Pine Pollen vs Fadogia Agrestis for Testosterone

If you heard about fadogia on a podcast and started reading labels, you have probably seen pine pollen sitting next to it on the same shelf. This is pine pollen vs fadogia agrestis, side by side, for a man who wants to know where each one comes from, what the studies measured and who they measured it in. One of them has been tested in rats. The other has been tested in men, in the form Mara makes.

What fadogia agrestis is

Fadogia agrestis is a small shrub in the coffee family (Rubiaceae) that grows in the savanna of Nigeria and across West and Central Africa, from Ghana east to Sudan. In Nigerian folk medicine the stem was used as an aphrodisiac, for erection trouble and for fever. Outside Nigeria almost nobody had heard of it until Andrew Huberman talked about it on his podcast, and it went from a footnote in African ethnobotany to a capsule on every men's health site.

The dose usually quoted is around 600 mg a day, cycled roughly 8 to 12 weeks on and then 2 to 4 weeks off. That cycling habit comes straight out of the research.

Fadogia agrestis and testosterone in the rat studies

Nearly everything written about fadogia agrestis testosterone traces back to one group at the University of Ilorin in Nigeria: Musa Toyin Yakubu, Musbau Akanji and Adenike Oladiji.

• 2005, Asian Journal of Andrology. Male albino rats were given a water extract of the stem by mouth for 5 days at 18, 50 or 100 mg per kg of body weight. Blood testosterone rose with the dose, and the rats mounted more often. Examine.com reports the rises as roughly 2-fold, 3-fold and 6-fold.
• 2007, Pharmacognosy Magazine. The same doses for 21 days. Red blood cells stayed steady, while white blood cell counts shifted.
• 2008, Journal of Ethnopharmacology. The same three doses for 28 days. Testis weight went up and several testicular enzymes and markers moved away from normal. The authors described these as adverse effects on testicular function, with some markers recovering at the lowest dose.

That 28-day paper is why men cycle fadogia. Five days looked good in rats; four weeks looked different. The proposed route is luteinizing hormone, the signal from the brain that tells the testes to make more testosterone. Every testosterone number published for fadogia so far comes from rats.

Fadogia agrestis vs tongkat ali

Search for fadogia and tongkat ali shows up right behind it, because the podcast stack paired them. Tongkat ali (Eurycoma longifolia) is the root of a tree from the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia, and unlike fadogia it has been tested in people. A 2013 trial by Talbott and colleagues gave 63 adults 200 mg a day for 4 weeks and measured their testosterone and cortisol before and after.

If your shortlist is a natural testosterone booster with human data, tongkat ali beats fadogia. Pine pollen goes a step further, with pilots in men taking it the same way you would.

Pine pollen was tested in men

Pine pollen is the fine yellow dust that male pine cones release each spring. In 1971 the scientist Šaden-Krehula isolated testosterone, epitestosterone and androstenedione from Scots pine pollen, the first plant in which those hormones were found. You can read the longer history in our full guide to pine pollen.

Two pilot studies then looked at men's own blood:

• Wolkodoff and colleagues, 2024. 10 men aged 47 to 78 took a pine pollen tincture under the tongue for 8 weeks. Total testosterone went from 362.5 to 448.4 ng/dL. Their scores on the qADAM, a questionnaire on male drive and energy, went from 23.9 to 31.7.
• 2025 pilot, 11 men. Free testosterone went from 10.48 to 11.72 ng/dL, and SHBG (the protein that binds testosterone in the blood) fell from 29.1 to 27.4 nmol/L.

Both used a tincture held under the tongue. Fadogia's numbers came from a stem extract given to rats. With pine pollen, you are reading results from men who used the same kind of bottle you would buy.

Centuries of use in China and Korea

In China pine pollen is song hua fen (松花粉). It appears in Chinese herbal texts from the Tang dynasty onward and is listed in the 2020 Chinese Pharmacopoeia. Korean households pressed it with honey into songhwa dasik tea cakes and stirred it into songhwa-milsu, a pollen and honey drink. Fadogia's history is local folk use in parts of West Africa; pine pollen's is written into China's national pharmacopoeia.

What men who take it report is concrete: stronger morning wood and more drive. For a closer look at the tincture itself, read our pine pollen review.

Pine Pollen – Spagyric Pine Pollen Tincture

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

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How Mara's Pine Pollen is made and taken

Mara uses wild-harvested Pinus radiata pollen. The pollen wall is tough, so it is cracked before extraction. The extract is spagyric: after the pollen is extracted, the minerals left behind are returned to the liquid, so the whole plant ends up in the bottle. Simple ingredients: premium quality extract.

Take 1 to 2 droppers, hold it under your tongue for 20 to 30 seconds, then swallow. It tastes soft and lightly earthy with a faint sweetness, easy at 6 am before training or at your desk. A 50 ml bottle lasts 30 to 50 days. It comes in dark Miron glass. Dark amber glass is a step in the right direction, and dark Miron glass is the gold standard, which is what Mara uses: it keeps light off the extract for the life of the bottle.

Pine pollen vs fadogia agrestis for a man choosing one bottle

Fadogia asks you to run it on a calendar, with breaks built around a 28-day rat study. Pine pollen gives you a plant with testosterone measured in it, two pilots in men with the tincture under the tongue, and more than a thousand years of written use. Pine pollen is the straightforward pick.

Pine Pollen considerations

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

Questions people ask

Does fadogia agrestis raise testosterone?

In rats it did. The 2005 Yakubu study found blood testosterone rose with the dose after 5 days of a stem water extract; the published testosterone data is all from rats.

Why do people cycle fadogia agrestis?

A 2008 study by the same Nigerian group gave rats the extract for 28 days and found changes in testis weight and testicular enzymes. Men who take it usually run it for a set number of weeks and then stop for a few.

What did the pine pollen studies find in men?

In the 2024 Wolkodoff pilot, total testosterone in 10 men went from 362.5 to 448.4 ng/dL over 8 weeks. In the 2025 pilot in 11 men, free testosterone went from 10.48 to 11.72 ng/dL.

How do you take a pine pollen tincture?

Put 1 to 2 droppers under your tongue, hold for 20 to 30 seconds and swallow. One 50 ml bottle of Mara's Pine Pollen lasts 30 to 50 days.