How much alfalfa should you take a day?

There's no established or recommended daily dose of alfalfa — no health authority sets one, and no trial has compared different doses against each other to find an effective amount. What exists instead: typical commercial serving sizes, and the very different amounts used in the handful of small studies that have looked at alfalfa in humans at all.

What a typical supplement label offers

Commercial alfalfa dietary supplements are most commonly sold as dried-leaf tablets or capsules, usually somewhere in the 400–650 mg range per tablet, taken multiple times a day; some brands sell 1,000 mg capsules or loose tea instead. None of these amounts come from a dose-finding trial. They're set by the manufacturer based on convention and tablet size, not on research establishing that a particular amount does something a smaller or larger one doesn't.

What research doses actually look like

The two human studies that exist used amounts that don't map onto a typical tablet regimen at all:

• A 1980 study on cholesterol had three volunteers add whole alfalfa seeds to their diet for three weeks — a food-level amount, not a milligram figure you could compare to a capsule label.
• A 2024 randomized trial in 60 men with a fertility diagnosis used 6 grams a day of alfalfa seed powder, taken alongside vitamin E, for 12 weeks — several times more than a typical over-the-counter tablet regimen delivers, and seed powder rather than the dried leaf most supplements are made from.

Because no one has tested dried-leaf capsules against a placebo at a specific dose, there's no research basis for recommending a number of capsules, and this page isn't going to invent one.

One more thing worth knowing before you pick a number

Whatever amount you're considering, the safety picture matters more here than the exact dose does. Alfalfa side effects and who should not take alfalfa cover specific situations — including one where the amount you're already taking of something else (a blood thinner) matters more than how much alfalfa you take.

Questions people ask

How many mg of alfalfa should I take a day?

There's no established number. Commercial tablets are commonly sold in the 400–650 mg range, taken several times a day, but that reflects what manufacturers sell, not a dose a trial has shown to be effective or optimal.

How much alfalfa is safe?

No trial has specifically tested a range of doses for safety either. See alfalfa side effects and who should not take alfalfa for what the safety literature actually covers, regardless of dose.

Is 500 mg or 650 mg of alfalfa better?

Neither amount comes from a trial establishing an effective or safer dose — it's a manufacturer's choice of tablet size, not a research-backed one.

How much alfalfa did the cholesterol study use?

The one human study on alfalfa and cholesterol, from 1980, had participants add whole alfalfa seeds to their diet rather than take a measured capsule dose, which is part of why it doesn't translate into a supplement-label recommendation. See alfalfa benefits: what the research does and doesn't show for what that small study found.