One jar says 60% fulvic acid. The next says 75%. A third says "rich in fulvic acid" and prints nothing.
Only one of those three is doing anything useful, and it is not the highest number. The reason is that fulvic acid is not a single molecule, and a percentage of a category is only as good as the instrument that drew the boundary.
What is fulvic acid, and how much is in shilajit?
Fulvic acid is not one compound. It is a class of related humic substances defined partly by how the material behaves in a particular assay. Shilajit carries a fulvic fraction along with humic substances, a mineral fraction and a group of compounds called dibenzo-alpha-pyrones. The proportions vary with where the material was collected and how it was purified.
So the honest answer to the headline is a shape rather than a number. There is a fulvic fraction, it varies by source, and a single figure without a method attached is not a measurement anyone can act on.
Why do fulvic acid percentages not compare across brands?
Because the assays in common use do not agree with one another. Run two accepted methods on the same sample and both can return honest numbers that are meaningfully different, because each method draws the line around the fulvic class in a slightly different place. Neither result is wrong. They are answers to slightly different questions.
Which means a 60% figure on one jar and a 75% figure on another may be describing the same material through two instruments. Comparing them as though they were comparable is the single most common error in this category, and brands are in no hurry to correct it.
What makes a fulvic percentage readable?
A named method printed beside the figure, and a statement of whether the number is a measured result or a specification the formula was built to. With both, the percentage becomes a fact about a sample. With neither, it is a marketing figure that happens to have a decimal point in it.
The rule that survives everything else in this article: a fulvic percentage is worth reading when the method is named beside it, and worth very little when it is not. That is a one-line test and it eliminates most of the shelf.
What about the 84 trace minerals?
Nearly every jar says so and almost none publish a document showing it. The figure has become category furniture, repeated because it is repeated. Shilajit does carry a mineral fraction, but a specific count is a testable claim, and a testable claim with no test behind it is a phrase rather than a fact.
We do not print a trace-mineral count on Mineral Base, and will not until there is a document under it. That is not a criticism of the number, which may well be defensible. It is a statement about what we can show, which is the only standard this brand runs on.
What does TARE print instead?
Mineral Base prints four ingredients with four figures: shilajit extract 30:1 (Asphaltum) 400 mg, ashwagandha root extract 30:1 100 mg, sea moss extract 20:1 100 mg, tongkat ali root extract 300:1 100 mg — one capsule, nothing inside a blend. No fulvic percentage and no mineral count, because we hold no assay for either.
Against a shelf of ten-in-one stacks printing one combined weight, four figures printed individually is the entire differentiation of this product. We would rather say that plainly than dress it up as something larger.
What the research does not show
Shilajit is the thinnest evidence base of anything TARE sells. The human work is small in scale, uneven in quality, and several of the more frequently pointed-to trials were funded by the companies supplying the ingredient. Nothing in it is replicated well enough for us to hang a claim on.
The fulvic percentage is not an efficacy figure in any case. Even a well-measured number with a named method beside it describes composition. Treating a composition figure as a potency figure is a second error stacked on the comparability one, and the category makes both at once.
And our own document is one of the two weaker ones. Mineral Base, lot 6010323, reports specification limits and no measured results at all — no method, no test date, no figure. For a material collected from rock, that is the wrong document to be missing, and we have said we will pay for the testing ourselves if the manufacturer does not. The full transcription is on Testing & Certification.
More in this cluster: what shilajit actually is, the three forms and what separates them, and how to read the document that would settle it.