One product, one panel, one record.
Designs for Health ProbioMed 50, 30 vegetarian capsules (SKU PBM050) — label audit
All ten strains are named and individually dosed, and the numbers sum to exactly 50 billion — among the best CFU disclosures in the project, matched exactly by the brand's own ProbioMed 100 and exceeded on organism count by Xymogen ProbioMax Complete 350B, which does the same across eighteen. And the page asserts four separate times that each strain is "backed by clinical research", when two of the ten have zero PubMed records of any kind and the single largest component, 20 billion CFU at 40% of the dose, has never been tested in a human being.
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 Torn down 2026-07-31, after the founding cohort of 27 was frozen. It sits outside every D₂₇ denominator this site publishes.
- 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 Three bounded items, and the first is the important one. The panel on this page did not come from the carton. The brand publishes no Supplement Facts panel anywhere on its product page, there is no DSLD record for this SKU under four spellings, and the ten strains and their doses rest on two independent retailer transcriptions that agree line-for-line and sum exactly to 50 billion. That is strong evidence and it is not a label read — so any statement here about what the physical carton does or does not print, including the absence of a through-expiry footnote, is bounded to the surfaces a buyer can actually reach. Second, the per-strain RCT count is the source's own scorecard of 5 of 10, which names La-14, GG, Ls-33, HN019 and UABb-10; the source's separate list of strains with no human RCT names four — UALp-05, UALpc-04, UALc-03 and Bbr8 — and leaves UABl-14 in neither list, so the declared count is the source's and is not a sum of the rows on this page. Third, whether NSF's listed "Probiotic 50" at Kennesaw GA is this product is ambiguous: not verified and not refuted, and it must not be reported as either. What did survive verification in full: the ten designators and their individual CFU figures, arithmetic-audited to exactly 50 billion; the two strains with zero PubMed records, confirmed at three spellings each with every wildcard hit manually rejected; the Bl-05 versus UABl-14 discrepancy between the brand's prose and its own label; the absence of any CFU-basis statement across the page, the FAQ and both retailer transcriptions; and the NSF GMP facility registration, read at NSF's own live register with positive controls passing first.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
77.3 out of 100
Rank 38 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 the whole rubric: this record answers all five questions below, so nothing is renormalised away and the divisor is the full 1.00. That share travels with every score on this site and is never dropped — a score over part of the rubric’s 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 | 6 of 10 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. | 6 / 10 = 0.6000 | 0.1200 |
| Certification confirmed at the issuer’s own register | 0.14 | 2 claimed certifications found on the issuer’s own public register. Read the scope before reading the mark: most certify one narrow property. | 1 / 1 = 1.0000 | 0.1400 |
0.773333 — the last column added up — divided by 1.00, the weight this record could answer, is 0.7733. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 77.3 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 — 350 mg (50 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 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lactiplantibacillus plantarum | UALp-05 | 20.0 B | Animal or in-vitro only | "UALp-05"[tiab] OR "UALp 05"[tiab] · UALp[All Fields] · "Lactiplantibacillus plantarum UALp-05"[tiab] |
| Lactobacillus acidophilus | La-14 | 10.0 B | Human RCT | "Lactobacillus acidophilus La-14"[tiab] · "La-14"[tiab] AND (randomized[pt] OR "randomized controlled trial"[pt]) |
| Lacticaseibacillus paracasei | UALpc-04 | 5.0 B | No records | "UALpc-04"[tiab] · "UALpc-04" · "UALpc 04" · UALpc[All Fields] |
| Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus | GG | 3.0 B | Human RCT | "rhamnosus GG"[tiab] AND (randomized[pt] OR "randomized controlled trial"[pt]) |
| Lacticaseibacillus casei | UALc-03 | 3.0 B | No records | "UALc-03"[tiab] · "UALc-03" · "UALc 03" · UALc[All Fields] |
| Bifidobacterium breve | Bbr8 | 3.0 B | Human records, no RCT | "Bbr8"[tiab] OR "BBr8"[tiab] OR "Bbr-8"[tiab] · "Bifidobacterium breve Bbr8" |
| Ligilactobacillus salivarius | Ls-33 | 2.0 B | Human RCT | "Lactobacillus salivarius Ls-33"[tiab] OR "Ligilactobacillus salivarius Ls-33"[tiab] · "Ls-33"[tiab] OR "LS-33"[tiab] |
| Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis | HN019 | 2.0 B | Human RCT | "HN019"[tiab] AND (randomized[pt] OR "randomized controlled trial"[pt]) · "HN019"[tiab] |
| Bifidobacterium bifidum | UABb-10 | 1.0 B | Human RCT | "UABb-10"[tiab] · "UABb-10" · UABb[All Fields] |
| Bifidobacterium longum | UABl-14 | 1.0 B | Human RCT | "UABl-14"[tiab] OR "UABI-14"[tiab] OR "UABl 14"[tiab] · "Bifidobacterium longum UABl-14" |
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-50-pdp-2026-07-31https://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-50 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Live product page, HTTP 200. Source for the price, taken from the page's own schema.org ProductGroup JSON-LD block ("price":"58.99","priceCurrency":"USD","size":"30 capsules"), for the Mechanism of Action paragraph that names Bl-05, for the four "backed by clinical research" assertions, for the health claims quoted on this page and for the two footer citations. It is also the artefact behind a finding: the page carries no Supplement Facts panel in any form.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — probiomed-50-retailer-transcriptions-nhc-and-fullscript-2026-07-31 captured The only surface on which this product's panel exists. Two independent retailer transcriptions — Natural Healthy Concepts and Fullscript — that agree line-for-line, and whose ten CFU figures sum to exactly 50 billion. Recorded without a URL on purpose: the source records these retailers by name and by reachability rather than by address, and this project does not reconstruct a URL it did not fetch. Both were asked specifically for a manufacture-versus-expiry footnote and both report that none exists. This is not the carton, and the record says so rather than implying a label read that did not happen.
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, 5 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
$1.97 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $58.99 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle (30 servings, 1 capsule daily with a meal)
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-50 — 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 GMP facility registration (NSF 306, Section 6) | Confirmed at issuer | 31 July 2026 |
| NSF/ANSI 173 finished-product certification (company-wide) | Confirmed at issuer | 31 July 2026 |
| NSF/ANSI 173 certification for ProbioMed 50 specifically | Absent from register | 31 July 2026 |
| "External ISO certified laboratories" | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
| Per-batch certificate of analysis | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
NSF GMP facility registration (NSF 306, Section 6)
Found on the certifier’s own public register.
Verified at NSF's own live register - a listing under NSF 306, Section 6 for Designs for Health, 14 Commerce Boulevard, Palm Coast FL, with manufacturing facilities in Arlee MT and Henderson NV and a Nevada distribution centre in Henderson NV. "Number of matching manufacturers is 1", current as of the register's own timestamp of Friday, July 31, 2026, 12:15 a.m. ET. Scope: this certifies how the facilities are run, not what is in this bottle.
NSF/ANSI 173 finished-product certification (company-wide)
Found on the certifier’s own public register.
CompanyName=Designs returns "Number of matching Products is 43" under NSF/ANSI Standard 173, across facilities in Broomfield CO, Oldsmar FL, Kennesaw GA and Henderson NV. This is a real, issuer-verified result for the company.
NSF/ANSI 173 certification for ProbioMed 50 specifically
The register was queried and this product is not listed on it.
TradeName=ProbioMed and TradeName=Probiomed both return No Matching Companies Found, so this SKU is not listed under its own name. The register does contain one Designs for Health capsule product at the Kennesaw GA facility, category "Men/Probiotic/Women", trade designation "Probiotic 50", 1-capsule serving — and it cannot be established that "Probiotic 50" is ProbioMed 50. The brand markets nothing called "Probiotic 50" (its line is ProbioMed 50 / 100 / 250, ProbioMed Kids and Complete Commensal Probiotic) and NSF's register does not use the ProbioMed name anywhere. Recorded as ambiguous — not verified, not refuted. Notably, the ProbioMed 50 product page makes no NSF claim, so nothing on it is being contradicted.
"External ISO certified laboratories"
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
Claimed verbatim - "All Designs for Health ingredients are tested… at external ISO certified laboratories." No lab, no accreditation body and no scope is named, so there is nothing to query. The phrase is also wrong for testing laboratories: the relevant credential is ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, granted by accreditation bodies, not "certification".
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.
The brand's COA page states "We test every batch of our products… Each Certificate of Analysis (COA) confirms that your product has been third-party tested and verified." The ProbioMed 50 row reads, in full: "Please call customer service at (860) 623-6314 with your lot number to request a COA." Of the roughly twenty products listed on that page, exactly one — Complete Commensal Probiotic, Lot 0001 — has a viewable COA. A claim of universal third-party batch verification is published alongside a register that publishes one document.
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 each-strain-is-backed-by-clinical-research-is-false-for-two-of-ten
UALpc-04 and UALc-03 — 8 billion CFU between them, 16% of the dose — have zero PubMed records of any kind: not randomised trials, not animal work, not in vitro. Three query spellings each plus an [All Fields] wildcard were run, and every wildcard hit was opened and confirmed unrelated (a canine cardiology paper for one; retinal nanopetals, bovine horn ontogenesis, neonatal cerebellum and a 1993 staining paper for the other). Anyone with a browser can reproduce this in ninety seconds.
The record: PubMed esearch, 2026-07-31, three spellings each with wildcard follow-up and manual inspection — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 2 sixty-two-percent-of-the-dose-sits-on-strains-with-no-human-rct
UALp-05, UALpc-04, UALc-03 and Bbr8 carry 31 of the 50 billion CFU and none has a human randomised controlled trial. The single largest component — UALp-05 at 20 billion, 40% of the dose — has never been tested in a human being; its entire evidence base is one rat model and one in-vitro screen. Buyers read "50 billion" and assume the 50 billion was studied.
The record: Per-strain PubMed queries with counts, 2026-07-31; UALp-05: PMID 37333632 (rat) and PMID 30008595 (in vitro) — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 the-brands-own-page-names-a-strain-the-label-does-not-contain
The Mechanism of Action paragraph reads "…B. bifidum (UABb-10™, 1 billion CFU), B. longum (Bl-05™, 1 billion CFU), and B. breve (Bbr8, 3 billion CFU)." The label — per both independent retailer transcriptions — says B. longum UABl-14, not Bl-05. These are different organisms with different literatures: "Bl-05" returns 4 records, of which one is relevant and in vitro, the rest a fish study and a duck-egg mayonnaise study; "UABl-14" returns 3, one of which is a real human trial. A clinician reading the page and going to PubMed will look up the wrong strain.
The record: designsforhealth.com PDP Mechanism of Action paragraph versus the panel per two retailer transcriptions — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-50 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 4 cfu-basis-unstated
"50 billion CFU per serving" appears fourteen times across the page and FAQ and is never once qualified in time. No at expiry, no at manufacture, no guaranteed potency through. This matters more here than anywhere else in its batch, because the CFU number is the entire value proposition: the brand is meticulous about where the 50 billion goes and silent about when the 50 billion is true.
The record: designsforhealth.com PDP and FAQ; two retailer transcriptions both report no timing footnote — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-50 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 5 the-only-rendered-citation-is-for-a-strain-not-in-the-product
The page footer renders exactly two numbered citations. The first is Sawada et al. 2017 on Lactobacillus gasseri CP2305 and sleep quality; the second is a keystone-commensal comparison against single-strain Akkermansia products. ProbioMed 50 contains no L. gasseri CP2305 and no Akkermansia.
The record: designsforhealth.com PDP footer; identical footnotes render on the unrelated /certificate-of-analysis page — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-50 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 6 no-supplement-facts-panel-on-the-brands-product-page-at-all
The only image on the page is the bottle render. No Supplement Facts image, no PDF, no panel markup, no ingredient table; the strings "Serving Size", "Other Ingredients" and "Supplement Facts" do not appear in the HTML. The strain and CFU data survive only inside a marketing prose paragraph — which is exactly where the Bl-05 error lives.
The record: Machine-readable check of designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-50 HTML, 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/products/probiomed-50 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 7 no-dsld-record
Four query spellings plus a 190-record brand enumeration confirm ProbioMed is not in the US government's label database at any potency, and that nothing from this brand has been entered since 2023. There is therefore no independent transcription of this label anywhere in the public record.
The record: DSLD queries ProbioMed, ProbioMed 50, Probio Med 50, and a brand-filtered enumeration returning 190 records — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 8 coa-gated-behind-a-phone-call
The brand claims every batch is third-party tested and verified, and the ProbioMed 50 row on its own COA page reads "Please call customer service at (860) 623-6314 with your lot number to request a COA." Of roughly twenty products listed, exactly one has a viewable COA.
The record: designsforhealth.com/certificate-of-analysis, 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/certificate-of-analysis — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 9 conform-to-one-or-more-of-is-a-weasel-construction
The quality page says the products are made at facilities that "conform to one or more of these industry standards and/or certifications: NPA, NSF, OTC, TGA, and the requirements of the FDA Dietary Supplement GMPs." Conforming to one item on a five-item list, and conforming to rather than being certified against, are both materially weaker than the sentence reads at a glance. The NSF element happens to check out at the issuer — but the sentence would have been equally true if NSF were the item they did not hold.
The record: designsforhealth.com/learn-more/quality-and-manufacturing, quoted verbatim, 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.designsforhealth.com/learn-more/quality-and-manufacturing — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 10 the-rct-evidence-that-does-exist-does-not-match-the-claims
Ls-33's two RCTs are in obese adolescents. La-14's five are all multi-strain interventions, none single-strain. And the page's gut-brain and mood claims — "Supports the gut-brain connection", "May promote mood health" — have no strain in the formula with mood or stress RCT evidence; the only citation attached to them is the CP2305 trial for a different product.
The record: PMIDs 23510724 and 22695039 (Ls-33, obese adolescents); PMIDs 34111674, 33765904, 31250099, 25855055, 18422632 (La-14, all multi-strain) — 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.
- "External ISO certified laboratories" status
- Claimed verbatim - "All Designs for Health ingredients are tested… at external ISO certified laboratories." No lab, no accreditation body and no scope is named, so there is nothing to query. The phrase is also wrong for testing laboratories: the relevant credential is ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, granted by accreditation bodies, not "certification".
- Per-batch certificate of analysis status
- The brand's COA page states "We test every batch of our products… Each Certificate of Analysis (COA) confirms that your product has been third-party tested and verified." The ProbioMed 50 row reads, in full: "Please call customer service at (860) 623-6314 with your lot number to request a COA." Of the roughly twenty products listed on that page, exactly one — Complete Commensal Probiotic, Lot 0001 — has a viewable COA. A claim of universal third-party batch verification is published alongside a register that publishes one document.
- The physical carton, or any panel published by the brand
- A machine-readable check of the product page HTML found the bottle render as the only image, no Supplement Facts image, no PDF, no panel markup and no ingredient table; searches for "Serving Size", "Other Ingredients" and "Supplement Facts" returned nothing. The panel on this page is reconstructed from two independent retailer transcriptions that agree line-for-line. It is strong — the numbers sum exactly — but it is not the carton.
- Any independent government transcription of this label
- ProbioMed has no DSLD record. Four query spellings were run and a positive control passed: a brand-filtered enumeration returns 190 Designs for Health records, of which the probiotics are Probiotic Supreme, Probiotic Synergy, Probiotic Synergy Powder and FloraMyces, with no ProbioMed at any potency and nothing entered after 2023. DSLD participation is voluntary, so this is a transparency gap rather than a legal defect — but it means there is no independent transcription to check the brand against.
- Whether a through-expiry footnote exists in small print on the bottle
- Both retailer transcriptions were asked for a manufacture-versus-expiry footnote and both report none. The brand's page and FAQ say "50 billion CFU per serving" fourteen times and never qualify it in time. If such a footnote exists on the carton, it is absent from the brand's website, absent from two retailer transcriptions, and absent from DSLD, which has no record. By any test a buyer can actually run, it is unstated.
- Whether NSF's listed "Probiotic 50" is this product
- NSF's finished-product register does not use the ProbioMed name anywhere, and the brand does not market anything called "Probiotic 50". Ambiguous — not verified, not refuted.
- The brand's full live catalogue
- /shop category pages return an SPA shell with no product links. Product enumeration rests on the 190-record DSLD list plus the products named on the brand's own pages.
- Funding and conflict-of-interest statements for the UAS Labs trial
- PMID 31271261 is authored from UAS Laboratories, the strain vendor — that much is on the abstract. Full funding statements were not pulled, so no COI characterisation beyond the stated affiliation should be published.
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.
Start with the part that is genuinely excellent, because it is rare enough that it should not be buried.
All ten strains are named and all ten are individually dosed. 20 + 10 + 5 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 = 50 billion exactly. No proprietary blend, no hidden remainder, no rounding fudge. The brand’s own claim — “fully transparent strain identities… and CFU counts” — is true, and this is the best CFU disclosure in its batch and among the best in the project. Its NSF GMP facility registration was verified at NSF’s own live register, along with 43 NSF/ANSI-173 certified products company-wide. And it has the best cost per billion CFU in its batch by fifteen times.
Now hold that transparency against the sentence the page repeats four times.
“Each strain is backed by clinical research.”
That is a testable claim, and it fails.
Two of the ten strains have zero PubMed records of any kind. UALpc-04 and UALc-03 — 8 billion CFU between them, 16% of the dose — return nothing under three query spellings each. Not a randomised trial, not animal work, not an in-vitro screen. The wildcard follow-ups were opened by hand: a canine cardiology paper for one; retinal nanopetals, bovine horn ontogenesis, neonatal cerebellum and a 1993 electron-microscopy staining paper for the other. Anyone with a browser can reproduce that in ninety seconds.
And the single largest component of the product has never been tested in a human being. L. plantarum UALp-05 is 20 billion CFU — 40% of the dose — and its entire published evidence base is one rat constipation model and one in-vitro screen. The species-qualified query returns zero.
Add it up: 62% of the CFU dose sits on strains with no human RCT. The one unimpeachable strain on the label, L. rhamnosus GG with its 188 RCT-tagged records, is 3 billion — 6% of the bottle.
Three more things.
The brand’s own page names a strain the label does not contain. The Mechanism of Action paragraph says B. longum Bl-05; the label says B. longum UABl-14. Different organisms, different literatures — “Bl-05” returns four records including a fish study and a duck-egg mayonnaise study, while UABl-14 at least appears in a real human trial. A clinician reading the page and going to PubMed looks up the wrong strain. And this error lives in marketing prose because there is no Supplement Facts panel on the brand’s product page at all — no image, no PDF, no table. The panel on this page had to be reconstructed from two independent retailer transcriptions.
No CFU basis, anywhere. “50 billion CFU per serving” appears fourteen times across the page and FAQ and is never once qualified in time. That matters more here than almost anywhere, because the CFU number is the product. Meticulous about where the 50 billion goes; silent about when it is true.
And the only study citation a reader can see on the page is for a strain that is not in the bottle — Sawada 2017 on L. gasseri CP2305, which belongs to a different Designs for Health product and renders as site-wide footer boilerplate. That is a templating decision, not a deliberate claim, and it is still the case that on a page asserting four times that every strain is backed by clinical research, the two strains with genuinely nothing go uncited while a strain from another product gets a full journal reference — sitting directly under gut-brain and mood claims that no strain in this formula supports.