Milk thistle is a plant extract that’s been used for thousands of years, but recent scientific evidence has indicated that it is a very promising treatment for liver damage and toxicity.
It’s been used in everything from clinical trials for advanced liver disease to simple liver cleanse programs. Looking for the best milk thistle supplements?
Our research team looked into what’s on the market and ranked the top ten.
1. PureCo Organic Milk Thistle
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PureCo offers a great milk thistle supplement that is highly concentrated, vegan-friendly, and also certified organic. For these reasons, it’s hard to beat.
Each capsule provides 250 mg of 24:1 milk thistle extract, so its effective dosage is equivalent to that of six grams of raw plant material, making it one of the best supplements on the market in terms of dosage.
The fact that it is organic is especially attractive for people looking for a liver cleanse, because the organic certification means it’s far less likely that any pesticides or herbicides made it into the plant material.
2. Jarrow Formulas Milk Thistle
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The milk thistle supplement from Jarrow Formulas is a high dosage, high-concentration form of the plant extract, and it’s delivered in a vegan-friendly capsule too.
The plant extract is a 30:1 concentrate of milk thistle, so the 150 mg serving size is equal to 4.5 grams of raw milk thistle plant material.
Without much in the way of additives or preservatives, Jarrow Formulas Milk Thistle is an excellent supplement.
3. Oregon’s Wild Harvest Milk Thistle Dandelion
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This combination supplement delivers milk thistle alongside extracts from other liver-cleansing supplements like dandelion root, burdock root, and artichoke leaf.
The dosage of the milk thistle is just shy of 600 mg when you combine the raw milk thistle seed and the powdered extract that delivers the active ingredient, silymarin. This is pretty good, though many competitors offer higher doses.
The real advantage to Oregon’s Wild Harvest is its USDA organic certification, which means that the likelihood of pesticide and herbicide contamination is very low, and its other active ingredients. If you are looking for an overall liver cleansing supplement, this is great, but if you need a high dose of milk thistle, you should look elsewhere.
4. Naturenetics Liver Smart
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Naturenetics makes a milk thistle extract supplement that’s specially formulated for liver health and is rigorously tested for purity, both in terms of bacterial content and heavy metal content.
This is especially important for a liver supplement, given that your liver is precisely what is going to be filtering out any heavy metal contaminants.
Each vegetarian capsule provides 250 mg of milk thistle extract alongside a proprietary blend of other supplements to help your liver, like dandelion root, artichoke leaf, and beetroot.
For a targeted liver detox, Naturenetics Liver Smart is an excellent choice.
5. aSquared Nutrition Milk Thistle Extract
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aSquared Nutrition has one of the most simple and straightforward milk thistle supplements out there. While it is not particularly concentrated, the supplement is quite minimalist, as it has only three ingredients.
The 250 mg of 4:1 milk thistle extract, rice powder, and gelatin are the only three ingredients in the supplement, so if you really want to keep things simple for your body, this is the way to do it.
People looking for a high dosage may want to look elsewhere, but if all you need is the equivalent of one gram of milk thistle plant material, it’s a pretty good choice.
6. Puritan’s Pride Milk Thistle
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Puritan’s Pride provides a milk thistle supplement that is high in dose and low in added extras. Each capsule provides a healthy 250 mg of milk thistle extract at a 4:1 concentration, meaning that one serving is equal to one gram of raw milk thistle.
The supplement is delivered in a gelatin based softgel, which makes it easy to absorb but also unsuitable for strict vegetarians and vegans–gelatin is animal-derived.
The caramel and titanium dioxide colorings might not be up everyone’s alley, but in terms of active ingredients, Puritan’s Pride is still a good choice.
7. Superior Labs Milk Thistle
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Superior Labs makes a milk thistle supplement that is moderate in dosage but fairly straightforward in its formulation.
Each vegan capsule, made from vegetable derived cellulose, contains 250 mg of milk thistle extract, and nothing else, aside from rice powder.
It’s a pretty good choice if you want a simple milk thistle supplement and know that a higher dosage is not what you are looking for, but aside from that, it doesn’t have too many defining characteristics.
8. Thorne Research Liver Cleanse
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Thorne Research Liver Cleanse is a blend of several supplements, including milk thistle, that is designed to help your liver function better.
In addition to milk thistle, it features dandelion root, burdock extract, barberina, and uva-ursi extract. The main problem with this supplement is that all of the ingredients are hidden behind a proprietary blend, so it’s not possible to know how much of each ingredient you are getting per capsule.
Thorne Research is a reputable company, so it’s likely that their nutritionists know what they are doing, but still, it’s a lot more helpful when you actually know what the dosage of the supplements you are taking is.
9. Herb Pharm Milk Thistle
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Herb Pharm has a milk thistle that’s in a pretty unconventional format: a liquid extract sold in a dropper bottle. This means that you can deliver essentially any dosage you want, though your are limited quite severely by the precision of the dropper vial.
A standard serving is one dropper-full, which provides 625 mg of milk thistle extract. The solvent in this case is alcohol, which is a bit problematic if you are trying a liver detox–alcohol itself is pretty rough on your liver, so it may be counteracting the benefits of the milk thistle.
It’s one possible option if you want to be able to incorporate milk thistle into shakes or smoothies, but most people will want to opt for a capsule-based milk thistle supplement.
10. Nature’s Bounty Milk Thistle
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Nature’s Bounty has a reputation for economical, simple versions of popular supplements, which makes its products somewhat hit or miss.
This is certainly the case here, as the milk thistle content is mediocre at 250 mg of a 4:1 extract, but the real problem is the excessive content of binders, stabilizers, and other additives that—based on what’s in the supplements made by other competitors—clearly don’t need to be in the supplement.
You’re getting an average dose of milk thistle, but you are also getting silica, maltodextrin, magnesium stearate, and a handful of other added ingredients. At the end of the day, there are just better options out there on pretty much every front when it comes to a good milk thistle supplement.
Milk thistle benefits and side effects
For a kick start to detox and cleanse your liver, a milk thistle supplement is a great method. Milk thistle contains active ingredients that appear to boost liver function and help reduce damage to the liver that’s resulted from excessive use of alcohol in the past.
Benefits
While milk thistle has a long history as a “liver tonic” or an herbal remedy for organ problems, its benefits are rooted squarely in solid medical research.
Milk thistle has been a strong candidate for therapy in liver disease, indicating that it has several different properties that assist with liver function.
According to a review article by researchers at Oregon Health Sciences University published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, milk thistle appears to protect the liver through a number of mechanisms (1).
First, it seems to shield DNA inside the liver from damage, in part by functioning as an antioxidant to clean out free radicals in the liver.
Milk thistle also appears to increase the rate of synthesis of proteins in the liver, which helps the liver repair itself.
Finally, milk thistle absorbs calcium and iron in the liver, which the authors claim has a positive effect on liver health.
Other research by David D.J. Kroll, Heather S. Shaw, and Nicholas H. Oberlies suggests that milk thistle can accomplish all of this with minimal interaction with other biologically active compounds (2).
This is a highly desirable quality for an herbal supplement for liver issues, because any drug interactions could have strong negative effects on the liver, especially if it was not at top capacity to begin with.
Milk thistle may also be helpful for rehabilitating livers that have been damaged by excessive alcohol use. That was the conclusion of a study published in the journal Phytotherapy Research by researchers in Italy (3).
In a review of several studies on animal models, they showed that milk thistle is effective at reducing damage from a number of toxic compounds to the liver, and repairs the type of damage typically seen in alcohol-related liver damage.
While it can’t fully reverse the damaging effects of chronic, excessive alcohol consumption, there does seem to be evidence that milk thistle can contribute to reducing and repairing the damage to the liver.
A systematic review published in 2005 came to the same conclusion (4). Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine concluded that, while evidence is still emerging, the current state of the science was very promising and the authors recommended additional clinical trials in the future to study the use of milk thistle in treating alcoholic liver damage.
The primary mechanism by which milk thistle appears to help alcoholic liver damage is reduction of the oxidative damage to the liver from ethanol (i.e. drinking alcohol).
This was what researchers in India discovered when they exposed rats to high doses of alcohol with or without a milk thistle supplement as part of their diet (5).
The milk thistle reduced biomarkers of oxidative damage in the rats’ blood, similar to the effects of a high-dose antioxidant used as a comparison.
Notably, the researchers found better results when milk thistle was used and alcohol was avoided—you can interpret this to mean that milk thistle isn’t a ticket to keep drinking heavily and continue to damage your liver.
Side Effects
As far as supplements go, milk thistle seems to be quite safe.
A report published in the scientific journal Integrative Cancer Therapies in 2007 noted that milk thistle is quite inert when it comes to interactions with prescription medications (6).
While a number of studies mention side effects ranging from gastrointestinal problems to headaches to skin rashes, a systematic review notes that randomized clinical trials found more or less the same rate of side effects in control groups (who received an inert placebo pill) as in the experimental groups (7).
This implies that the effects were not actually related to the milk thistle supplement, and were instead random occurrences.
While small, there is a possibility that milk thistle could interact with other pharmaceutical drugs that you are taking.
If you take prescription medication, or if you have liver disease, you should ask your doctor about the possibility for any undesirable side effects due to interactions between milk thistle and your current medications.
Recommended Dosage
A wide range of clinical trials have tested the efficacy of milk thistle supplements, and they’ve used a broad range of doses.
As reported in a scientific article by Janice Post-White, Elena J. Ladas, and Kara M. Kelly, the dosage in these studies ranges from 160 mg of milk thistle extract per day (usually standardized to 80% silymarin) up to 560 mg per day (8).
More studies have used the higher end of this dosage range, so something around 500 mg of milk thistle extract is what you should aim for if you want to replicate the most successful clinical studies.
Recap
Milk thistle is a supplement with a strong body of research supportings its use for both treating liver disease and as part of liver cleanse or detoxification for people who think they’ve had subpar liver health.
Milk thistle, and its active ingredient silymarin, work to improve liver function by halting oxidative damage and through increasing synthesis of proteins for liver repair. For best results, you should follow a protocol that’s been tested in scientific research.
The optimal dose seems to be in the neighborhood of 500 mg of milk thistle extract (with 80% silymarin content) per day. Because of the evidence for its efficacy, milk thistle can be used as a core component of a liver cleanse or detox.
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