One product, one panel, one record.
Gundry MD Bio Complete 3 (label revision DRGBIOC3-LBL-R4, 60 capsules) — label audit
The word "CFU" does not appear on the Supplement Facts panel, on the bottle, or in the listing's ingredients field. The probiotic is declared by weight only — 22 mg of a 772 mg formula, 2.8% by weight — in a product whose name and first benefit bullet are about probiotics.
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.
- What did not survive verification
- Part of this page was refuted or could not be reproduced Two load-bearing figures could not be established at source and are not published here. The current retail price and the subscription price were unreadable — the brand site 403s to automation and the marketplace price is injected client-side — so no cost per day is computed. The "2 billion CFU" figure attributed to this product is a company statement relayed by a third-party reviewer, not a label claim, and is not published as one. "Bifidobacterium bifidum UABb-10" as an ingredient of this product is third-party copy that does not appear on the current panel; it is not published as an ingredient. The panel transcription itself is image-verified against the brand's own label image at label revision DRGBIOC3-LBL-R4 and stands.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
0.0 out of 100
Rank 154 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 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 | 0 of 2 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 0 / 2 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 0 of 2 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 0 / 2 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| What the CFU count is measured against | 0.22 | Potency basis "no-cfu-number": CFU figure printed no, single basis stated no, basis reaches expiry no — 0 of 3. | 0 / 3 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| Printed designators that lead to a human trial | 0.20 | 0 of 2 checked organism slots resolve to at least one human randomised trial under the designator exactly as printed. This counts whether the identity leads to a trial, never what the trial found. | 0 / 2 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| 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 |
0.0000 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, the weight this record could answer, is 0.0000. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 0.0 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 | No CFU figure recorded |
| What that count is measured against | No CFU figure |
| Strain designators | None — species only |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 2 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
No CFU figure appears anywhere on the panel.
The panel names species only, with no strain designator anywhere. A species name is not a claim: the trials in this field are of strains, and a species can contain thousands.
| Organism as printed | Designator as printed | Quantity as printed | What the designator resolves to | The query we ran |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bacillus coagulans | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | "Bacillus coagulans"[tiab] AND ("SNZ 1969"[tiab] OR "GBI-30"[tiab] OR "MTCC 5856"[tiab] OR "Unique IS-2"[tiab]) |
| Bifidobacterium bifidum | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | "Bifidobacterium bifidum"[tiab] AND humans[mh] AND randomized controlled trial[pt] |
What of that is verifiable
A disclosure is verifiable when a reader can open a record that neither we nor the brand controls and see the same thing. Below is every dated artefact this page rests on. What is absent from this list is not verified, however reasonable it sounds.
- Photograph of the printed panel — 81NBlvCUoUL._AC_SL1500_.jpghttps://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81NBlvCUoUL._AC_SL1500_.jpg — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The brand-supplied label image on the Amazon listing, read directly. The label revision code DRGBIOC3-LBL-R4 is legible in the image, which is what ties this transcription to a specific label revision rather than to "the product".
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — amazon-B0CHC9MMR1-2026-07-31https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHC9MMR1 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Source for the ProDURA advertising claim, the Directions field that contradicts the label, the UPC 810075810585 used for the second DSLD query, and the "Date First Available" of 5 September 2023.
- Internet Archive capture — 20230225011349 (opens in a new tab) captured The brand's own previous formula, with the panel published as HTML text. This capture is the only reason the 2023-to-2026 reformulation is detectable at all, and it is also the corroborating artefact for the $69.95 bottle price.
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, 0 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
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 |
|---|---|---|
| AVA Certified Vegan (American Vegetarian Association) | Register unreachable | 31 July 2026 |
| "Certified Gluten Free" | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
| "Certified Vegetarian" | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
| "GMP Certified Facility" | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
AVA Certified Vegan (American Vegetarian Association)
The certifier’s register could not be queried at all. That is a finding about the verification infrastructure, not about the brand.
The seal is on the label image. The issuer publishes no public searchable directory of certified products, so there is no consumer-facing way to verify this mark at the issuer at all. The domain americanvegetarian.org, tried first, is NXDOMAIN. Recorded as unverified, never as "does not hold it". Scope note — even a real AVA vegan mark certifies the absence of animal-derived inputs. It says nothing about CFU count, strain identity, potency at expiry or contaminants.
"Certified Gluten Free"
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
Appears in the Amazon title. No certifying body is named on the listing or on the label image, so there is no register to query. Unverifiable by construction.
"Certified Vegetarian"
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
AVA presumed from the label seal; the same missing-register problem applies.
"GMP Certified Facility"
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
On the 2023 archived brand page. Facility-level, no registrar named. cGMP compliance is a legal baseline for dietary supplement manufacturing, not an achievement.
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 no-cfu-figure-anywhere-on-the-label
A probiotic product that does not state its potency. The word "CFU" appears nowhere on the panel, the bottle, or the listing's ingredients field. The probiotic is declared by weight only — 22 mg — and milligrams of a probiotic blend tell a buyer nothing, because that mass is mostly carrier. The basis question does not even arise: there is no number to have a basis.
The record: Panel JPEG 81NBlvCUoUL._AC_SL1500_.jpg, label revision DRGBIOC3-LBL-R4, transcribed 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81NBlvCUoUL._AC_SL1500_.jpg — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 2 every-row-of-the-panel-is-a-proprietary-blend
Prebiotic Fiber Blend 450 mg, Postbiotic Blend 300 mg, Probiotic Blend 22 mg. There is not one individually quantified active ingredient in the product.
The record: Panel JPEG 81NBlvCUoUL._AC_SL1500_.jpg, transcribed 2026-07-31
Finding 3 probiotic-is-2-8-percent-of-the-formula-by-weight
22 mg of a 772 mg formula. A product sold as "3-in-1 Probiotics, Pre & Postbiotics", whose first named benefit is probiotic, is 97.2% not-probiotic and declines to state its potency.
The record: Panel JPEG 81NBlvCUoUL._AC_SL1500_.jpg, arithmetic on the panel's own figures
Finding 4 produra-advertised-but-deleted-from-the-panel
The Amazon bullet says the product "contains Bacillus Coagulans (ProDURA)". ProDURA does not appear on the Supplement Facts panel. It did in 2023 — the archived label listed "Bacillus Coagulans (ProDura®)" on the panel itself with a trademark attribution line. The current R4 label dropped the trade name from the panel while the advertising kept using it. Disclosure went backwards.
The record: Wayback 20230225011349 versus label revision DRGBIOC3-LBL-R4, and the Amazon B0CHC9MMR1 bullet copy — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 5 trademarked-ingredients-with-zero-human-trials-under-their-trade-names
ProDURA returns 5 PubMed hits and every one is a false positive — an electrospun membrane for dura mater repair (PMID 38841904), wheat stripe rust (PMID 30722363), and three wheat-nematode papers from 1981 to 1989 (PMIDs 19287662, 19287575, 19300773). CoreBiome returns 14, of which 13 are the string matching "core...biome" prose in unrelated papers; the single genuine hit, PMID 41473189, is explicitly in vitro. A count without a title inspection would have reported "5 papers exist".
The record: PubMed E-utilities, queries run 2026-07-31; every title read — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 6 listing-directions-contradict-the-label-and-double-the-cost
The label image says "Take 2 capsules per day with water, preferably before a meal." The Directions field on the same listing says "Simply Take Two Small Capsules Twice Per Day" — four capsules a day. Follow the listing and a 60-capsule bottle is a 15-day supply, not 30, and the real cost per day doubles. The Directions text is a leftover from the previous 4-capsule formula that was never updated.
The record: Amazon B0CHC9MMR1 Directions field versus the label image, both 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHC9MMR1 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 7 zero-strain-designators-on-both-organisms
No ATCC, DSM, CNCM, NCIMB or CECT designator appears anywhere on this label. Neither of the two organisms can be matched to a tested agent. For scale, the same species-level queries return 53 and 137 human RCTs — all of that literature is strain-specific and none of it attaches here.
The record: PubMed E-utilities 2026-07-31; anchor: PMID 29868585 (McFarland 2018, 228 trials) — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 8 mitochondria-and-weight-loss-claims-with-no-supporting-ingredient
"Supports the energy-generating mitochondria in your cells" is a mechanistic cellular claim resting on tributyrin, whose only genuine PubMed citation under the CoreBiome name is in vitro. The archived brand page's "an easier time hitting those weight loss goals" is a body-composition claim attached to a product with no ingredient carrying a human weight-loss RCT. All claims are structure/function-worded and carry the FDA disclaimer; nothing crosses into an explicit disease claim.
The record: Amazon B0CHC9MMR1 bullets and Wayback 20230225011349, both read verbatim
Finding 9 formula-changed-silently-while-the-advertising-did-not
Between the 2023 label and the current R4 label the bottle went from 120 capsules to 60, the serving from 4 capsules to 2, SunFiber 200 mg was replaced by a 450 mg acacia/PHGG blend, B. bifidum was added, probiotic mass moved 16 mg to 22 mg, and two trade names — ProDURA and SunFiber — disappeared from the panel. Calories and fat were declared in 2023 and are not now. The tributyrin did not change: 1000 mg of CoreBiome standardised to 30% tributyrin is 300 mg of tributyrin, so a reader comparing old reviews to the new label will read "1000 mg to 300 mg" and conclude a 70% cut that did not happen.
The record: Wayback 20230225011349 versus label revision DRGBIOC3-LBL-R4 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 10 not-a-mens-product-and-never-was
No men's SKU, no women's SKU, no prostate ingredient, no urinary ingredient, no androgen-related ingredient and no male-selected organism. It is a unisex gut product that appears in the men's universe because it is one of the highest-spend DTC gut supplements a man searching for a men's probiotic will be advertised. The differentiator the brand does sell is the founder's authority: the creative is a portrait of "Dr. Gundry, Founder" over a first-person claim about the formula.
The record: gundrymd.com catalogue and Amazon B0CHC9MMR1 listing copy, both 2026-07-31
Finding 11 all-four-certification-claims-are-brand-asserted
AVA Certified Vegan, "Certified Gluten Free", "Certified Vegetarian" and "GMP Certified Facility". The vegan certifier operates no public register at all, so that mark is structurally unverifiable; the other three name no certifying body. This product carries no NSF contents certification, no USP verification, no Informed Choice mark and no published certificate of analysis.
The record: Label image seals and Amazon B0CHC9MMR1 title; americanveg.org queried 2026-07-31
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.
- The CFU figure on the panel
- No CFU figure was recorded for this product. Either the panel prints none or it was not transcribed; this teardown does not yet distinguish between the two.
- AVA Certified Vegan (American Vegetarian Association) status
- The seal is on the label image. The issuer publishes no public searchable directory of certified products, so there is no consumer-facing way to verify this mark at the issuer at all. The domain americanvegetarian.org, tried first, is NXDOMAIN. Recorded as unverified, never as "does not hold it". Scope note — even a real AVA vegan mark certifies the absence of animal-derived inputs. It says nothing about CFU count, strain identity, potency at expiry or contaminants.
- "Certified Gluten Free" status
- Appears in the Amazon title. No certifying body is named on the listing or on the label image, so there is no register to query. Unverifiable by construction.
- "Certified Vegetarian" status
- AVA presumed from the label seal; the same missing-register problem applies.
- "GMP Certified Facility" status
- On the 2023 archived brand page. Facility-level, no registrar named. cGMP compliance is a legal baseline for dietary supplement manufacturing, not an achievement.
- A US retail price, and therefore the cost per day
- No verifiable US price could be read at source. gundrymd.com returns HTTP 403 to automation on the product path, and the live route is a JS-rendered page that archives as an empty shell; the Amazon listing injects its price client-side, so no price node is served in the HTML. The $69.95 bottle price and the $44.95 subscription price that circulate for this product are third-party reported. The bottle figure is corroborated by the brand's own 2023-02-25 archived page, which lists "Bio Complete 3 $69.95"; the subscription figure is corroborated by nothing. No cost per day is computed here.
- The current retail price and the subscription price, at source
- The brand site returns HTTP 403 to automation and the Amazon price is injected client-side. Both circulating figures are third-party reported. Only the bottle price has a dated corroborating artefact, and that artefact is three years old.
- Any CFU figure for this product
- None is printed. A third-party reviewer reports obtaining "2 billion CFU per 2-capsule serving" by contacting the company directly. That is a company statement relayed by a reviewer, not a label claim, and nobody said whether 2 billion is at manufacture or at expiry. It is not published here as a fact about the label.
- Whether Bifidobacterium bifidum UABb-10 is in this product
- A widely-cited third-party review names it. The designator does not appear on the current panel and could not be verified at the brand. Treated as unverified and not published as an ingredient.
- Per-strain quantities of any kind
- Every row on the panel is a proprietary blend. Two organisms share one 22 mg figure, and that figure is a mass, not a potency.
- A machine-readable Supplement Facts panel
- The panel exists only as pixels in a JPEG on Amazon. The brand site 403s and its live page archives as an empty shell. A screen-reader user cannot access this panel at all.
- A federal label record
- DSLD holds four Gundry MD records — Total Restore (210836), PrebioThrive (210823), Vital Reds (239690) and MCT Wellness (275313). Bio Complete 3 is not among them, confirmed by a second independent query on the product's UPC 810075810585, which returns zero. DSLD is a voluntary archive, so this is a provenance limit, not a compliance finding — but it means no government-transcribed copy of this label exists to check the marketing against.
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.
A probiotic that will not tell you how much probiotic is in it.
Read the Supplement Facts panel and there is no CFU figure — not a vague one, not an at-manufacture one, none. The probiotic is declared by weight: 22 mg, inside a proprietary blend, alongside two other proprietary blends. Twenty-two milligrams of probiotic powder could be fifty billion organisms or fifty thousand; the mass is mostly carrier and the label does not say which. For scale, that 22 mg sits in a 772 mg formula. A product named for its probiotics is 2.8% probiotic by weight, and declines to state the potency of that 2.8%.
The two organisms it does name — Bacillus coagulans and Bifidobacterium bifidum — carry no designators at all. That would be ordinary for this category if the advertising were not doing something specific: the marketing bullet names ProDURA, a trade name that is not on the panel. And it was, in 2023. The archived label printed “Bacillus Coagulans (ProDura®)” on the panel itself, with a trademark attribution line. The current revision dropped it from the panel and kept it in the ads. The brand demonstrably knew how to name the ingredient on-panel and stopped.
Then paste the two trade names the whole product rests on into PubMed. ProDURA returns five papers and all five are about something else — dura mater repair, wheat stripe rust, and three wheat-nematode papers from the 1980s. CoreBiome returns fourteen and thirteen are the string matching “core…biome” in unrelated prose; the one genuine paper is explicitly in vitro. Anyone who reports the raw counts publishes “five papers exist” and “fourteen papers exist”. Read the titles and both collapse to zero human trials.
Credit where it is owed, because this file has to survive a hostile reader: the claim wording is disciplined structure/function throughout, the FDA disclaimer is prominent, the money-back guarantee is real and carries a published phone number, the dosing is a single two-capsule regimen, the label names the CoreBiome trademark owner — more supply-chain transparency than most of this category offers — and 300 mg of tributyrin is a genuinely differentiated postbiotic ingredient, even with no human evidence behind it.
And one last trap, this one aimed at the buyer’s wallet rather than their beliefs: the label says two capsules a day, and the listing’s own Directions field says four. Follow the listing and the bottle is a 15-day supply, not 30.