One product, one panel, one record.
Culturelle Digestive Daily Probiotic Capsules — label audit
Culturelle guarantees its 10 billion CFU at the expiration date and attacks the alternative in its own page copy — "Some competitors claim the number of live probiotics based on when the product was made." The competitor that describes is Align, precisely and exactly, and the two products sit next to each other on the same pharmacy shelf.
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, outside the frozen founding cohort of 27 and outside every D27 denominator.
- 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.
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 "through-expiry": 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 | 10 billion CFU per capsule (Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG — 40 mg, 10 billion CFU) |
| What that count is measured against | Through expiry |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 1 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
Label: "Guaranteed potency through date on box when stored as directed." / "Guaranteed purity & potency". Live page, and this is among the strongest at-expiry statements encountered anywhere in this project: "Some competitors claim the number of live probiotics based on when the product was made. We measure the number of live probiotics at product expiration date, guaranteeing you get the full amount per our label whenever you purchase them."
The panel’s own words on potency, verbatim.
The panel guarantees the count through the expiration or best-by date. This is the only basis that is falsifiable by a reader holding the bottle.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lactobacillus rhamnosus (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus) | GG | 40 mg, 10 billion CFU | Human RCT | ("Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG"[tiab] OR "Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GG"[tiab] OR "ATCC 53103"[tiab]) AND randomized controlled trial[pt] AND humans[mh] |
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 250856 (opens in a new tab) captured 30-count, UPC 0 49100 40009 9. UPC cross-check passed: the live Shopify variant sku 049100400099 matches this record exactly, so the panel published here is definitively this SKU. Sister records for the same formula at other counts: 250851 (10 ct), 250853 (14 ct), 250859 (30 ct), 250862 (60 ct), 250864 (50 ct), 250846 (80 ct), 273846.
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 250864 (opens in a new tab) captured 50-count, UPC 0 49100 40021 1, matching live Shopify sku 049100400211 — the second passed UPC cross-check on this product.
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 267571 (opens in a new tab) captured Culturelle Women's 4-in-1 Protection, UPC 0 49100 40059 4, matching live Shopify sku 049100400594. The women's panel used in the comparison.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — culturelle-digestive-daily-pdp-2026-07-31https://culturelle.com/products/digestive-daily-probiotic — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Fetched HTTP 200 direct. Source of the at-expiry page copy quoted verbatim, the prices, and the "most clinically researched strain" footnote.
- Internet Archive capture — 20251012170012 (opens in a new tab) captured The discontinued Culturelle Men's Daily Health SKU, used to cross-check its Supplement Facts image. No DSLD record exists for that product under four name spellings and three UPC formats.
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
$0.60 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $17.99 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle (30 servings, 1 capsule daily)
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://culturelle.com/products/digestive-daily-probiotic — 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 is claimed, so there is no issuer register to check. A word-boundary scan of the brand page for NSF, USP Verified, Informed-Choice, Non-GMO Project, ConsumerLab, cGMP, third-party tested and certified by returned zero hits on every term. What is claimed is "vegetarian, non-GMO and gluten-free ▲", "Meets the FDA's guidelines for gluten-free" — a self-assertion against a federal standard, certified by nobody — and "Allergy friendly — free from milk, wheat, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts". Also on-label and marketing rather than quality: "The most trusted probiotic brand — Based on the 2019 BrandSpark American Shopper Study."
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.
Compared against Culturelle® Women's 4-in-1 Protection Capsules (formerly Women's Healthy Balance). Diffed .
What the two panels differ by
- The women's SKU hides behind a proprietary blend and the unisex one does not. Women's 4-in-1 is "A Proprietary Probiotic Blend — 154 mg, 15 billion CFU" across five strains with no per-strain CFU disclosed. Digestive Daily is one named strain at 40 mg and 10 billion CFU. DSLD 267571 versus DSLD 250856
- The women's SKU has a genuine anatomical rationale — vaginal microbiota, pH, urinary tract — built on five designated strains: L. crispatus LBV 88, L. rhamnosus LBV 96, L. rhamnosus GG, L. gasseri LBV 150N and L. jensenii LBV 116. Digestive Daily has no sex-specific rationale of any kind. DSLD 267571, Shopify sku 049100400594 matching its UPC 0 49100 40059 4
- Women's 4-in-1 is $27.49 for 30 capsules against Digestive Daily's $17.99 for 30 — 53 percent more per day. culturelle.com variant JSON, read 2026-07-31
What is identical across the pair
- Both contain Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG.
- Both are one capsule daily, 30 capsules to a bottle.
Every finding on this page, with the record behind it
Finding 1 most-researched-strain-is-a-volume-claim
"The most clinically researched strain in the world" is footnoted by the brand itself as "Based on the number of Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG studies as of January 2019" — explicitly a claim about study volume, not about effect size or outcome. The footnote is honest and the 186-RCT count is consistent with it. Volume is still not efficacy: a strain can be the most-studied and have modest or mixed results for any given endpoint.
The record: culturelle.com product page footnote, read 2026-07-31, against 186 RCTs on PubMed — open ithttps://culturelle.com/products/digestive-daily-probiotic — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 2 most-trusted-brand-is-a-seven-year-old-shopper-survey
"The most trusted probiotic brand — Based on the 2019 BrandSpark American Shopper Study." A consumer survey, seven years stale, printed on the label.
The record: DSLD 250856 label copy — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 no-third-party-certification-claimed
"Meets the FDA's guidelines for gluten-free" is a self-assertion against a federal standard, not a certification by anyone. No NSF, USP Verified, Informed-Choice, Non-GMO Project or ConsumerLab mark appears — zero hits on a word-boundary scan of every term.
The record: Word-boundary scan of culturelle.com product page, 2026-07-31
Finding 4 womens-sku-uses-a-proprietary-blend-and-this-one-does-not
Women's 4-in-1 is 154 mg and 15 billion CFU across five strains with no per-strain split. The unisex SKU names one strain and gives both its mass and its count.
The record: DSLD 267571 versus DSLD 250856 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 5 discontinued-mens-sku-charged-fifty-three-percent-more-for-less
Identical probiotic — same strain, same 40 mg, same 10 billion CFU — plus a magnesium-oxide multivitamin, minus the 200 mg inulin prebiotic, at $0.92 a day against $0.60. The brand now points shoppers at this product as "the perfect replacement".
The record: culturelle.com/products.json and the men's Supplement Facts image, cross-checked against Internet Archive snapshot 20251012170012, all 2026-07-31
Finding 6 antibiotic-adjunct-dosing-instruction
Directions include an antibiotic regimen — "during antibiotic use, take one capsule twice daily … continue for 10 days after completion of antibiotics" — which edges toward a therapeutic-use instruction without naming a disease. Worth flagging precisely because the rest of the claim set is the most careful compliance language in its batch: "occasional" is deployed correctly throughout, an adverse-event phone line is printed on the label, an immunocompromised warning is present, and nothing crosses into disease-claim territory.
The record: DSLD 250856 directions and culturelle.com product page, both 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
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 is claimed, so there is no issuer register to check. A word-boundary scan of the brand page for NSF, USP Verified, Informed-Choice, Non-GMO Project, ConsumerLab, cGMP, third-party tested and certified by returned zero hits on every term. What is claimed is "vegetarian, non-GMO and gluten-free ▲", "Meets the FDA's guidelines for gluten-free" — a self-assertion against a federal standard, certified by nobody — and "Allergy friendly — free from milk, wheat, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts". Also on-label and marketing rather than quality: "The most trusted probiotic brand — Based on the 2019 BrandSpark American Shopper Study."
- A government label record for the discontinued men's SKU
- None exists. Confirmed with four name spellings — "Culturelle Men's Daily Health", "Mens Daily Health probiotic", "Culturelle Mens", "Daily Health Culturelle" — plus three UPC formats (0 49100 40169 0, 049100401690, 0491004016). No Culturelle men's record returned on any. The men's panel used in the comparison above therefore comes from the brand's own Supplement Facts image and an Internet Archive snapshot, not from a federal transcription.
- What the four male-endocrine records across these strains actually are
- A cross-strain negative control — ("CNCM I-745"[tiab] OR "Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG"[tiab] OR "Bifidobacterium 35624"[tiab]) AND (testosterone[tiab] OR prostate[tiab] OR "male fertility"[tiab]) — returned four records across three strains and three decades. They were not opened, so their species, design and direction of effect are unknown and none of them is characterised anywhere on this page. What the count supports, and all it supports, is that there is no male-endocrine literature body behind this strain.
- Subscription terms
- "All Subscribe & Save Orders Ship Free" appears on the page; the flow was not tested.
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.
Two things about this product are unusual enough to lead with, and both of them are good.
The first is that it answers the question this whole category dodges. Not how many CFU — guaranteed when. The label says “Guaranteed potency through date on box when stored as directed.” The page says it harder:
“Some competitors claim the number of live probiotics based on when the product was made. We measure the number of live probiotics at product expiration date, guaranteeing you get the full amount per our label whenever you purchase them.”
The competitor being described is Align, precisely — the product on the next shelf, whose own label prints 5 billion at manufacture and guarantees 50 million to best-by. Quote the two side by side and you have the cleanest available demonstration that the industry knows at-manufacture labelling is a defect.
The second is the strain. Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG — which is ATCC 53103, with the label’s own IP footnote naming Chr. Hansen as the trademark holder. 186 randomised controlled trials under the exact designator. One of one disclosed strains is matchable to human evidence.
The brand’s “most clinically researched strain in the world” line is footnoted, by the brand, as a count of studies as of January 2019. That footnote is honest, and it is worth saying plainly that volume is not efficacy — a strain can be the most-studied and still have mixed results on any given endpoint.
Then the men’s question, which this brand has already answered for us. Culturelle had a men’s SKU. Its own catalogue entry now reads:
“This product has been discontinued. We suggest checking out Culturelle® Digestive Daily Probiotic Capsules as the perfect replacement product.”
The panels show why that replacement works. The men’s probiotic content was byte-identical — same strain, same 40 mg, same 10 billion CFU. What made it “men’s” was a bolted-on multivitamin with no prostate, androgen or urinary ingredient, whose magnesium was 420 mg of magnesium oxide, one of the worst-absorbed forms there is, at a dose that is simply the male RDA. It dropped the 200 mg inulin this product carries. And it cost 53 percent more.
The women’s SKU, for contrast, has a real anatomical rationale — and is the one that hides behind a proprietary blend.
The genuine gaps are small: no third-party certification is claimed at all, “meets the FDA’s guidelines for gluten-free” certifies nothing, and “the most trusted probiotic brand” is a 2019 shopper survey. On disclosure and potency basis, this is the strongest performer read in its batch.