You’ve probably seen it before, promising to balance your hormones, support menopause, or restore natural progesterone levels. The story goes that wild yams contain a compound called diosgenin, which supposedly helps your body make progesterone.
Kate Thomas looks at the wild yam claims of 2025 Bend Spoon award winner, Barbara O’Neill.
“Yes, well, we’ve got a big problem today. There are so many women with hormonal imbalances. And the yam cream is able to restore the balance because it works with the biochemical pathways that the body uses to make hormones.” – O’Neill
Sounds beautifully scientific, doesn’t it? Like the cream is gently nudging your endocrine system back into harmony. Except it’s absolute nonsense. Let’s unpack it.
When O’Neill says it works with your body’s biochemical pathways, what she’s trying to suggest is that the body can somehow take this plant compound, diosgenin, and convert it into progesterone. But humans don’t have the enzyme to do that. That chemical conversion can only be done in the lab using solvents, catalysts and industrial chemistry. It’s how pharmaceutical manufacturers create progesterone from plant sources. But once that process is finished, the product is synthetic progesterone, not wild yam.
If you just rub the raw plant extract onto your skin, your body isn’t participating in some elegant biochemical symphony, it’s just moisturising itself with a bit of herbal lotion. There’s no pathway being activated. It’s as biologically active as rubbing mashed potatoes onto your legs and claiming you’re making vodka. And even if a product did contain actual progesterone – and some of them do without listing it – your skin would still need a proper transdermal delivery base to absorb it. Pharmaceutical hormonal creams like estrogel are designed with alcohols and permeation enhancers to drive molecules through the skin barrier.
As for wild yam creams, they’re typically made in bog standard moisturiser bases that don’t deliver actives into the bloodstream. So, when someone says, it works with your body’s biochemical pathways, what they’re really saying is, “I don’t know what a biochemical pathway is, but I hope I sound impressive.” The only thing it’s working with is your wallet.
Let’s go a step further because this kind of language is really common in wellness marketing. “Supports natural pathways, balances hormones, restores equilibrium.” They’re all vague, non-scientific phrases that sound reassuring but are impossible to test or falsify. They don’t mean anything measurable in biology. If a company genuinely had evidence that a plant extract could be absorbed through the skin and stimulate the human steroidogenic pathway, they’d publish that data, patent it and make billions. Yet there’s no such evidence because the claim collapses the moment you ask for proof.
So, to summarise: wild yam cream does not work with your body’s biochemical pathways. You cannot convert diosgenin into progesterone inside your body. Your skin is an effective barrier and molecules don’t easily cross through it, so therefore wild yam cream is not an effective or regulated treatment for menopause or “hormone imbalance”, whatever that is.
If you want to support your actual biochemical pathways, you can do that with things like sleep, nutrition and proper medical care, not with yam moisturiser. Your body’s biochemical pathways don’t run on root vegetables.
Kate Thomas has over 25 years’ experience in NSW public hospitals, community palliative care, aged care, policy writing and community pharmacy. She is also a reporter on the Skeptic Zone Podcast. Visit Kate on TikTok PrescribeorPass or debunkingbabs; and Instagram – https://linktr.ee/PrescribeorPass
