One product, one panel, one record.
Align Probiotic Bloating Relief + Food Digestion, 28 Capsules — label audit
The label prints its own decay curve — "Contains one billion (1 x 10^9 CFU) probiotic cells when manufactured, and provides 1 x 10^7 probiotic cells until the 'best by' date." That is a hundredfold drop. The page carrying that footnote is badged "Guaranteed Potency", and what is guaranteed is 1% of the number on the box.
This page is an audit of a label. It records what this product’s panel discloses, what of that could be checked against a primary record, and what could not. The score below ranks this product on that disclosure and on nothing else.
The record this page rests on
- NIH label record
- No NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record is on file for this product in this teardown.
- Label read on
- The most recent dated artefact behind this page. Labels change; this is how old our reading of it is.
- Cohort
- Addendum — outside the founding denominators Audited 2026-07-31, outside the frozen founding cohort of 27 and outside every D27 denominator.
- How deep this went
- Label audit — the lighter pass What the label says, what basis it gives for its CFU number, whether the strains are coded, whether a government label record exists — checked and published. No full claim inventory was written for this SKU. It is a real result, and it is a shallower one than the teardowns above it, which is why the page says so before you weigh it against them.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
100.0 out of 100
Rank 1 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score. This rank is shared with 18 other products — 19 products sit on 100.0 and are tied. They hold the position jointly; no tiebreaker is applied, because every tiebreaker available here would be a number the rubric deliberately refused to weigh, smuggled back in to make a list look tidier.
The score measures one thing: how much of what you are buying this company tells you, and how much of that survives being checked against a source that is not the company. It does not measure whether the product works — this site holds no efficacy data of its own, and 0 of 294 organism slots in the founding cohort carry a strain with a human randomised trial for any male-specific outcome, so nobody in this category has evidence that would support a ranking by effect.
Computed over 86% of the rubric by weight — the share of the five questions below this record could answer. The remaining question is unanswered, and unanswered is not nought: it leaves the divisor rather than dragging the score down. That share travels with the number and is never dropped — this score over 86% of the weight and the same score over all of it are different claims.
| Component | Weight | What was counted, and where | Fraction | Weight × fraction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strain identity printed on the panel | 0.24 | 1 of 1 organism slot carries a printed strain designator. | 1 / 1 = 1.0000 | 0.2400 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 1 of 1 organism slot has an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 1 / 1 = 1.0000 | 0.2000 |
| What the CFU count is measured against | 0.22 | Potency basis "both-endpoints": CFU figure printed yes, single basis stated yes, basis reaches expiry yes — 3 of 3. | 3 / 3 = 1.0000 | 0.2200 |
| Printed designators that lead to a human trial | 0.20 | 1 of 1 checked organism slot resolves to at least one human randomised trial under the designator exactly as printed. This counts whether the identity leads to a trial, never what the trial found. | 1 / 1 = 1.0000 | 0.2000 |
| Certification confirmed at the issuer’s own register | 0.14 | Every certification on this record is brand-asserted with the register unreachable, or not yet queried. An unreachable register is a fact about the verification infrastructure, not about this brand, so it may not move its position. | Not answered | — excluded from the divisor, not counted as nought |
0.8600 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, the weight this record could answer, is 1.0000. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 100.0 above.
See this product’s row in the full ranking, alongside the other 153 scored products, or read what each of the five components asks and how to check it .
What this label discloses
Everything in this table is what the product itself states — on the printed panel, on the brand’s own page, or in the label record the manufacturer filed. Nothing in it is checked yet; checking is the next section.
| Disclosure | As recorded |
|---|---|
| CFU as printed | 1 billion CFU at manufacture; 1 x 10^7 probiotic cells until the best-by date |
| What that count is measured against | Both endpoints printed |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 1 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
"Contains one billion (1 x 10^9 CFU) probiotic cells when manufactured, and provides 1 x 10^7 probiotic cells until the 'best by' date." Note the wording shift — "probiotic cells" rather than "CFU" for the best-by figure. Whether 1 x 10^7 is a viable count or a total-cell count is not resolved by the label.
The panel’s own words on potency, verbatim.
The panel prints both a manufacture figure and an expiration figure, so the decline over shelf life is readable off the label itself.
Every organism on the panel carries a printed strain designator. Whether those designators lead anywhere is a separate question, answered below.
| Organism as printed | Designator as printed | Quantity as printed | What the designator resolves to | The query we ran |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum | 35624 | 10 mg | Human RCT | "35624" AND Bifidobacterium AND randomized controlled trial[pt] |
What of that is verifiable
A disclosure is verifiable when a reader can open a record that neither we nor the brand controls and see the same thing. Below is every dated artefact this page rests on. What is absent from this list is not verified, however reasonable it sounds.
- Photograph of the printed panel — 8.00030772086773_Label_Facts.jpghttps://www.alignprobiotics.com/en-us/products/probiotics-digestive-support/align-probiotic-bloating-relief-food-digestion-capsules — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The brand's own label-facts art, whose filename embeds the GTIN 030772086773. The SKU was tied back to the Amazon ASIN in the brief by product name, count and GTIN rather than assumed, because the Amazon page itself was unreadable.
How many of its strains have a human trial for what it is sold for
Across the frozen founding cohort, 0 of 294 organism slots (0.0%) carry an organism with a human randomised controlled trial for any male-specific outcome. Not for this product — for all 27 of the founding teardowns, taken together. That is the number to hold against any men’s probiotic, including this one.
Two further founding-cohort figures for context: only 43 of 294 organism slots carry a strain with any human RCT at all under the exact code printed on the label, and only 2 of 27 products have a published human trial of the finished formula — the thing actually in the bottle. All three figures divide by the frozen cohort of 27 teardowns and 294 organism slots, never by every teardown on this site.
For this product specifically, 1 organism slot carries a strain with a human RCT under the exact designator printed on the label.
A word on what a designator has to clear before it counts here. The organism must be named with the exact strain code that appears in the trial, the trial must be in humans, and the code must return that trial when a reader searches it. A species name does not qualify: the trials in this field are of strains, and a species contains thousands of them.
What it costs per day
$1.11 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $30.99 USD
- What that buys
- 28-capsule pack (28 servings, 1 capsule daily), Target price
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.target.com/p/align-bloating-38-food-digestion-capsules-28ct/-/A-93227244 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
What certification it holds, checked at the issuer’s own register
A badge on a bottle is a claim like any other. Every row below was checked — or not checked — at the certifier’s own public register, never at the badge. Across the frozen founding cohort, 2 of 27 products hold a certification we could confirm at the issuer — a founding-cohort figure, not a count over every teardown on this site.
| Programme | Status at the issuer | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| Any third-party certification | Not checked | 31 July 2026 |
Any third-party certification
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
None claimed. Page badges — "Gluten free", "No Refrigeration Required", "Guaranteed Potency", "Vegetarian" — are all self-asserted. The one testing claim is in-house: "Each lot is DNA tested to ensure it contains our unique strain, Bifidobacterium 35624". That verifies identity, not potency, and names no external laboratory. No NSF, USP, Informed Choice or Non-GMO Project mark appears.
How it differs from the same brand’s women’s version
Across the fourteen same-brand men’s-versus-women’s label diffs run inside the frozen founding cohort, zero men’s or default formulas contain a probiotic strain, identified by designator, that was selected on male-specific evidence. In eight of the fourteen the sex-specific differentiator is a botanical or a mineral, and in five of the fourteen the women’s SKU is better-specified, cheaper, or both — “better-specified” meaning the panel that discloses more, never the panel with more in it. The rule behind each of those counts, and all fourteen pairs classified against it , are published in full. Diffs run on teardowns added since sit outside this fourteen, and outside the sentence above.
This brand sells no women’s counterpart to this product, so there is no diff to run.
Every finding on this page, with the record behind it
Finding 1 hundredfold-decay-disclosed-under-a-guaranteed-potency-badge
1,000,000,000 CFU at manufacture against 10,000,000 cells guaranteed to best-by. 99% of the advertised organisms are not guaranteed to be alive when the capsule is taken, and the page badge says "Guaranteed Potency". This cuts both ways and both halves belong in the same sentence — the marketed figure overstates guaranteed delivered potency by 100 times, and Align is one of very few brands that disclosed the decay curve at all rather than printing an at-manufacture number and letting the reader assume.
The record: Panel image 8.00030772086773_Label_Facts.jpg, footnote verbatim
Finding 2 enzyme-blend-dosed-in-the-wrong-unit
DIGEZYME at 23 mg across alpha-amylase, neutral protease, lactase, cellulase and lipase, with no activity units and no per-enzyme split.
The record: Panel image 8.00030772086773_Label_Facts.jpg
Finding 3 number-one-recommended-tenure-is-self-inconsistent-on-one-page
"the #1 probiotic brand recommended by Gastroenterologists for over 15 years running" in one block and "Align has been the #1 Doctor Recommended Probiotic Brand for the last 10 years" in another — on the same page load. The associated "nearly 2x more than any other probiotic brand" sits behind a footnote whose survey, sample and date are not stated in readable page text.
The record: alignprobiotics.com product page, both strings, 2026-07-31
Finding 4 vitamin-b12-carrying-a-digestion-claim
2.4 mcg, 100% of the daily value — a nutritionally trivial addition being used to support a "helps promote the breakdown of food" claim.
The record: Panel image 8.00030772086773_Label_Facts.jpg
What we could not verify
Every gap below is published rather than deleted. Most are derived automatically from the empty fields in this page’s own record, so a gap cannot be hidden by leaving a box blank.
- Any third-party certification status
- None claimed. Page badges — "Gluten free", "No Refrigeration Required", "Guaranteed Potency", "Vegetarian" — are all self-asserted. The one testing claim is in-house: "Each lot is DNA tested to ensure it contains our unique strain, Bifidobacterium 35624". That verifies identity, not potency, and names no external laboratory. No NSF, USP, Informed Choice or Non-GMO Project mark appears.
- The Amazon price and listing
- amazon.com hard-blocks automated fetching; the ASIN returned a 3,781-byte bot interstitial rather than a product page.
- Any government label record
- None exists for this SKU. Established properly rather than by a single miss: all 13 Align brand records in DSLD were pulled individually and their UPCs read, and every one sits on the 0 37000 prefix. This product's GTIN, 030772086773, is on the 0 30772 prefix — a different P&G company prefix — and does not appear. DSLD is voluntary, so absence is a limit on independent verification, not a defect.
- Enzyme potency
- DIGEZYME is a proprietary blend at 23 mg total across five enzymes with no per-enzyme disclosure — and milligrams are the wrong unit for enzyme potency, which is measured in activity units such as DU, HUT or ALU. The figure tells a buyer nothing.
- Whether 10 million guaranteed cells is an adequate dose
- It is very low in absolute terms relative to the doses used in most 35624 trials, and the label does not address it. A dose-adequacy comparison against the trials was not run in this pass.
- Whether the certification registers would confirm anything
- Non-GMO Project 404, USP 403, NSF 403. Moot here, since no third-party certification is claimed.
How to check every line of this page yourself
Nothing on this page requires trusting us. Every claim above resolves to a record you can open:
- Open the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record linked at the top of this page. It is the label the manufacturer filed, not our transcription of it.
- Compare the CFU line and the suggested-use line against the disclosure table above. If they disagree with us, we are wrong and we want to know.
- Take any strain designator from the panel and run the query printed beside it. The query is published precisely so you can get a different answer than we did.
- Divide the price by the number of days the label’s own dose instructions make the container last. That arithmetic is the whole of the cost-per-day row.
- Search the certifier’s own register for this product, not for the brand. A company can participate in a programme without this product being on its list.
Align does the rarest thing in this category: it puts both ends of the potency curve on the label.
“Contains one billion (1 x 10⁹ CFU) probiotic cells when manufactured, and provides 1 x 10⁷ probiotic cells until the ‘best by’ date.”
Read the arithmetic plainly. A billion at the factory. Ten million guaranteed by the best-by date. That is a hundredfold drop — 99% of the advertised organisms are not guaranteed to be alive when you swallow the capsule. And the page carrying that footnote is badged “Guaranteed Potency”, which, read against the footnote, guarantees one per cent of the number on the box.
Both halves of that have to travel together. The marketed figure overstates guaranteed delivered potency by 100×. And Align disclosed the decay at all, which most of this category does not — the norm is to print an at-manufacture number and let the reader assume it survives. Putting the unflattering second number next to the first is more honest than the norm, even though what it reveals is unflattering.
The strain is the strongest part. Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum 35624 — full subspecies plus strain number, current nomenclature, a real deposited organism with a substantial randomised-trial literature behind it. One of one strains here is matchable to human evidence, which is the best result in its batch. The open question the label does not answer is whether ten million guaranteed cells is anywhere near the dose those trials used.
The enzyme blend is the weak spot: DIGEZYME at 23 mg across five enzymes, with no activity units — and milligrams are simply the wrong unit for enzyme potency.