One product, one panel, one record.
Designs for Health ProbioMed 100, 30 vegetarian capsules (SKU PBM100) — label audit
Ten organisms, ten designators, ten per-strain CFU figures, summing to exactly 100 billion — the best label disclosure in the whole tier-2 set. Which is precisely what makes it possible to establish that two of the ten designators return no PubMed record at all, and that half the entire dose sits on a strain with two.
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, after the founding cohort of 27 was frozen. It sits outside every D27 denominator this site publishes.
- 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.
- What did not survive verification
- Part of this page was refuted or could not be reproduced Three bounded items, and the first is the important one. The panel on this page did not come from the carton and it did not come from a government record either. Designs for Health publishes no Supplement Facts panel on its product pages in any form, and the brand's entire ProbioMed line — 50, 100 and 250 — is absent from DSLD, an absence verified with four query spellings plus a 49-SKU brand sweep. The ten designators and their ten per-strain CFU figures rest on two independent practitioner-retailer transcriptions that agree with each other and that sum to exactly 100 billion with no hidden remainder. That arithmetic closing is strong evidence and it is not a label read, so any statement here about what the physical carton prints — including the absence of a CFU-basis footnote — is bounded to the surfaces a buyer can actually reach. Second, no per-slot human-randomised-trial count is published for this product and none may be derived from this page. Only one designator, L. rhamnosus GG, was counted under the randomised-controlled-trial filter (207 records); the other nine carry plain PubMed record counts that were not adjudicated for trial status, and turning those counts into a "strains with an RCT" figure would be manufacturing a statistic. Third, the B. longum slot carries an unresolved conflict between two brand documents: the Mechanism of Action copy says Bl-05 and the panel says UABl-14, at the same 2.0 billion CFU. One of them is wrong, the marketing copy is the likelier error, and neither is asserted here as correct. What did survive verification in full: the ten designators and their individual CFU figures, arithmetic-audited to exactly 100 billion across two independent transcriptions; UALpc-04 and UALc-03 returning zero PubMed records; the 50 billion allocation to UALp-05 against its two-record literature; the absence of any DSLD record for the whole ProbioMed line, confirmed on four spellings; and the NSF/ANSI 173 negative read at the issuer's own register.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
64.2 out of 100
Rank 68 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score.
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 80% 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 80% 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 | 10 of 10 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 10 / 10 = 1.0000 | 0.2400 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 10 of 10 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 10 / 10 = 1.0000 | 0.2000 |
| 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 | Only 3 of 10 designators on this panel have been searched — below the 50% coverage a published share requires. A ratio over 3 slots would describe our sampling, not the label. | Not answered | — excluded from the divisor, not counted as nought |
| Certification confirmed at the issuer’s own register | 0.14 | 1 claimed certification queried at the issuer’s register and not listed there. | 0 / 1 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
0.513333 — the last column added up — divided by 0.80, the weight this record could answer, is 0.6417. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 64.2 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 | Probiotic Blend — 550 mg (100 billion CFU) |
| What that count is measured against | No basis stated |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 10 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
There is nothing to quote. No footnote on the panel and no basis language in the page body — not at expiry, not at manufacture. This is the one thing standing between this label and a clean sheet, on a $96.49 SKU that markets potency as its differentiator ("twice the potency of ProbioMed 50"). Potency claims without a time basis are the least checkable kind.
The panel’s own words on potency, verbatim.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lactobacillus plantarum (correct name: Lactiplantibacillus plantarum) | UALp-05 | 50.0 billion | Not yet checked | PubMed designator search, record count |
| Lactobacillus acidophilus | La-14 | 10.0 billion | Not yet checked | PubMed designator search, record count |
| Lactobacillus paracasei (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus paracasei) | UALpc-04 | 10.0 billion | No records | PubMed designator search, record count |
| Lactobacillus rhamnosus (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus) | GG | 6.0 billion | Human RCT | PubMed designator search under the randomised-controlled-trial filter |
| Lactobacillus casei (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus casei) | UALc-03 | 6.0 billion | No records | PubMed designator search, record count |
| Bifidobacterium breve | Bbr8 | 6.0 billion | Not yet checked | PubMed designator search, record count |
| Lactobacillus salivarius (correct name: Ligilactobacillus salivarius) | Ls-33 | 4.0 billion | Not yet checked | PubMed designator search, record count |
| Bifidobacterium animalis lactis (correct name: Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis) | HN019 | 4.0 billion | Not yet checked | PubMed designator search, record count |
| Bifidobacterium bifidum | UABb-10 | 2.0 billion | Not yet checked | PubMed designator search, record count |
| Bifidobacterium longum | UABl-14 | 2.0 billion | Not yet checked | PubMed designator search, record count |
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.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — dfh-probiomed-100-pdp-2026-07-31https://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-100 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Fetched directly, HTTP 200. Source for the price and SKU from the page's own ld+json offer block, for the Mechanism of Action section that names Bl-05 where the panel says UABl-14, for the "twice the potency of ProbioMed 50" positioning, and for the PBM10 versus PBM100 SKU inconsistency. It is also an artefact behind a finding: the page carries no Supplement Facts panel in any form.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — probiomed-100-retailer-transcriptions-psc-and-nhc-2026-07-31 captured The only surface on which this product's panel exists. Two independent practitioner retailers — Professional Supplement Center and Natural Healthy Concepts — reproducing the panel as text, identical to each other, and whose ten per-strain CFU figures sum to exactly 100 billion. That arithmetic closing with no hidden remainder is what makes the transcription trustworthy enough to publish. Both also carry UABl-14 rather than Bl-05 at the same 2.0 billion, which is what makes the brand-copy discrepancy a documented conflict rather than an assumption. Recorded without a URL on purpose: the audit records these retailers by name and by reachability rather than by address, and this project does not reconstruct a URL it did not fetch. This is not the carton.
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.
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
$3.22 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $96.49 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle (SKU PBM100, 30 servings, 1 capsule daily)
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-100 — 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 |
|---|---|---|
| NSF/ANSI 173 contents certification | Absent from register | 31 July 2026 |
| Per-batch certificate of analysis | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
NSF/ANSI 173 contents certification
The register was queried and this product is not listed on it.
Verified at the issuer's own register. Designs for Health is listed with exactly one certified product, "Pro Greens + Reds". ProbioMed 100 is not NSF contents-certified. No certification mark is claimed on this product page, so this is a plain negative rather than a caught false claim.
Per-batch certificate of analysis
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
Available by phone request only. The brand's certificate-of-analysis page asserts universal third-party batch verification while publishing lot-linked documents for only a handful of SKUs. Recorded as unverified rather than refuted: no phone call was made.
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 two-of-ten-designators-return-no-pubmed-record-at-all
UALpc-04 and UALc-03 — 16 billion CFU between them, 16% of the dose — return zero PubMed records. Not randomised trials, not animal work, not in vitro. Nothing.
The record: PubMed per-designator record counts, 2026-07-31: UALpc-04 returns 0 and UALc-03 returns 0 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 2 half-the-dose-sits-on-a-two-record-strain
UALp-05 is 50 billion CFU — half the entire product — and returns 2 PubMed records. Meanwhile L. rhamnosus GG, with 207 randomised-trial-tagged records, is 6 billion, or 6% of the bottle. Buyers read "100 billion" and assume the 100 billion was studied.
The record: DRS-free panel transcription at two independent retailers against PubMed per-designator counts, 2026-07-31: UALp-05 2 records, GG 207 RCT-tagged — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 the-brands-marketing-copy-contradicts-its-own-label-on-a-strain-identity
The Mechanism of Action section on designsforhealth.com states the formula contains "B. longum (Bl-05™, 2 billion CFU)". The Supplement Facts panel says UABl-14 in that slot, confirmed at two independent retailers reproducing the same 2.0 billion figure. Bl-05 and UABl-14 are different designators. One of the two documents is wrong, the marketing copy is the likelier error, and a practitioner reading the product page would record the wrong strain — on a product whose central selling point is fully transparent strain identities.
The record: designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-100 Mechanism of Action section versus the panel as transcribed at Professional Supplement Center and Natural Healthy Concepts, all 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-100 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 4 no-cfu-basis-on-a-96-dollar-potency-product
No footnote on the panel and no basis language in the page body, on a SKU that markets potency as its differentiator — "twice the potency of ProbioMed 50". Potency claims without a time basis are the least checkable kind, and this is the one thing standing between this label and a clean sheet.
The record: Panel transcription at two independent retailers plus designsforhealth.com page body, 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-100 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 5 the-page-cannot-agree-with-itself-on-the-sku
The product header renders "SKU: PBM10" while the ld+json offer block on the same page carries PBM100.
The record: designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-100 header versus its own ld+json offer block, 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-100 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 6 no-government-label-record-for-the-entire-product-line
Four independent DSLD queries plus a 49-SKU brand sweep confirm that ProbioMed 50, 100 and 250 are all absent from the US government's label database. A researcher checking only DSLD would conclude this product does not exist.
The record: DSLD queries ProbioMed 100, ProbioMed, ProbioMed 50, ProbioMed 250 and Designs for Health ProbioMed; 49-SKU brand sweep, all 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 7 not-nsf-certified-while-the-brand-holds-one-nsf-listing
Designs for Health is listed at NSF with exactly one certified product, Pro Greens + Reds. ProbioMed 100 is not on the register, and claims no certification, so this is a plain negative.
The record: info.nsf.org/Certified/Dietary/Listings.asp queried for Designs for Health, 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.
- 7 strain designators not looked up
- These designators are printed on the panel and have not been searched. They are unchecked, not empty.
- Per-batch certificate of analysis status
- Available by phone request only. The brand's certificate-of-analysis page asserts universal third-party batch verification while publishing lot-linked documents for only a handful of SKUs. Recorded as unverified rather than refuted: no phone call was made.
- Any Supplement Facts panel published by the brand
- Designs for Health product pages contain no Supplement Facts panel in any form — no table, no panel image, no PDF. The panel on this page comes from two independent practitioner retailers, Professional Supplement Center and Natural Healthy Concepts, whose transcriptions are identical and whose ten CFU figures sum to exactly 100 billion. That arithmetic closing is what makes the transcription trustworthy enough to publish, and it is not the carton.
- Any government label record
- None exists, and the absence was verified with four independent queries. "ProbioMed 100" returns 40 hits with no Designs for Health product; "ProbioMed" returns 1 hit, an unrelated Rabano Yodado liquid; "ProbioMed 50" and "ProbioMed 250" return no Designs for Health product; and "Designs for Health ProbioMed" returns 41 brand SKUs, none of them a ProbioMed. The 49-SKU brand sweep contains no ProbioMed at any strength. The brand's entire ProbioMed line — 50, 100 and 250 — is absent from the US government's label database.
- A per-slot human-randomised-trial count
- Not established, and none is published. Of the ten designators, only L. rhamnosus GG was counted under the randomised-controlled-trial filter (207 records). The other nine carry plain PubMed record counts that were not adjudicated for trial status. Deriving a "strains with an RCT" figure from those counts would be manufacturing a statistic, so this page publishes none.
- Which of the two brand documents is right about the B. longum slot
- The marketing copy says Bl-05 and the panel says UABl-14, at the same 2.0 billion CFU, and the panel figure is confirmed at two independent retailers. One of the two documents is wrong. The marketing copy is the likelier error and neither is asserted here as correct.
- Any CFU basis
- Absent from the panel and from the page body. Neither at expiry nor at manufacture.
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.
This is the best-disclosed label in the entire tier-2 set, and that is exactly why it is the one whose evidence falls apart in public.
Ten organisms. Ten designators. Ten per-strain CFU figures. 50 + 10 + 10 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 4 + 4 + 2 + 2 = 100 billion exactly. No proprietary blend, no hidden remainder. A reader can actually evaluate this product, which is more than almost anything else in this category permits.
So evaluate it.
Two of the ten designators return no PubMed record at all. UALpc-04 and UALc-03 — 16 billion CFU between them, 16% of the dose — return zero. Not a randomised trial, not animal work, not an in-vitro screen.
And half the entire product sits on a strain with two records. L. plantarum UALp-05 is 50 billion CFU — 50% of the bottle — against a literature of two. Meanwhile L. rhamnosus GG, with 207 randomised-trial-tagged records, is 6 billion. Six per cent.
That is the argument for demanding disclosure, stated in its strongest form. A proprietary blend would have concealed all of this. Full disclosure did not make the product better — it made it checkable, and the check found something.
Then a defect in the brand’s own copy. The Mechanism of Action section says the formula contains “B. longum (Bl-05™, 2 billion CFU)”. The panel says UABl-14 in that slot, at the same 2.0 billion, confirmed at two independent retailers. Those are different designators with different literatures. One of the two documents is wrong — the marketing copy is the likelier error — and a practitioner reading the product page records the wrong strain. On a product whose central selling point is transparent strain identity, that is a material defect.
Two more. There is no CFU basis anywhere — no footnote on the panel, no timing language in the body — on a $96.49 SKU, $3.22 a day, that markets potency as its differentiator (“twice the potency of ProbioMed 50”). And the entire ProbioMed line is absent from the US government’s label database, verified on four query spellings plus a 49-SKU brand sweep. There is no independent transcription of this label anywhere in the public record.
One last thing worth holding onto. The same brand, at the same price tier, sells Probiophage DF — seven species in a proprietary blend, zero designators — while advertising “Strain identification provided for transparency.” Disclosure quality here is a per-SKU property, not a brand property, and this pair is the proof.