because it won’t get anywhere. Don’t waste your time. And so I eventually found a purveyor from the Altai Mountains of Russia, which for the listeners and watchers here, go on Google satellites and look down at a satellite map. Look at the Altai Mountains. It’s fabulous. There’s almost no one living there.

MARTIN: The Altai is the ultimate in wilderness. Like, it’s just so remote and so undeveloped. It’s just shocking just how untouched that region is.

REHMANNIA: It is. I feel that in this Shilajit, I feel something like, wow, this is coming from a place that’s pure and the people who got it don’t want to mess with that purity. They want to be part of bringing the best of the best. Yeah. And when I received these people’s Shilajit, I tasted it, oh, boy, that’s good. So we sent it to a lab in Sri Lanka. It came back 91% fulvic acids. I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked.

MARTIN: That’s knock your socks off strong.

REHMANNIA: Yeah. It means it’s nine tenths of the entirety of that ancient form.

MARTIN: No adulteration, no mix. Yeah.

REHMANNIA: Yeah.

MARTIN: Fantastic. So that’s what you have available now, right?

REHMANNIA: Yes. And I decided, just because of my own preference, to put it in capsules, I also sell it as a bulk powder in a little jar, so you could take a little thimble worth.

MARTIN: Yeah. It’s so hard to handle. I would just as soon work with the capsule because it’s so much easier to dose.

REHMANNIA: Now that said, and it said in much research, and I believe I said in my book, I did say it in my book too, is that powders are very easily the ones to get corrupted because once someone’s got that Shilajit powder, there could be a lot of temptation to add something to fill it out.

MARTIN: Yeah, true enough. You can hide anything inside a capsule.

REHMANNIA: Yeah. So it does, purveyors would say, don’t buy the capsules. They’re going to be corrupted. And that was where I can come in and say, look, here it is in its purity.

MARTIN: Yeah. If you can trust my other products, maybe you can trust this one.

REHMANNIA: Yeah, yeah.

MARTIN: Okay. So there we are. Well, we have Shilajit. We have it in stock. We have it available. It’s really good. And I will soon be running an experiment because I’m thinking that I need some remineralization, and I’ll be reporting back.

REHMANNIA: Yeah, great. Yeah. That’s beautiful, Martin. And yes, my book, you’ll have copies of the book, too?

MARTIN: Oh, yes, we will definitely be offering the book and,

REHMANNIA: Fantastic.

MARTIN: That’s the gift of meeting people who have done the work and have, I don’t know how else to say it. You want to be doing business with people who have the chops, who have done the work.

REHMANNIA: That’s right.

MARTIN: And Rehmannia is one of them. So we’re so pleased to have this relationship. Take a good, serious look at all the supertonic herbs. There are 16 of the formulas available, each one of them with a specific target, specific goal. Whether you’re needing help with your lungs or your stomach, your heart, your aging, your reproduction, whatever it is that your body needs to Shift or the direction, these herbs are phenomenal. And the products are really well made.

REHMANNIA: We also have Shilajit in my product called Three Masters, which you’re selling. That’s wonderful.

MARTIN: Oh, sure enough. Yes, that’s ORMUS, Shilajit and?

REHMANNIA: Reishi. 10:1 extract of reishi fruiting body only. Pure. That’s maybe my favorite product in the world. I’m really proud of that. I created it in 2006. It’s like, wow. I don’t know what it came down from the ethers, it seems like.

MARTIN: All right, okay. Well, I think this pretty much explains what we have. And I would like to just thank you for the time you’re spending. First of all, thank you for the time you put into writing the book and looking around the world to find the best of the best. And I feel so proud to be associated with you.

REHMANNIA: Thank you, Martin. Yeah, it’s my pleasure. And it’s my gift. And you and I both have a gift to give people the highest integrity, and that’s why I like working with you, too. I know I can feel that from you as well.

MARTIN: Thank you so very much. This is Rehmannia Thomas, the formulator at SuperTonic Herbs, and Martin Pytela, your health coach at Life Enthusiast. Life-enthusiast.com. Thank you for being here.

REHMANNIA: Thank you.