Boron is a trace mineral element that, when taken in supplement form, can help improve your bone strength, increase levels of testosterone, improve your cognitive function, and decrease levels of inflammation in your body.
Boron was historically a fairly obscure mineral, but increasing amounts of scientific research are demonstrating that it plays a critical role in everything from bone metabolism to brain function, so it’s become increasingly popular as a supplement.
If these benefits are what you are looking for, we’ve evaluated and ranked the ten best boron supplements on the market so you can make the most of its physiological benefits for your body.
Research
Rankings
Last updated: February 19, 2023
Boron supplements considered: 22
Hours of research: 35
Experts reviewed: 8
Scientific papers referenced: X
1. Pure Encapsulations Boron Glycinate
Pure Encapsulations has the most minimal and easily absorbable boron supplement around. It’s delivered using boron glycinate, which can be easily absorbed by your body, and the vegetable-based cellulose capsule is vegan-friendly.
With zero additional ingredients, this supplement delivers a respectable 2 mg dosage, which is plenty for most people. Unless you know you need a higher dosage, this should be your top choice.
2. Now Boron
Now Boron delivers a 3 mg dose of boron in the form of calcium borogluconate.
It’s contained in an animal-based gelatin capsule and only has a couple of additional ingredients: rice flour and stearic acid, both to hold the capsule together. It’s an easily-absorbed form of boron in a fairly simple package, making it a good choice.
3. Swanson Triple Boron Complex
Swanson Triple Boron Complex uses three different forms of boron to ensure that this high-dose boron supplement achieves a high level of bioavailability.
With boron glycinate, citrate, and aspartate, the amount of boron you actually absorb from this boron supplement is going to be higher than many of its competitors.
Not everybody needs a high dose of boron, but if you do, Swanson Triple Boron Complex is the right choice.
4. Trace Minerals Ionic Boron
Trace Minerals makes their boron supplement in liquid form. Using an ionic salt form of boron, each serving (delivered with the measured dropper in the vial) delivers 6 mg of boron, along with a small amount of a few other trace minerals like calcium and magnesium.
The liquid form is the primary convenience of this supplement; while it’s harder to get a precise dose because of the difficulty of accurately measuring small amounts of liquid, it’s far easier to incorporate a couple of drops of this boron supplement into a shake or a smoothie.
It’s a good choice if you’ve already got enough capsule-based supplements or medications in your life.
5. Bluebonnet Triple Boron
Bluebonnet is far from the only supplement manufacturer to make a triple source boron supplement using boron glycinate, citrate, and aspartate, but Bluebonnet does have a solid reputation for supplement purity.
This boron supplement delivers 3 mg per serving, and comes in a vegan-friendly vegetable derived cellulose capsule. It’s a decent middle of the road choice.
6. Good State Health Solutions Natural Ionic Boron
Good State Health Solutions makes a liquid form of boron that’s just boric acid dissolved in highly purified water.
This is a good option if you need a high dose of boron in liquid form, but for most people, the difficulty of measuring out the liquid in an accurate manner is going to offset these benefits for most people.
Keep it on your list if you do need a large volume of high-dose liquid form boron, though.
7. Life Extension Boron
Life Extension tries to capitalize on the multifaceted and evolving knowledge on boron’s biological role by providing it alongside vitamin B2 for enhanced hormonal benefits.
It has a triple source boron complex like a few of the other boron supplements on the market, which will enhance its bioavailability, but the inclusion of vitamin B2 is hard to justify so far—our understanding of the function of boron is so limited that it’s hard to definitively point to research showing that this particular combination is going to be beneficial.
8. Solgar Boron
Solgar makes a simple boron supplement that provides a solid dosage of 3 mg of boron per capsule. However, it has a few extra binders and stabilizers compared to its competition, and delivers its boron in a relatively mundane boric acid form, which is why it ends up further down in the rankings
9. Nature’s Way Boron Complex
Nature’s Way makes a 3 mg boron supplement, which is delivered as an amino acid chelate. While amino acid chelates are usually well-absorbed, the manufacturer doesn’t specify which amino acids this boron supplement is chelated with, making it difficult to compare with other supplements and making it impossible to match the supplementation protocols used in the scientific literature.
While it’s not an awful option, other boron supplements don’t have these drawbacks.
10. Vibrant Health Super Natural Boron
This boron supplement is delivered in the form of calcium fructoborate, and is paired with broccoli powder for some green superfood power. The boron dosage is 3 mg, so pretty solid. While green veggies are definitely beneficial, there isn’t enough research to support this pairing either, so it makes it hard to recommend. To take advantage of the full range of boron’s benefits, it’s probably better to take a more focused supplement.
Category winners
Best boron overall: Pure Encapsulations Boron Glycinate
Pure Encapsulations garners our top overall recommendation thanks to the highly soluble glycinate form of boron used, plus Pure Encapsulations’ well-known independent purity testing. For a boron supplement with a solid dose and reliably good absorption, you can’t go wrong with this choice.
Best boron for boosting testosterone: Swanson Triple Boron Complex
Swanson makes a higher-dose boron supplement that uses three different boron compounds, all of which are highly soluble. This makes it readily-absorbed and highly effective at assisting your body in testosterone synthesis.
Best boron for arthritis: Now Boron
Boron helps cut down on inflammation, and for that purpose, Now Boron is our recommendation. It’s simple, high-dose, and has no extraneous ingredients, making it easy to integrate with other supplements if desired.
Best boron for women: Pure Encapsulations Boron Glycinate
For bone strength and estrogen control, Pure Encapsulations is a great choice thanks to its high quality formulation and easily-absorbed glycinate form. It’s the best boron supplement out there for women.
Best boron for bodybuilding: Swanson Triple Boron Complex
Swanson’s strength really shines in applications that call for high doses of highly bioavailable boron, and bodybuilding is definitely one of them. That makes it our recommendation for serious bodybuilders.
Best boron for cognitive function: Pure Encapsulations Boron Glycinate
With a solid, moderate dosage in a simple and easily-absorbed capsule, Pure Encapsulations is a great addition to your supplementation regimen to ensure your boron levels are high enough to support strong cognitive function.
Who should buy boron?
Boron is a rare but important mineral that has a few specific applications. It’s useful for increasing testosterone and reducing estrogen levels in your body, as well as improving cognitive function, reducing inflammation, and strengthening your bones. That means there are a few clear groups of people who should add boron to their supplement stack.
Men who want higher testosterone and lower estrogen. Boron’s potential for boosting testosterone levels and inhibiting the production of estrogen make it a great addition for men looking for testosterone’s benefits: higher libido, stronger muscles, and less body fat.
Men over 40. Not only do men over 40 face increasing rates of low testosterone; they also often experience several of the other health concerns that boron could address, including systemic inflammation in the body, decreased bone strength, brain fog, and decreased cognitive performance.
Women who want stronger bones. Don’t make the mistake of thinking boron is just for men–its ability to contribute to bone strength makes it great for women, especially when taken alongside vitamin D and calcium supplements.
People who want to maintain cognitive health as they get older. Some scientific evidence suggests that boron can stave off age-related declines in cognitive function and brain fog. Direct experimental studies have shown that low boron intake inhibits cognitive performance, so if you’re not sure if your diet is as high-quality as it could be, a boron supplement is a good add-on.
How we ranked
Since the research on boron supplementation in humans is still fairly preliminary, we kept things pretty simple with our boron supplement rankings. We were looking for the purest, simplest, and most effective boron supplements that delivered an effective dose with as little ancillary or unnecessary ingredients as possible. Here’s how we measured those criteria:
Predictable and consistent dosage. Our research team found two categories of boron supplements on the market: tablets and capsules, or liquid ionic boron. We preferred tablets and capsules for most use cases, as they provide consistent and precisely-measured dosages.
The key weakness of liquids is that eyedropper measurements are far less precise than what a supplement manufacturer can achieve with commercial-grade tablet pressing equipment.
However, liquid boron supplements do fill a niche: they’re great for people who already have too many pills to take in a day, or who want to incorporate boron into a specially designed green drink, smoothie, or protein shake, so we included a handful of the best liquid boron supplements.
Highly bioavailable forms of boron. Beyond the delivery format, we also looked at the actual molecular form of boron. Some supplements only supply a single form of boron, while others use multiple different molecular forms in an effort to boost bioavailability.
The research isn’t in yet on whether having multiple kinds of boron boosts absorption, so we were fairly agnostic on this front.
However, we did have a preference for specific molecular forms which are known to be bioavailable, like certain amino acid chelates and water-soluble salts like glycinate.
Preference for simple, cellulose-based capsules. As usual, a product that used a cellulose capsule as opposed to an animal-based gelatin was slightly preferable to improve compatibility with vegetarian and vegan diets.
Dosage in line with the best scientific research. In terms of the dose of boron, we looked primarily for supplements that provided doses in the most common range used in research, two to three milligrams per day. A few supplements provided higher doses, like 12 mg, but most applications call for a lower dose.
No unnecessary binders, fillers, or stabilizers. Like with all of our rankings, we valued purity and clean supplement design, but since boron is such a simple supplement, these factors were even more important than usual.
We dropped products that had too much in the way of fillers and binders. Some products offered extras, like vitamin B12 alongside boron, and while there may be some theoretical justifications for these choices, the empirical support isn’t there yet, so these were rated lower.
We sorted the remaining products by a combination of their delivery format, form of boron used, capsule substance, and purity, leaving us with our final list of the best boron supplements that are available right now.
FAQ
Q: Does boron increase estrogen?
A: Boron actually appears to decrease estrogen (and increase testosterone). One study in men was able to show that seven days of supplementation with 11.6 mg of boron per day leads to increases in testosterone levels and a decrease in estrogen levels (1).
Interestingly, though, boron may be helpful for post-menopausal women, even though it does not increase estrogen levels. One of the early studies on boron and its role in diet was conducted in 1987 in a sample of postmenopausal women (2).
The study concluded that women who have a diet that is low in boron could gain bone mass and decrease calcium excretion by taking a boron supplement, even independent of any effects on estrogen levels.
Q: Is boron good for arthritis?
A: Boron is known to generate anti-inflammatory effects, which has stimulated increased interest in using it as a supplement for arthritis.
Some fascinating data from R.E. Newnham presented in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives points out that arthritis incidence is much higher in areas with low boron intakes compared to areas with high boron intakes (3).
Additionally, a placebo-controlled trial found that 6 mg per day supplement of boron led to improvements in symptoms of arthritis (4).
As with much of the other research on boron, these results are preliminary and these studies are small; there isn’t as much evidence supporting boron as there is supporting other ingredients commonly used in joint supplements, for example.
Q: Does boron have benefits for the brain?
A: Yes, cognitive benefits are one of the more promising avenues for boron supplementation. A paper published in the journal Advances in Plant and Animal Boron Nutrition points out that boron deficiency can inhibit central nervous system function (5), and other data supports the idea that increasing boron levels can increase cognitive performance.
A paper published in 1994 describes a series of three experiments in which dietary boron levels were manipulated to be low (0.25 mg of boron per day) or high (3.25 mg of boron per day), and subjects were tested on their cognitive performance (6).
The results from a series of experiments suggested that higher boron levels were associated with better scores on the cognitive performance assessments, making the case that a lack of boron can contribute to cognitive tasks including memory, hand-eye coordination, manual dexterity, attention, and perception.
Based on these data, boron could be a great supplement for boosting brain function, especially if your diet is low in boron to begin with.
Q: Does a boron supplement boost testosterone levels?
A: Boron has shown some early promise in boosting testosterone levels, at least based on a small study on eight men (7). This finding was in contrast with earlier work in bodybuilders which found no benefit to boron supplementation (8), so the issue is definitely not fully settled. Still, the simultaneous increase in testosterone and decrease in estrogen seen in the first study is a positive sign.
In any case, we’ll need larger and better controlled studies on boron supplementation in men to get a definitive answer on its potential for boosting testosterone levels. Still, that won’t stop many men from using boron for potentially increasing their testosterone levels in the interim.
Q: Can boron help erectile dysfunction?
A: No direct evidence has yet emerged that suggests that boron can directly improve erectile function in men with sexual dysfunction.
A multi-part research article published on potential nutritional, lifestyle, and supplemental interventions for erectile dysfunction published in the journal Urology Clinics of North America reviewed reams of studies on trace minerals and supplements, but did not even discuss boron specifically (9).
There is some indirect evidence that boron could improve erectile dysfunction via its potential testosterone boosting effects; if your erectile problems are caused by low testosterone, and low boron levels were implicated in your low testosterone, there is a possibility that boron could help.
However, a more direct solution might be to try something that targets erectile dysfunction specifically, like a male enhancement pill or a nitric oxide supplement.
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Recap
Boron has a wide range of applications, from supporting healthy brain function and cognition to keeping your testosterone levels high and your inflammation levels low.
It could be helpful for older men who struggle with low testosterone and “brain fog,” as well as people looking for relief from arthritis or other inflammatory conditions.
There are no adverse effects known so far, and the optimal dose for most people looks to be 2 to 3 mg per day. That’s the range of doses used in the scientific studies that have found the greatest benefits.
Taken at this level, boron could be an easy addition to your supplementation routine that has broad health benefits.
For BodyNutrition’s #1 boron recommendation, click here.
