Photo by Thomas Martinsen .

The people of 4chan are the latest, but were not the first and will probably not be the last, to try to boost their testosterone by drinking raw onion juice. This is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.




Will Sommer, who writes a newsletter about conservative media, tweeted about the onion craze currently ongoing on 4chan’s /pol/ forum. There’s more where those screenshots came from, but click at your own peril. (Content warning for racist memes about onions, a thing that 2015 me would never have dreamed I would one day have to type.)


Drinking onion juice, or eating massive quantities of raw onions, is a bad idea because the taste is reportedly horrible and the aftermath consists of sweating onion stench out of every pore for days if not weeks. This is something the message board denizens would have known if they’d checked out the many times people have tried this before and reported back, for example on bodybuilding forums.

If you are tempted to try onion juice to increase your testosterone:

First, consider why you think you need to increase your testosterone. Do you have a medical issue, or are you just trying to impress your online friends? If the former, you’re better off consulting with a medical professional.

Second, you should know that there are no randomized controlled trials of onion’s effect on testosterone in humans. Fans of onion juice typically cite two papers to support their claims. One, from the Jordan University of Science and Technology, found that onion juice made male rats copulate faster but less often. Another, from the Islamic Azad University in Iran, found that onion juice increased the concentration of sperm in male rats’ testes (as determined by dissection). In both cases, the rats did not have to drink the onion juice, but had it squirted directly into their stomachs.

Are you a rat? Would you like to copulate faster and with a greater sperm count, but less often? Then perhaps you could use this research. For the rest of us, exercise and a reasonable diet (go ahead and include onions if you enjoy the taste) can support healthy testosterone levels. As general life advice, though, do not follow dietary advice that is illustrated with a Pepe meme.