One product, one panel, one record.
GoodBelly Probiotic Supplement (LP299V®) — label audit
The panel's "10 billion live cells" carries two footnote markers and only one of them resolves — the dagger has no legend anywhere, the character appears zero times in the entire product page HTML, and the only at-manufacture language on goodbelly.com is keyed to a different symbol and scoped to a different product line, so the CFU basis for this product is genuinely unstated.
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 the 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.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
71.3 out of 100
Rank 50 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 | 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 "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 | 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 | 1 claimed certification queried at the issuer’s register and not listed there. | 0 / 1 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
0.713333 — the last column added up — divided by 1.00, the weight this record could answer, is 0.7133. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 71.3 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 | 10 billion live cells |
| What that count is measured against | No basis stated |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 1 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
The panel prints "Lactobacillus plantarum 299v (LP299V®) (43mg) — 10 billion live cells**†". The double asterisk resolves to "Daily Value not established", printed on the panel. The dagger resolves to nothing: the character † appears zero times in the entire product page HTML, verified by direct character count on the raw source, and there is no dagger legend on the product page, the Why GoodBelly page or the footer. The nearest candidate is a caret footnote in the site-wide footer — "^Cells per serving at the time of manufacture. Storage conditions may affect the number of active probiotic cultures. Please keep at 34-40° Fahrenheit for maximum potency." — which is keyed to ^, not †, and whose own text describes refrigerated products, while GoodBelly's page classifies this capsule as shelf-stable.
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) | 299v (LP299V®) | 43 mg — 10 billion live cells | Human RCT | ("299v" OR "LP299V" OR "DSM 9843") AND randomized controlled trial[pt] → 39; "Lactobacillus plantarum 299v" → 126; "Lactiplantibacillus plantarum 299v" → 47; "DSM 9843" → 24 |
What of that is verifiable
A disclosure is verifiable when a reader can open a record that neither we nor the brand controls and see the same thing. Below is every dated artefact this page rests on. What is absent from this list is not verified, however reasonable it sounds.
- Photograph of the printed panel — Supplement-Original-Nutrition-panel.pnghttps://goodbelly.com/cdn/shop/files/Supplement-Original-Nutrition-panel.png — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The brand's own Supplement Facts image, downloaded from its CDN and transcribed verbatim: 30 servings per container, serving size 1 capsule, "Lactobacillus plantarum 299v (LP299V®) (43mg) — 10 billion live cells**†", "**Daily Value not established". The panel is image-only and the probiotic appears nowhere in the page's machine-readable ingredient list. The sibling Probiotics + Iron panel (Supplement-Iron-Nutrition-panel.png) was transcribed the same day for the panel diff and carries the same unresolved dagger.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — goodbelly-probiotic-supplement-2026-07-31https://goodbelly.com/products/probiotic-supplement — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Shopify JSON-LD read directly — SKU 300331, variant "Probiotic Supplement - 30 Capsules", availability http://schema.org/InStock, $30.00 with a selling-plan allocation at price 2700 against compare_at_price 3000. The only cleanly buyable SKU in its batch, with a functioning cart. This capture is also the source of the "up to 10 Billion CFUs" FAQ line and of the zero-count of the † character in the raw page source.
How many of its strains have a human trial for what it is sold for
Across the frozen founding cohort, 0 of 294 organism slots (0.0%) carry an organism with a human randomised controlled trial for any male-specific outcome. Not for this product — for all 27 of the founding teardowns, taken together. That is the number to hold against any men’s probiotic, including this one.
Two further founding-cohort figures for context: only 43 of 294 organism slots carry a strain with any human RCT at all under the exact code printed on the label, and only 2 of 27 products have a published human trial of the finished formula — the thing actually in the bottle. All three figures divide by the frozen cohort of 27 teardowns and 294 organism slots, never by every teardown on this site.
For this product specifically, 1 organism slot carries a strain with a human RCT under the exact designator printed on the label.
A word on what a designator has to clear before it counts here. The organism must be named with the exact strain code that appears in the trial, the trial must be in humans, and the code must return that trial when a reader searches it. A species name does not qualify: the trials in this field are of strains, and a species contains thousands of them.
What it costs per day
$1.00 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $30.00 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle, 1 capsule daily. $27.00 on the brand's own 10% subscription ($0.90 a day), with "Swap, skip, or cancel at any time" and free shipping; free shipping over $50 on one-time orders.
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://goodbelly.com/products/probiotic-supplement — 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 |
|---|---|---|
| GFCO (Gluten-Free Certification Organization) | Absent from register | 31 July 2026 |
GFCO (Gluten-Free Certification Organization)
The register was queried and this product is not listed on it.
Brand field "GoodBelly" and keyword field "GoodBelly" and "Good Belly" all returned "No products found", with the control query "probiotic" returning 25 certified products, proving the search works. Read carefully: GoodBelly never claims gluten-free CERTIFICATION, only the attribute, so this absence is arguably honest labelling rather than a red flag. The product page claims no certification of any kind — its badges are plain formulation attributes (Soy-Free, Dairy-Free, Vegan), and the Why GoodBelly comparison table adds Gluten-Free and "Clinically Tested Probiotics" with no issuer named. There is no NSF contents certification, no USP verification, no Informed Choice or BSCG mark, no published certificate of analysis and no batch potency verification: for a product sold entirely on a viability number, no third party attests to that number.
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-cfu-basis-is-genuinely-unstated
The panel declares "10 billion live cells**†" and only the double asterisk resolves, to "Daily Value not established". The dagger points to a legend that is not published: the character † appears zero times in the entire product page HTML, verified by direct character count on the raw source, and no legend exists on the product page, the Why GoodBelly page or the footer. The nearest candidate — the site-wide "^Cells per serving at the time of manufacture… Please keep at 34-40° Fahrenheit for maximum potency" — is keyed to a caret and describes refrigerated products, while GoodBelly's own page classifies this capsule under "SHELF STABLE". The one footnote that would tell a buyer whether the number is measured at manufacture or at expiry points at text that does not exist.
The record: goodbelly.com product page raw source, † character count = 0, and the footer caret footnote, both 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://goodbelly.com/products/probiotic-supplement — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 2 ten-billion-on-the-panel-versus-up-to-ten-billion-in-the-faq
The regulated panel states a flat 10 billion. The page's own FAQ states, twice, "GoodBelly Probiotic Supplements and Fast Melts contain up to 10 Billion CFUs of LP299V". "Up to" is not a dose, it is a ceiling. Two different claims about the same number on the same page — and combined with the missing dagger legend, there is no point at which a buyer can establish what they actually receive.
The record: goodbelly.com product page panel and FAQ text, both read verbatim 2026-07-31
Finding 3 the-probiotic-is-absent-from-the-machine-readable-ingredient-list
The page's HTML ingredient block reads, in full: "Potato Starch, Hydroxypropylmethyl Cellulose (Capsule), Magnesium Stearate (Vegetable). May contain trace amounts of soy." The strain and its dose exist only inside Supplement-Original-Nutrition-panel.png. A screen reader, a price-comparison bot, an LLM shopping agent or a consumer using text search cannot read what this product contains.
The record: goodbelly.com product page HTML ingredient block, quoted in full, 2026-07-31
Finding 4 zero-third-party-verification-of-a-product-sold-on-a-viability-number
No NSF, no USP, no Informed Choice or BSCG, no published certificate of analysis, no batch potency data, and no NIH label-database record. The brand claims no certification at all — its badges are plain formulation attributes — which is honest as far as it goes, and it leaves the 10-billion number attested by nobody.
The record: goodbelly.com product and Why pages, token audit; products.gfco.org queries with a working control; DSLD queried across four spellings plus an LP299V control returning 25 other brands, all 2026-07-31
Finding 5 more-energy-and-better-mood-outrun-the-strain
The Why GoodBelly benefit list headlines "MORE ENERGY*" and "BETTER MOOD*" alongside "YOUR GUT AFFECTS MORE THAN JUST DIGESTION—IT INFLUENCES ENERGY, MOOD, AND HOW GOOD YOU FEEL.*" No 299v energy trial was found. The mood side rests on one small study — PMID 28101105, salivary cortisol under examination stress — whose own COI discloses that "Irini Lazou Ahrén is an employee at Probi AB. The product and placebo capsules were provided by Probi AB." Thin support for two of five headline benefits.
The record: goodbelly.com Why page copy; PMID 28101105 COI quoted verbatim; "299v" AND (immune OR immunity) AND randomized → 1, run 2026-07-31
Finding 6 the-benefit-list-is-page-level-across-two-different-strains
The Why GoodBelly page covers both the DE111® drinks and the LP299V® capsules, and "supports immune function" is attributed on that page primarily to DE111® — "helps balance gut bacteria through microbiome diversity and supports immune function and regular digestion" — a strain that is not in this product. A reader arriving at the benefit list has no way to tell which benefits belong to the capsule they are buying. Mitigated by the fact that GoodBelly does name both strains and attach each to its own description.
The record: goodbelly.com Why GoodBelly page, attribution read verbatim 2026-07-31
Finding 7 the-dose-is-not-demonstrably-the-studied-dose
10 billion CFU/day sits at or below the doses in the two trials that state one — 2 x 10¹⁰ CFU/day in PMID 33015813 (n=35, cancer patients on home enteral nutrition) and in PMID 12450890 (n=36 smokers, 18 of them men). It is not a token dose and it is plausibly the Probi Digestis® standard, but the brand cites which studies exist rather than which of them used 10 billion. A moderate dose-match concern — materially better than the mismatches elsewhere in this batch, and not a clean match either. Worth naming alongside it: the strongest evidence for this strain is IBS symptom relief in a diagnosed patient population, and the product is sold to the general public for "digestive balance".
The record: PMIDs 22912552, 33015813, 12450890 and 11711768, all identity-verified via NCBI E-utilities 2026-07-31
Finding 8 uncited-survivability-claim-and-testimonial-backed-efficacy
"Unlike some probiotics, all strains used by GoodBelly have research showing that the strains survive past the stomach to the intestine" is a specific, testable claim offered without a citation. "We make sure our products actually work! With the backing of clinical studies and tons of happy customer testimonials" rests an efficacy assertion partly on testimonials, which are not evidence. And the company's tenure is given three different ways across two pages — "over 15 years", "OVER 20 YEARS" and "trusted by millions for over 20 years" — which indicates uncontrolled copy rather than anything worse.
The record: goodbelly.com product page and Why GoodBelly page, all quoted verbatim 2026-07-31
Finding 9 the-panel-art-predates-the-2020-reclassification
The panel prints "Lactobacillus plantarum" while the page footer uses the current "Lactiplantibacillus plantarum". Both on the same page. Cosmetic, and it indicates the panel has not been refreshed since Zheng et al. 2020.
The record: Panel Supplement-Original-Nutrition-panel.png against the page footer, 2026-07-31; PMID 32293557
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.
- What "10 billion live cells" is measured against
- The panel's dagger marker has no legend anywhere — the character appears zero times in the product page HTML — and the only at-manufacture language on goodbelly.com is keyed to a caret and scoped to the refrigerated juice drinks and shots, not to this shelf-stable capsule. There is no at-expiry guarantee anywhere. The consumer cannot determine what the number means at the moment of swallowing. This is a finding, not a failure of searching.
- The CFU dose used in the strain's headline IBS trial
- Ducrotté P, Sawant P, Jayanthi V, World J Gastroenterol 2012;18(30):4012-8, PMID 22912552 — n=214, Rome III IBS, double-blind, placebo-controlled, 4 weeks, one capsule daily — does not state the CFU per capsule in its abstract, and full text was not pulled. No dose is asserted for it.
- Any NIH label-database record
- Four spellings were queried — GoodBelly, Good Belly, GoodBelly Probiotic Supplement, NextFoods — plus an LP299V search that returns 25 other brands' LP299V products (Jarrow, Sundown, Puritan's Pride, Solgar, Nature's Bounty, American Health, Vitamin World, Probiata and others) and no GoodBelly. The absence is confirmed with a positive control proving the index contains LP299V products generally. This is a completeness gap in a voluntary database, not a legal defect.
- Any third-party attestation of viability
- No NSF, no USP, no Informed Choice or BSCG, no published certificate of analysis, no batch potency data. For a product whose entire value proposition is "10 billion live cells", nothing external verifies the count — and, per the dagger finding, not even a first-party statement says when it is measured.
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 honest counter-example, and it is worth publishing precisely because it does almost none of what this site exists to document.
One strain, and it is identified all the way down. Lactobacillus plantarum 299v (LP299V®), 43 mg, 10 billion live cells. 299v is not a house code: it maps to a public DSMZ deposit, DSM 9843, so an independent laboratory can obtain the reference strain and check identity. That is stronger traceability than a proprietary designator, and with one organism at one declared dose there is no blend, no split to hide and no ambiguity about which component is doing the work. GoodBelly also discloses that it licenses the strain rather than implying it owns it: “Probi®, Probi Digestis®, and LP299V® are registered trademarks of Probi AB.”
“Backed by over 60 human studies” survives checking. 126 PubMed records for the strain’s binomial, 47 more under the current one, 39 of RCT publication type. Against the rest of this project, that is notable: it is the first “backed by N studies” claim a check has corroborated rather than deflated.
No gendered marketing of any kind. No “for men” FAQ, no “for women” FAQ, no gendered imagery, no gendered SKU — the product page, the Why page and the FAQ were all searched. And the one demographically skewed sibling is named after its nutrient, not a sex: Probiotics + Iron. That is the correct way to build such a product, and it is a direct contrast with everything else in this batch. Two capsules from one brand also make a useful point on their own: same organism, same declared 10 billion live cells, 43 mg in one and 80 mg in the other. Milligrams are carrier, not bacteria.
Its failure is narrower, and it is real. The panel prints “10 billion live cells**†” and only the double asterisk resolves. The dagger has no legend — the character appears zero times in the entire page HTML — and the only at-manufacture language on goodbelly.com is keyed to a caret and scoped to the refrigerated drinks, not to this shelf-stable capsule. There is no at-expiry guarantee anywhere. Then the FAQ says, twice, “up to 10 Billion CFUs”, which is a ceiling rather than a dose. There is no point at which a buyer can establish what they actually receive, on a product sold entirely on a viability number that no third party attests to.
One last thing to credit, because it cost the brand something. This strain’s best evidence is IBS symptom relief — a diagnosed patient population — and GoodBelly does not make the IBS claim. Its footer says, in plain English and in addition to the standard disclaimer, that the product “is a food product and not a treatment or cure for any medical disorder or disease”, and its qualified construction reads “Some scientific evidence suggests probiotics may help promote healthy digestion.” Declining the claim your own literature would support is an act of restraint, and it is rare enough here to name.