Primal Queen is a beef organ supplement marketed to women. The company claims that women taking Primal Queen experienced higher energy levels, and greater satisfaction with their menstrual cycle.

But what's actually in Primal Queen? Are its ingredients shown in research studies to have these effects? Does Primal Queen contain any unhealthy ingredients? And is it better than other popular women's health supplements like Hormone Harmony?

In this article we'll answer all of these questions and more, as analyze the ingredients in Primal Queen to give our take on whether or not it's likely to be effective for women's hormonal health, and whether or not it's healthy overall.

We'll share our concerns with one of the company's research claims, and compare Primal Queen's formulation to other popular women's health supplements to pick our winners.

Key takeaways:

• Questionable health claims
• Relatively high heavy metal levels
• We do not currently recommend Primal Queen

Ingredient Analysis

The active ingredients in Primal Queen are shown below:

All of these ingredients are beef organs.

Bovine uterus powder is an ingredient we've never come across before in an Illuminate Health review.

We're unable to identify any research studies on the safety of bovine uterus consumption.

Although it is a whole food and natural, we don't understand why this ingredient would be chosen. If it's because the supplement is marketed to women, this seems illogical unless there is research showing that bovine uterus consumption benefits women's health (which we cannot identify).

The good thing about organ meat consumption is that it's extremely nutritious.

Organ meats are rich in vitamin A, vitamin b12, iron, zinc, folate, selenium, choline and essential fatty acids, as we documented in our heart and soil reviews article.

The inactive ingredients in Primal Queen, shown below, should be safe and non-toxic:

Overall, we consider Primal Queen to be a healthy supplement (in moderation) that may improve energy (due to the nutrient density), but we're unconvinced that it will have any female-hormone-specific health effects.

Questionable Clinical Claim on Brand Website

The company claims their supplement caused significant improvement across in three areas of health in a clinical trial:

What they conveniently leave out is that women in the study taking placebo pills experienced similar effects.

The study was placebo-controlled, and concluded the following:

"Importantly, both the Primal Queen and placebo groups showed improvements over the 12 week study (a common occurrence in supplement trials due to placebo effect and natural cycle variation). Because of this, differences between groups did not reach statistical significance."

It's also important to note that this was a study conducted by a private research organization.

As we've mentioned in many Illuminate Health articles, we recommend that consumers entirely disregard health claims based on this type of study, due to the potential bias.

Clinical trials published in peer-reviewed journals are what we recommend checking for.

Relatively High Heavy Metal Levels

Primal Queen's own third party testing document shows heavy metal levels that are concerning to us.

Arsenic is at a 24.9 part-per-billion (ppb) level and cadmium is at 13.5 ppb.

Both of these levels exceed Prop 65 limits (as documented by EuroFins, the very same company that performed the tests).

We do not necessarily agree with California's Prop 65 limits, but these levels are higher than the vast majority of supplements we've reviewed to date where levels were accessible (and on independent testing sites like ConsumerLab).

Mercury is also listed at <5 ppb, which is highly unscientific in our view, given that the Prop 65 limit is under 10% of that threshold. There is a big difference between a 4 ppb mercury level and a 0.04 ppb mercury level. Primal Queen should publish the absolute level.

We recommend avoiding Primal Queen due to these test results (though we do commend the company for publishing third-party test results).

Primal Queen vs. Popular Women's Supps

Here's how Primal Queen compares to other popular women's health supplements in terms of potential effectiveness, and potential safety, in our opinion:

Hormone Harmony

Like Primal Queen, this brand makes health claims we disagree with.

However, we consider its formulation to be superior from a potential efficacy perspective, as it contains active ingredients like fennel seed which are clinically shown to support female hormonal health. 

Winner: Hormone Harmony

Ristela

Three of the four active ingredients have clinical backing, as we documented in our Ristela review article.

We didn't find any evidence of relatively high heavy metal levels.

Winner: Ristela

Pink Pussycat Honey

This popular women's sexual health supplement is manufactured by a company that received an FDA warning for unapproved drug ingredients being included.

Winner: Primal Queen

Conclusion

Primal Queen is "legit" in the sense that it's made from whole food ingredients and can improve energy.

We do not currently recommend this supplement due to the clinical claim made by the brand regarding comparative efficacy, and due to our concerns over the heavy metal levels.

We hope that the company finds alternate sourcing in the near future, because we would have no major issues with this supplement were it not for the heavy metals.

To the credit of Primal Queen, the company funded a clinical trial and publishes third-party testing, so from a transparency perspective, they're arguably better than average in the supplement industry.

However, we recommend that consumers disregard company-funded clinical trials that are not published in peer-reviewed journals, because the risk of bias and misaligned incentives is too high for the results to be worthwhile.

Since all of the active ingredients in Primal Queen are beef organs, women may be able to get a better value by simply purchasing beef organs directly and taking them in small doses (cooked).