What Is in HoneyPower? The Six Botanicals Explained

Honey leads the ingredient graphic and gives the product its name, which sets an expectation the capsule format has to work against. A jar of honey is eaten by the spoonful. The human trials behind it were run the same way: 50 grams of carbohydrate from honey a day for two weeks, 70 grams before every training session across eight weeks, and 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight daily in a crossover trial.

What those trials measured is worth knowing before anyone assumes the bottle inherits them. Two looked at oxidative markers in trained cyclists, one at blood lipids, one at glucose response. A 2025 crossover trial of a honey powder product found no endurance benefit at all. None of them studied erections, drive or stamina in the sense this bottle is sold for.

Powdered honey is a real ingredient and it goes into capsules routinely. The question a buyer can hold onto is one of scale rather than of quality: a capsule holds a fraction of a gram of anything, and the honey research starts at fifty grams.

Of the six, this is the one with a real body of human work aimed at the thing the bottle is sold for. The 2021 Cochrane review pooled nine studies in 587 men with erectile difficulty and found ginseng ahead of placebo, with the authors flagging small samples and short follow-up. Their own plain summary of the review is more cautious than the abstract reads.

The doses are the part worth carrying away. A twelve-week Brazilian trial gave 1,000 mg three times a day, so three grams. A Korean trial gave four 350 mg tablets daily for eight weeks. A berry-extract trial used 1,400 mg a day. The fatigue literature runs similarly: 2,000 mg a day for eight weeks in cancer-related fatigue is a representative figure.

Ginseng also carries the clearest interaction on this panel, and it is named once here and once on the side effects page rather than repeated through the site. A randomised trial gave 1 g of ginseng twice daily to men on warfarin and measured a fall in the drug’s effect.

Maca is a Peruvian root vegetable, dried and milled, and it is eaten as food at home in quantities no capsule approaches. The botanical and phytochemical literature treats it as a cruciferous crop rather than as a concentrated extract, which is why the trial doses are measured in grams.

The dose-finding work is unusually clean for a botanical. Gonzales ran 1,500 mg against 3,000 mg for twelve weeks and both arms moved on a desire questionnaire. Dording’s later trial ran 1.5 g against 3.0 g and only the 3 g arm separated from placebo. A twelve-week safety trial used 3 g a day and reported no change in hormone measurements. The systematic review of the area calls the evidence limited and the trials small.

That pattern is useful rather than damning. It says the ingredient has a threshold, the threshold was measured, and it sits at three grams a day of dried root.

Tribulus is the ingredient most associated with the testosterone claim, and it is the one where the human work is most direct about that claim. Neychev gave 10 and 20 mg per kilogram a day to young men and measured androgen production directly. Nothing moved. A later review of the plant’s wider pharmacology makes the same point about the hormonal story.

Where it has shown something, the doses are large and standardised. The phase IV trial used 1,500 mg a day of an extract standardised to furostanol saponins in men with erectile difficulty. A three-month trial used 750 mg a day. The rugby trial used 450 mg for five weeks and found no body-composition or strength difference. The 2026 meta-analysis and a 2025 review both land on the same summary: some erectile signal, no androgen signal.

Standardisation matters more here than with most plants, because the saponin content of tribulus varies with where it grew and which part was harvested.

The name does most of the selling and the laboratory work does the rest. Icariin, the compound epimedium is standardised for, inhibits PDE5 in a test tube and raises cGMP in cultured cavernous smooth muscle cells. PDE5 is the enzyme the prescription erectile drugs act on, which is why the comparison gets made so often.

What has not happened is the trial. The only human trial of isolated icariin found in this search gave 300 mg a day for eight weeks, open label, to people with bipolar disorder and an alcohol use disorder, and its endpoint was mood. A urologist’s review of the herbal erectile market says the same thing in fewer words: the glassware is interesting and the clinic is empty.

Two practical notes travel with it. NIH LiverTox records the usual commercial product as one 250 mg or 500 mg capsule a day, which is the nearest thing to a reference dose anywhere in the literature, and it documents the liver injury reports that go with the plant.

The sixth row is not a botanical the product is sold on. It is there to change what happens to the other five. Piperine, the active fraction of black pepper, slows two of the body’s clearance systems, and the famous demonstration is Shoba’s 1998 study: 20 mg of piperine alongside 2 g of curcumin lifted curcumin’s blood levels by a factor the paper puts at twenty.

The mechanism is documented on both fronts. Piperine inhibits CYP3A4, the liver enzyme that clears a large share of prescription medicines, and inhibits P-glycoprotein, the pump that throws compounds back out of the gut wall. The bioavailability literature treats both as the point of adding it.

The honest limit on the row is specific rather than general: nobody has measured piperine against honey, ginseng, maca, tribulus or icariin. The effect it is famous for was measured on one compound, curcumin, in one study design.