Does Spearmint Tea Affect Fertility With PCOS? What Nobody Has Measured

Does Spearmint Tea Affect Fertility in PCOS?

Zero published trials have measured spearmint tea’s effect on ovulation, conception, or live birth in women with PCOS. That is the entire finding, and it is worth sitting with before looking for a workaround answer: the two human trials behind spearmint tea’s reputation measured testosterone and a hirsutism score, not a single fertility outcome. Neither ran longer than 30 days. Neither recorded a menstrual cycle, an ovulation date, or a pregnancy test.

That gap matters because spearmint tea’s whole reputation in PCOS content rests on one mechanism — it lowers circulating androgens — and readers reasonably extend that finding into a fertility question the original researchers never asked. This article reports what has actually been tested: two human trials that didn’t look at fertility, one confounded human trial that did, and a small set of animal studies that measured reproductive tissue directly, at doses nothing like a cup of tea.

Why the Fertility Question Even Comes Up

A 2010 trial in 42 women with PCOS-related hirsutism found that two cups of spearmint tea daily lowered free and total testosterone within 30 days, while raising LH and FSH — a real hormonal shift, on a small scale. That is the finding covered in full elsewhere on this site, alongside a second, smaller trial that found a similar drop in free testosterone over five days. Neither trial tested whether that hormone shift helped, hurt, or did nothing to ovulation.

The logic that follows is reasonable on its face: PCOS-related infertility is driven partly by disrupted LH secretion and elevated androgens interfering with follicle development, so a substance that lowers androgens looks, at a glance, like it should help fertility too. But “lowers one hormone” and “improves the reproductive outcome that hormone affects” are two different claims, and only a trial that measures the second one can answer it. None has.

Note: in May 2026, PCOS was renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, by a global consensus of more than 50 organisations. Same condition, same open question about spearmint and fertility — only the label changed. This article uses PCOS, since that is still the term most readers search.

What Has One Human Trial Actually Reported on Pregnancy?

One trial, and only one, reports a pregnancy number anywhere near spearmint — and it cannot answer whether spearmint itself does anything, for three reasons stated plainly below. A 2019 randomized trial of 60 infertile women with PCOS compared clomiphene citrate alone against a four-herb mixture — spearmint (Mentha spicata), ginger, cinnamon, and orange peel, 700 mg daily — given either alone or alongside clomiphene, for three cycles.

Read the mixture-alone row first: it produced the lowest pregnancy rate of the three arms, not the highest. With 20 women per group, that difference is nowhere near large enough to call spearmint (or the mixture) harmful to conception — the trial simply was not powered to detect a real difference this small. It is equally not evidence of benefit. The combination arm’s higher rate is just as uninterpretable in spearmint’s favor, because two-thirds of that arm’s participants were also taking clomiphene, a drug with its own well-documented ability to induce ovulation on its own.

Three separate problems keep this trial from answering the fertility question:

• It tested a mixture, not spearmint. Ginger, cinnamon, and orange peel were in every dose alongside spearmint, at an unstated per-herb split of the 700 mg total. No result here can be attributed to spearmint specifically.
• Two of three arms also received clomiphene, a proven ovulation-inducing drug, which makes it impossible to separate any herbal contribution from clomiphene’s own effect.
• The design was single-blind with 20 women per arm — adequate for the antioxidant and glycemic markers the trial was built to measure, not for a pregnancy-rate comparison this size.

What Do Animal Studies Show About Spearmint and Reproduction?

Four rodent studies have measured spearmint’s effect on reproductive tissue directly, and they point in different directions — which is exactly why each one needs its species, dose, and route stated rather than flattened into a single “animal studies show” sentence.

Read the preparation column carefully, because it is doing most of the work here. Akdogan’s rats received spearmint tea at 20 to 40 grams per litre as their entire drinking water supply — a concentration well beyond a normally steeped tea bag, consumed continuously rather than as an occasional cup — and that is the study that found dose-dependent testicular tissue damage in males. Ali’s pregnant rats received a concentrated extract delivered by gastric tube daily through the full length of pregnancy, not a brewed beverage taken by choice. Sadeghi Ataabadi’s rats received essential oil, which concentrates the same plant compounds far beyond what steeping leaves in hot water extracts. None of the four studies gave rats a cup of spearmint tea the way a person drinks one.

One more distinction is easy to miss: Akdogan’s rat study tested both peppermint (Mentha piperita) and spearmint (Mentha spicata) side by side, and found spearmint’s effect on testicular tissue was more severe than peppermint’s at a matched concentration. The two mints get used interchangeably in casual advice, and this is one of the few studies to test them against each other directly — the two are not interchangeable in this specific animal model, whatever else they share.

If You’re Tracking Ovulation While Drinking Spearmint Tea

Nothing about spearmint tea changes what actually confirms ovulation in PCOS. A positive ovulation predictor kit is especially unreliable against PCOS’s typically elevated baseline LH — why OPKs misread ovulation in PCOS is covered in full elsewhere on this site — and that unreliability exists whether or not spearmint tea is part of your routine: no trial has tested whether an anti-androgen effect changes what an OPK reads. If cycle tracking is the actual goal, a timed progesterone test or basal body temperature pattern remains the more reliable signal, spearmint tea or not. For the wider picture beyond any one supplement, this site’s fertility coverage works through diagnosis, ovulation induction, and when to escalate to a specialist.

What This Means If You’re Trying to Conceive

The honest position, and the only one the evidence supports, is that nobody has looked. Not “it’s safe to keep drinking,” and not “stop while trying to conceive” — both of those are conclusions this evidence cannot support, in either direction. The 2023 international PCOS guideline does not mention spearmint at all, in either a fertility or a safety context, so there is no guideline position to defer to here either.

That absence of data is the same situation covered for a different supplement in berberine and trying to conceive — a substance with a plausible mechanism, popular use in PCOS circles, and no trial that actually measured a fertility or pregnancy outcome. The honest answer looks the same in both cases: what a substance does to one hormone panel is not the same finding as what it does to conception, and only a study that measures the second thing can answer it.

Who This Will Not Help

• Anyone looking for a fertility treatment. No trial has tested spearmint tea against ovulation induction, and nothing in the evidence base suggests it belongs in that category at all — it was studied for hirsutism, not conception.
• Anyone who wants a confirmed answer either way. If you are looking for a study that says “safe to drink while trying to conceive” or “avoid it while trying to conceive,” it does not exist yet. Waiting for certainty that isn’t published is a reasonable reaction to this gap, not an overreaction to it.
• Anyone whose hirsutism is not androgen-driven. As covered for hirsutism generally, a substance that lowers androgens has nothing to act on if androgens are not the underlying driver of the hair growth in the first place.
• A replacement for a fertility work-up. Irregular ovulation in PCOS has an evidence-backed path — confirming ovulation, then discussing ovulation-induction options with a clinician — and no tea substitutes for that path.

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