About

The Onion Pill is an expression popularized on the /fit/ and /pol/ boards on 4chan in reference to the hypothesis that consuming onion juice increases testosterone, based on Iranian studies demonstrating that rats fed onions have a marked increase in the sex hormone.

Origin

On November 18th, 2017, a user on 4chan's /fit/^[1] board posted a thread with the green text ">he hasn't taken the onion pill," which linked to several fitness and nutrion websites claiming that onions increase testosterone and sperm creation in the testes. Prior to being archived the thread accumulated upwards of 320 responses.

Spread

Over the next 24 hours, many additional threads about onions increasing testosterone were submitted to /pol/,^[8][9][10] leading to the creation of several Virgin vs. Chad memes comparing Soy Boys to onion eaters (shown below).

On November 19th, writer Will Sommer posted several screenshots from the 4chan threads (shown below).^[2] On November 20th, Redditor ZB4 posted a link to Sommer's tweet in the /r/ChapoTrapHouse^[7] subreddit. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the 4chan onion threads, including Metro,^[3] Indy100,^[4] The Poke^[5] and Lifehacker.^[6]

Search Interest

External References