Baseline

What the evidence actually says about hormones.

Hormone advice online is mostly confident and wrong. Every answer here carries a grade, the real numbers, and — where one exists — the study that disagrees.

No account needed. Nothing to buy. We take no money from any supplement or product mentioned.

Read this first. Everything below is what the published research currently shows — measured in specific people, under specific conditions, and reported as an average. Most of it is graded B or lower, which is the scientific way of saying we do not actually know yet.

Countless men report results that the studies do not capture. Sometimes that is placebo, or confounding, or a story told after the fact. Sometimes it is a real effect in a real person that a 20-person trial was never going to detect. An average tells you what happened across a group. It does not tell you what happens to you.

So take the grades as the floor, not the ceiling. Where the evidence is thin, we say so plainly instead of picking a side — and then the only way anyone finds out is by measuring it properly.

Start now. Become the proof.

Why this exists. Hormones are upstream of everything — energy, sleep, mood, strength, how you age. They are also the thing almost nobody measures. Baseline exists to change that, and to build the evidence out of the people actually living it rather than whoever is selling something.

— Finn Richert, Baseline

How grading works

A
Multiple RCTs or a strong meta-analysis. Replicated. Direction not seriously disputed.
B
One good RCT, or consistent large cohorts. Plausible but unsettled.
C
Mixed or conflicting. The effect may be real but is not established.
D
Mechanistically plausible, weak or absent human outcome data.
F
Tested and failed, or contradicted by better evidence.

What the labels mean

Small sample Orange chips sit under the numbers and say what is weak about the study those numbers came from — sample size, who was studied, who funded it. A grade is our judgement; these are facts about the paper.
Agency Not every source is a study. Badges on the links mark agency documents, reviews, news write-ups, and — importantly — the place a claim originally came from, which is not the same as evidence for it.

Missing something?

This page only covers what we've been able to grade and cite. If your question isn't here, say what it is — requests decide what gets researched next. And if the evidence turns out not to exist, we'll tell you that rather than invent an answer.

Only used to tell you when the topic lands. Leave it blank and the request still counts — we would rather not hold an address we don't need.

Don't look for proof. Be the proof.

Most of what's above is graded B or below, which means the honest answer is "we don't really know yet." Baseline lets you track your own hormones and lifestyle changes properly — so your results become part of the answer instead of another anecdote.

Start tracking →