One product, one panel, one record.
BioGaia Gastrus® Probiotic Chewables (30 chewable tablets) — label audit
Both organisms carry full culture-collection designators — which 99 of the 166 labels read also do, so it is the majority practice rather than a distinction — and then the panel stops. The split between the two strains is not printed, an earlier version of the same label did print it, and the peer-reviewed literature now disagrees with itself about what one tablet contains. There is no potency basis anywhere: not on the label, not on the product page, not in a twenty-question FAQ.
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
- 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 Torn down 2026-07-31, after the founding cohort of 27 was frozen. It sits outside every D27 denominator this site publishes and changes none of them.
- How deep this went
- Full forensic teardown Panel transcribed, every strain designator queried, every certification chased to its issuer’s own register, and the literature behind each marketing claim opened and read.
- What did not survive verification
- Part of this page was refuted or could not be reproduced One number on this record is not settled, and it is the one the product's own constipation claim depends on. The current label prints a 200 million CFU blend total across two organisms and no per-strain split. An earlier version of the same label printed 100 million each, and that version survives on the US distributor's site — but its ingredient list dates it to a superseded formulation. The peer-reviewed literature makes it worse rather than better: one paper describes the tablet as 2 x 10^8 CFU of each strain (400 million total, double the label), another as 2 x 10^8 CFU total (matching it). What is not quotable from this page is any per-strain dose for Gastrus, and therefore any statement about whether this tablet delivers the dose of DSM 17938 that the adult constipation trials used. Everything else here — the designators, the blend total, the absence of a potency basis — is corroborated between the government record and the brand's own materials and stands as written.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
59.7 out of 100
Rank 72 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score. This rank is shared with 7 other products — 8 products sit on 59.7 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 | 2 of 2 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 2 / 2 = 1.0000 | 0.2400 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 0 of 2 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 0 / 2 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| What the CFU count is measured against | 0.22 | Potency basis "none-stated": CFU figure printed yes, single basis stated no, basis reaches expiry no — 1 of 3. | 1 / 3 = 0.3333 | 0.073333 |
| Printed designators that lead to a human trial | 0.20 | 2 of 2 checked organism slots resolve 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. | 2 / 2 = 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 |
0.513333 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, the weight this record could answer, is 0.5969. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 59.7 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 | 200 million CFU (L. reuteri Gastrus Blend) |
| What that count is measured against | No basis stated |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 2 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
A CFU number appears with no temporal basis of any kind. A count with no basis is not a quantity; there is no date at which it is claimed to be true.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| L. reuteri | ATCC PTA 6475 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | "DSM 17938" AND "ATCC PTA 6475" AND randomized controlled trial[pt] |
| L. reuteri | DSM 17938 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | "DSM 17938" 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.
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 311007 (opens in a new tab) captured NIH's transcription of the physical label, on-market, version code 110471-004, country of origin Sweden. UPC cross-check passed digit for digit: the Shopify barcode 602359460179 equals the DSLD upcSku 6 02359 46017 9. This is the only route to the Supplement Facts for this product, because the brand's own page publishes no panel at all. Source for the blend total, the empty per-strain quantity rows, the absence of any potency basis, and the "Clinically proven" label statement.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — biogaia-gastrus-2026-07-31https://www.biogaia.com/products/gastrus — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The live brand page, HTTP 200 to a plain request with a desktop user agent — BioGaia does not block automation, which after a great many Akamai 403s in this audit is worth recording. Source for the price, the Shopify product JSON (SKU 46017, barcode 602359460179, product_type "Adults"), the seven product images that do not include a panel, the claim set, and the unhedged title tag.
- Internet Archive capture — 20231128184050 (opens in a new tab) captured Price and formulation stability check. The snapshot shows the identical $28.99 and the identical formulation prose, two years earlier.
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, 2 organism slots carry 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
$0.97 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $28.99 USD
- What that buys
- 30 chewable tablets, one tablet daily (a 60-tablet 2-pack sells at $42.00)
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.biogaia.com/products/gastrus — 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 |
|---|---|---|
| No third-party certification claimed | Not checked | 31 July 2026 |
| EvidenceBiotics® | Not checked | 31 July 2026 |
| "Non-GMO ingredients", "Milk free", "Lactose free", "Gluten free" | Not checked | 31 July 2026 |
No third-party certification claimed
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
All three BioGaia product pages plus the FAQ were scanned for NSF, USP Verified, Informed, ConsumerLab, BSCG, Non-GMO Project, cGMP, ISO and third-party. The only apparent NSF hits are substring false positives inside the CSS token TRANSFORM, and the single "third party" hit is a Shopify theme comment. The brand claims no certification, which is a different statement from not holding one. Both registers that would settle it are hard-blocked: nsf.org/api/certified-product returns Cloudflare 403 and listings.nsf.org serves an Angular shell with no data; quality-supplements.org and usp.org both return Akamai 403. Two attempts each. Record this as "none claimed, and unverified either way" — never as "does not hold certification".
EvidenceBiotics®
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
Not a certification. EvidenceBiotics® is a BioGaia trademark, defined on the brand's own page as "a category of premium probiotics held to the highest scientific and quality standards". No issuer, no register, no audit. Recorded here so that a reader who mistakes it for a mark can see what it actually is.
"Non-GMO ingredients", "Milk free", "Lactose free", "Gluten free"
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
Plain formulation claims, not certifications. Note in particular that "Non-GMO ingredients" is not "Non-GMO Project Verified" and no third-party mark accompanies it. "Clinically proven" is printed on the physical label itself, transcribed by DSLD under statement type "Formulation re: Other".
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 the-per-strain-split-was-disclosed-on-an-earlier-label-and-is-not-on-this-one
The current panel gives a blend total only — "L. reuteri Gastrus Blend, 200 million CFU" — with both organisms as nested rows carrying no quantity at all. In dose terms that makes Gastrus a two-strain proprietary blend with a disclosed total. An earlier version of the same label did print the split (100 million each), and it survives on the US distributor's site alongside an ingredient list that dates it. Disclosure went backwards.
The record: DSLD 311007 (nested rows encoded quantity 0, unit NP) against the Everidis Health Sciences panel showing 100M + 100M with palm oil in Other Ingredients — open ithttps://everidis.com/product/biogaia-gastrus/ — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 2 the-published-literature-now-disagrees-about-what-one-tablet-contains
This is what non-disclosure produces. PMID 31502382 (Helicobacter, 2020) describes the Gastrus tablet as "2 x 10^8 CFU L reuteri DSM 17 938 plus 2 x 10^8 CFU L reuteri ATCC PTA 6475 (Gastrus®)" — 400 million total, double what the label claims. PMID 31065301 describes the same product as "L. reuteri (Gastrus®) at a dose of 2 x 10^8 CFU" — 200 million, matching the label. Two peer-reviewed papers, one product, two different answers, and no printed split to arbitrate between them.
The record: PMID 31502382 and PMID 31065301, both quoting a Gastrus dose, in direct conflict — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 no-potency-basis-anywhere-on-any-brand-property
The label says "200 million CFU" and nothing else — the full DSLD record was searched for manufactur, expir, guarant, best before and shelf, and the only hit is the "Manufactured for: BioGaia USA" contact block. The product page says "a minimum of 200 million cfu", and "minimum" is a floor at an unspecified point in time rather than a basis. The FAQ runs to more than twenty questions including three on storage and says nothing about it. The nearest thing to a basis is on a brand-story page: "This ensures that every product delivers the minimum number of live active cultures (CFUs) stated on the label — from the first dose to the last", which is an in-use assertion about an opened package, not a through-expiry guarantee.
The record: DSLD 311007 full-record search; biogaia.com product page and /pages/faq; /pages/evidence-biotics, all 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.biogaia.com/pages/evidence-biotics — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 4 the-only-expiry-guarantee-is-on-a-distributors-website-in-another-country
An explicit expiry guarantee does exist in writing: "BioGaia probiotics are tested to ensure the stated CFU count remains available through to the end of shelf life. This means the number shown on the label reflects the amount confirmed at expiry, not just at manufacture." It is not on a BioGaia property. That site's footer reads "Hak cipta © 2024 ... Pharma Ace Sdn. Bhd. (802929-V)" — a Malaysian distributor, not BioGaia AB. A distributor's blog post is not a manufacturer's guarantee, and this label's basis stays unstated.
The record: biogaia.com.my/resources/probiotics-shelf-life/, footer identifying Pharma Ace Sdn. Bhd. (802929-V), read 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://biogaia.com.my/resources/probiotics-shelf-life/ — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 5 there-is-no-supplement-facts-panel-on-the-product-page-at-all
Seven product images on the page, and none of them is the Supplement Facts. Not in the HTML, not in structured data, not in the Shopify payload, not as an image. A buyer cannot see the panel before purchase in any form — only a prose sentence in the description. The only route to it is the NIH label database. The two sibling BioGaia SKUs at least publish theirs as a PNG; this one publishes nothing.
The record: biogaia.com/products/gastrus fetched HTTP 200 on 2026-07-31, all seven images enumerated; panel obtained from DSLD 311007 instead — open ithttps://www.biogaia.com/products/gastrus — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 6 the-constipation-claim-may-rest-on-half-the-studied-dose-of-one-strain
The page claims Gastrus eases constipation and supports regularity. The adult functional-constipation evidence is for DSM 17938 alone, at 2 x 10^8 CFU a day — PMID 29022390 (56 adults, 105 days) and PMID 25531996 (40 adults, four weeks, bowel movements per week +2.6 against +1.0 on placebo, p=0.046, with no effect on stool consistency). If the 100M/100M split is correct, this tablet delivers 1 x 10^8 CFU of DSM 17938 — half the dose those trials used, inside a blend whose split the brand no longer prints. The uncertainty is the brand's to resolve, and it is the reason the claim cannot be checked.
The record: PMID 29022390 and PMID 25531996 (both 2 x 10^8 CFU/day of DSM 17938) against a label that prints only a 200 million blend total — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 7 the-title-tag-drops-the-hedge-the-page-copy-carefully-keeps
The on-page copy is properly hedged — "Ease occasional GI discomfort, constipation, gas and bloating*", with the asterisk and the full DSHEA disclaimer present. The page title is not: "BioGaia Gastrus | Adult Probiotic for Constipation, Diarrhea, Gas, Bloating". No "occasional", no asterisk. Title tags are what a search engine renders in the results and what an AI summariser ingests, which makes the unqualified version the one most people actually read. The Shopify tag taxonomy that drives the site's own filters does the same thing.
The record: The <title> element and <meta description> of biogaia.com/products/gastrus against the body copy on the same page, 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.biogaia.com/products/gastrus — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 8 clinically-proven-is-printed-on-the-label-as-an-unqualified-absolute
"Clinically proven" appears on the physical label, transcribed by NIH. The most rigorous trial of this exact strain pair — PMID 39485760, 65 IBS-D patients over six weeks — missed its primary endpoint: intestinal permeability did not differ, hs-CRP fell in the dual-strain arm (p=0.041) and symptoms improved at three weeks (p=0.032), but at six weeks nothing differed from placebo. There is a genuinely positive on-strain, on-dose adult trial as well (see the body of this page); "proven", unqualified, is stronger than either supports.
The record: DSLD 311007 label statement "Clinically proven" against PMID 39485760 (PLoS One 2024, primary endpoint null) — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 9 no-mens-outcome-evidence-exists-for-either-strain
Double-queried per project rule. "DSM 17938" AND (men[ti] OR male[ti] OR prostate OR testosterone) returns 0; the broadened alternative-spelling query returns 126, all incidental — mixed-sex cohorts and male mice, none with a men's-specific outcome. For the other strain, "ATCC PTA 6475" AND testosterone returns 2, and the five-spelling alternative returns the identical 2. Both are covered on the sibling Osfortis page, and one of them is a null testosterone trial that BioGaia's own employee co-authored. The brand makes no men's claim on this SKU, and its Shopify product_type is simply "Adults".
The record: PubMed E-utilities, four query formulations across the two designators, run 2026-07-31 and printed verbatim in the teardown
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.
- No third-party certification claimed status
- All three BioGaia product pages plus the FAQ were scanned for NSF, USP Verified, Informed, ConsumerLab, BSCG, Non-GMO Project, cGMP, ISO and third-party. The only apparent NSF hits are substring false positives inside the CSS token TRANSFORM, and the single "third party" hit is a Shopify theme comment. The brand claims no certification, which is a different statement from not holding one. Both registers that would settle it are hard-blocked: nsf.org/api/certified-product returns Cloudflare 403 and listings.nsf.org serves an Angular shell with no data; quality-supplements.org and usp.org both return Akamai 403. Two attempts each. Record this as "none claimed, and unverified either way" — never as "does not hold certification".
- EvidenceBiotics® status
- Not a certification. EvidenceBiotics® is a BioGaia trademark, defined on the brand's own page as "a category of premium probiotics held to the highest scientific and quality standards". No issuer, no register, no audit. Recorded here so that a reader who mistakes it for a mark can see what it actually is.
- "Non-GMO ingredients", "Milk free", "Lactose free", "Gluten free" status
- Plain formulation claims, not certifications. Note in particular that "Non-GMO ingredients" is not "Non-GMO Project Verified" and no third-party mark accompanies it. "Clinically proven" is printed on the physical label itself, transcribed by DSLD under statement type "Formulation re: Other".
- The per-strain CFU split between ATCC PTA 6475 and DSM 17938
- The current label does not print it, and the two published sources that state a split disagree. BioGaia's US distributor Everidis publishes a Gastrus panel reading "Lactobacillus reuteri ATCC PTA 6475 100 million CFU; Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938 100 million CFU" — but that is an older label version, because its Other Ingredients list includes palm oil, which is absent from the current biogaia.com list, and it uses the retired genus name. Meanwhile PMID 31502382 describes the tablet as "2 x 10^8 CFU L reuteri DSM 17 938 plus 2 x 10^8 CFU L reuteri ATCC PTA 6475 (Gastrus®)", i.e. 400 million total, double the label; and PMID 31065301 says "L. reuteri (Gastrus®) at a dose of 2 x 10^8 CFU", i.e. 200 million, matching it. Treat 100M/100M as likely but not label-confirmed.
- Whether any third-party certification is held
- NSF's and USP's registers are both hard-blocked to automation — Cloudflare 403 on nsf.org, an Angular shell with no data on listings.nsf.org, Akamai 403 on quality-supplements.org and usp.org, two attempts each. The brand claims no certification, so this is nearly moot, but the correct statement is that no independent confirmation was possible in either direction.
- A Supplement Facts panel published by the seller
- There is none. The Gastrus product page carries seven product images and not one of them is the panel. A buyer on biogaia.com cannot see the Supplement Facts before purchase in any form — only a prose sentence in the description. The panel transcribed on this page was obtained from the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database instead.
- The government's own scanned label documents
- DSLD's label-scan PDFs did not serve on this pass — api.ods.od.nih.gov/dsld/s3/pdf/311007/... returns HTTP 403, and the v9 path returns the single-page-application HTML shell rather than a PDF. The DSLD record references 311007_document.pdf but the asset was unreachable, so this page relies on DSLD's structured transcription, which agreed with the brand's own materials wherever both existed.
- The capsule count of the adjacent Gastrus Capsules SKU
- BioGaia also sells Gastrus Probiotic Capsules at $46.99 (UPC 602359460605, SKU 46060) with the same two strains and the same 200-million claim. The capsule count is not in the Shopify payload and no DSLD record was found under that UPC, so no cost per day is published for it here.
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.
BioGaia does the hard part and then stops one line short.
The hard part is the designators. Both organisms on this panel carry a real culture-collection deposit — L. reuteri ATCC PTA 6475 and L. reuteri DSM 17938 — and that alone puts this label ahead of most of the products in this audit. DSM 17938 has 309 PubMed records under its exact code, 105 of them RCT-tagged; it is the deepest single-strain evidence base in the consumer probiotic market. And unusually, the pair has a trial that matches the product: PMID 41821785, 140 adults with Rome-IV IBS, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, dosed at 2 × 10⁸ CFU of exactly these two strains for fourteen weeks, with significant improvement in GSRS-IBS from week six. Publish it with its caveats — PubMed indexes it as a journal article rather than under the Randomised Controlled Trial publication type, and it is one trial, not a body of evidence — but it is real, and almost nothing else in this audit clears that bar.
The line it stops short of is the split. The panel gives a blend total: 200 million CFU, with both organisms listed beneath it as nested rows carrying no quantity at all. In dose terms that makes this a two-strain proprietary blend with a disclosed total. An earlier version of the same label printed 100 million each — it survives on the US distributor’s site, datable by the palm oil in its Other Ingredients list, which the current formulation does not contain. Disclosure went backwards.
The consequence is not theoretical. Two peer-reviewed papers now describe the same tablet differently: one says 2 × 10⁸ CFU of each strain — 400 million, double the label — and the other says 2 × 10⁸ CFU total, matching it. That is exactly what non-disclosure produces, and it means the page’s own constipation claim cannot be checked. The adult functional-constipation evidence is for DSM 17938 alone at 2 × 10⁸ CFU a day. If the split really is 100/100, this tablet delivers half of it.
Then the potency basis, which is not there at all. The label says “200 million CFU” and stops — the full government record was searched for manufactur, expir, guarant, best before and shelf, and the only hit is the manufacturer’s address block. The product page offers “a minimum of 200 million cfu”, and minimum without a date is a floor at an unspecified moment. The FAQ runs to more than twenty questions, three of them about storage, and says nothing. The only through-expiry guarantee anywhere in BioGaia’s orbit sits on a Malaysian distributor’s website, under a footer reading “Pharma Ace Sdn. Bhd.” That is not the manufacturer, and a distributor’s blog post is not a guarantee.
And the panel itself is not on the page. Seven product images, none of them the Supplement Facts. The only way to read what is in this tablet before buying it is to go to the National Institutes of Health.