Do more strains mean a better probiotic?
No. ISAPP, verbatim: "Simply having lots of strains is not a guarantee of a more beneficial product." In our set, 14.6% of all organism-slots carry a strain with any human RCT at all, and 92.6% of products have no published trial of the finished formula.
What the extra names on the panel resolve to
A strain count is a count of names, and a name is not a claim. Of the 294 organism slots on the labels of the 27 products in the frozen founding cohort, 43 carry a strain with any human randomised trial under the exact designator printed beside it, and 0 carry one with a human randomised trial for any male-specific outcome.
And a designator is not automatically a designator. Some of the codes printed on these panels look exactly like an ATCC or DSM accession to a shopper who has learned "look for the strain code", and return nothing at all when you search them — house code families such as UF-, SD-, WB-STR-#### and OM. The label is technically accurate. It is practically misleading, and the difference is invisible unless you run the query.