Pine Pollen and DHEA (How the Two Compare for Men)

Men who search pine pollen and DHEA are usually standing in front of two very different bottles. One is a capsule of a single hormone, dehydroepiandrosterone, made in a lab. The other is pollen from the male cones of a pine tree, a plant food with more than 1,300 years of written history. Both get bought by men in their 40s, 50s and 60s who want their mornings and their drive back.

What DHEA is

DHEA is a hormone your adrenal glands make, mostly from cholesterol by way of pregnenolone. Its job is to be raw material. Your tissues turn DHEA into androstenedione, and androstenedione is readily converted to testosterone in peripheral tissues, according to the Adrenal Androgens chapter of Endotext, the endocrinology reference published through the US National Library of Medicine.

The same chapter puts numbers on the decline. DHEA and its stored form, DHEA-S, peak in your 20s and then fall by around 2 to 5% a year. By the eighth or ninth decade of life, production is down 80 to 90% from that peak. Examine.com says people in their 70s have less than 20% of the DHEA-S levels of young adults.

So a man of 55 is working with a fraction of the DHEA he had at 25. That gap is the whole sales pitch for a DHEA pill.

Where DHEA pills come from

Supplement DHEA is made in a laboratory. Chemists start with diosgenin, a compound from wild yam, and convert it to DHEA in a series of reactions. RxList notes that this reaction happens in the lab and is not believed to happen in the human body, so eating yam or taking wild yam cream does not give you DHEA. What ends up in the capsule is one isolated molecule, and the published studies on it have used 25 to 200 mg a day.

Does pine pollen contain DHEA?

The research on hormones in pine pollen comes from Zagreb. In 1971 Šaden-Krehula, Tajić and Kolbah published a paper in Experientia reporting testosterone, epitestosterone and androstenedione in the pollen of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). It was the first time testosterone had been isolated from any plant. In 1979 the same group reported testosterone, epitestosterone and androstenedione again, this time in black pine (Pinus nigra) pollen, in Phytochemistry.

Both papers name the androgens they measured, and androstenedione is on both lists. Androstenedione is the step that comes straight after DHEA, one conversion away from testosterone. So when men talk about pine pollen as a plant androgen, they are talking about a pollen that was found to hold the next two molecules down the line from DHEA, testosterone itself among them.

Pine pollen and DHEA for men

Pine pollen vs DHEA, the way men argue it on forums, comes down to what kind of thing they want to take every morning.

• DHEA is one synthetic molecule at a fixed milligram dose, sold as a capsule.
• Pine pollen is a whole plant food. Each grain carries protein (about 13%, by Zhao's 1996 analysis) alongside the plant androgens found in 1971.
• DHEA is a modern lab product. Pine pollen has been written into Chinese herbal texts since the Tang dynasty.

Pine pollen, 松花粉 (song hua fen), appears in the Xinxiu Bencao, the materia medica compiled under Emperor Gaozong of Tang in 659. It is listed in the 2020 Chinese Pharmacopoeia. In Korea it is still pressed into songhwa dasik tea cakes and stirred with honey into songhwa milsu. The choice for men comes down to a plant food people have eaten for centuries or a single molecule built in a lab.

For the background on the tree, the cones and how the pollen is gathered each spring, read our full guide to pine pollen.

What two pilot studies in men found

In September 2024, Neil Wolkodoff and colleagues published a pilot report in the Annals of Clinical and Medical Case Reports. Ten men aged 47 to 78 (average age 63) took a pine pollen tincture under the tongue, half a dropper in the morning and half in the evening, five days on and two days off, for 8 weeks. Their average total testosterone went from 362.5 to 448.4 ng/dL. Their qADAM score, a questionnaire on energy, sex drive, strength and mood, went from 23.9 to 31.7.

In 2025 the same research group ran a second pilot in 11 younger men, aged 25 to 50, on the same five days on, two days off cycle. Free testosterone, the share that circulates unbound, rose from 10.48 to 11.72 ng/dL, and SHBG, the protein that binds testosterone up, fell.

Men who take pine pollen every day report the same two things again and again. Stronger morning wood, often the first change they notice. And more drive, in the gym and at home.

Why a tincture is the practical form

Each pollen grain has a tough outer wall and two small air sacs that carry it on the wind. The pine pollen androgen story starts inside that wall, which is why the label to look for is cracked cell, meaning the wall has been broken open before you take it.

A tincture goes one step further. The cracked pollen sits in alcohol, which pulls the plant's compounds out into liquid you can hold under the tongue for 20 to 30 seconds. Both human pilot studies used a tincture taken this way. Powder clumps in water and gets stirred into a shake you have to remember to make. A dropper under the tongue takes half a minute at the bathroom sink.

Pine Pollen – Spagyric Pine Pollen Tincture

50 ml dropper bottle. Wild-harvested, cracked-cell Pinus radiata pollen.

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Why Mara makes a spagyric tincture

Mara's Pine Pollen is wild-harvested, cracked-cell pollen of Pinus radiata. It is made the spagyric way. The pollen is extracted, then the minerals left behind are returned to the liquid, so the whole plant ends up in the bottle. That is the closest a dropper gets to the whole food the Tang herbalists wrote about, and the opposite of a single isolated molecule.

The taste is soft and lightly earthy, with a faint sweetness. The direction is 1 to 2 droppers a day, held under the tongue for 20 to 30 seconds and then swallowed, or stirred into water, juice or a smoothie. A 50 ml bottle lasts 30 to 50 days. It's bottled in dark Miron glass to keep light off the extract. If you want to see how it stacks up against other bottles first, our pine pollen review goes through the labels one by one.

The ritual is small. Same time every morning, one dropper, before the coffee. The 2024 men kept it up for 8 weeks, and that is a fair window to give it.

Pine Pollen considerations

Contains alcohol. If you're pregnant, nursing or taking medication, ask your doctor before using it.

Questions people ask

Is pine pollen a natural source of DHEA?

The hormones measured in pine pollen are testosterone, epitestosterone and androstenedione (Šaden-Krehula, 1971 and 1979). Androstenedione is the step right after DHEA on the way to testosterone.

Can I take pine pollen every day?

Yes. The product page direction is 1 to 2 droppers a day, and many men follow the five days on, two days off schedule used in the 2024 pilot.

Which pine is Mara's pine pollen from?

Wild-harvested Pinus radiata, cracked cell and made into a spagyric tincture in dark Miron glass.