One product, one panel, one record.
Metagenics UltraFlora® Intensive Care Probiotic (LP299V®, 20 billion CFU, 60 vegetarian capsules) — label audit
Metagenics runs a Men's Health category with six products in it — a prostate SKU, a testosterone SKU and a libido SKU — and not one of the six is a probiotic. The same brand sells a women's probiotic with two designated strains and a named urogenital indication. This SKU carries one of the best single-strain disclosure in the project and zero men's positioning: searched for men, male, prostate, testosterone and man across the archived brand page, the count is 0.
This page is an audit of a label. It records what this product’s panel discloses, what of that could be checked against a primary record, and what could not. The score below ranks this product on that disclosure and on nothing else.
The record this page rests on
- NIH label record
- Label read on
- The most recent dated artefact behind this page. Labels change; this is how old our reading of it is.
- Cohort
- Addendum — outside the founding denominators Torn down 2026-07-31, after the founding cohort of 27 was frozen. It sits outside every D27 denominator this site publishes and changes none of them.
- 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 things on this record did not clear. First, the brand's own page could not be read live — metagenics.com returns HTTP 403 to three independent fetchers — so every statement here about what that page says, including its price and its through-expiration prose, is scoped to an Internet Archive snapshot dated 2025-10-29 and is nine months old. The panel itself does not depend on that: it is tied to the exact SKU by a four-way UPC match through DSLD, GFCO, Amazon and the retailer. Second, and more seriously, the brand's two storefronts contradict each other about an allergen — no allergen declared on the brand page, "Contains: Soy" on Amazon — and the contradiction could not be resolved, because the site that would settle it is the one refusing to answer. What is not quotable from this page is any statement about whether this product contains soy.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
100.0 out of 100
Rank 1 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score. This rank is shared with 18 other products — 19 products sit on 100.0 and are tied. They hold the position jointly; no tiebreaker is applied, because every tiebreaker available here would be a number the rubric deliberately refused to weigh, smuggled back in to make a list look tidier.
The score measures one thing: how much of what you are buying this company tells you, and how much of that survives being checked against a source that is not the company. It does not measure whether the product works — this site holds no efficacy data of its own, and 0 of 294 organism slots in the founding cohort carry a strain with a human randomised trial for any male-specific outcome, so nobody in this category has evidence that would support a ranking by effect.
Computed over 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 "through-expiry": CFU figure printed yes, single basis stated yes, basis reaches expiry yes — 3 of 3. | 3 / 3 = 1.0000 | 0.2200 |
| Printed designators that lead to a human trial | 0.20 | 1 of 1 checked organism slot resolves to at least one human randomised trial under the designator exactly as printed. This counts whether the identity leads to a trial, never what the trial found. | 1 / 1 = 1.0000 | 0.2000 |
| Certification confirmed at the issuer’s own register | 0.14 | 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 |
1.0000 — the last column added up — divided by 1.00, the weight this record could answer, is 1.0000. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 100.0 above.
See this product’s row in the full ranking, alongside the other 153 scored products, or read what each of the five components asks and how to check it .
What this label discloses
Everything in this table is what the product itself states — on the printed panel, on the brand’s own page, or in the label record the manufacturer filed. Nothing in it is checked yet; checking is the next section.
| Disclosure | As recorded |
|---|---|
| CFU as printed | 170 mg (20 billion CFU) per 2-capsule serving |
| What that count is measured against | Through expiry |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 1 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
Label footnote, from the DSLD transcription: "20 billion CFU (at time of expiration)". Brand page: "Cold shipping not required. We do extensive quality testing to guarantee CFU count shown on the label through expiration. Please follow storage instructions on label to ensure product viability." The guarantee is conditioned on the label's storage instructions: "For best results, store in a cool dry place or keep refrigerated."
The panel’s own words on potency, verbatim.
The panel guarantees the count through the expiration or best-by date. This is the only basis that is falsifiable by a reader holding the bottle.
Every organism on the panel carries a printed strain designator. Whether those designators lead anywhere is a separate question, answered below.
| Organism as printed | Designator as printed | Quantity as printed | What the designator resolves to | The query we ran |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lactobacillus plantarum (correct name: Lactiplantibacillus plantarum) | 299v | 170 mg (20 billion CFU) | Human RCT | ("Lactobacillus plantarum 299v" OR "Lactiplantibacillus plantarum 299v" OR "LP299V" OR "DSM 9843") AND "Randomized Controlled Trial"[Publication Type] |
What of that is verifiable
A disclosure is verifiable when a reader can open a record that neither we nor the brand controls and see the same thing. Below is every dated artefact this page rests on. What is absent from this list is not verified, however reasonable it sounds.
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 295882 (opens in a new tab) captured NIH's own transcription of the physical label, on-market. UPC cross-check is a four-way match: DSLD 7 55571 93875 6 equals the Amazon-listed UPC 755571938756, equals the GFCO register entry 755571938756, equals the Castle Remedies barcode 755571938756. The Supplement Facts on this page are therefore tied to the exact SKU, not to a lookalike. Source for the at-expiry footnote, the "Practitioner exclusive" statement, the GFCO seal and the Probi AB Brand IP statement.
- Internet Archive capture — 20251029074819 (opens in a new tab) captured The archived brand page, used because metagenics.com refuses automation. Source for the brand's own JSON-LD price ($56.75), the prose through-expiration guarantee, the web Supplement Facts panel with its undefined footnote markers, the Other Ingredients list, and the zero-hit search for men, male, prostate, testosterone and man.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — amazon-B00O9S6K0I-2026-07-31https://www.amazon.com/Metagenics-UltraFlora-Intensive-Care-Count/dp/B00O9S6K0I — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The same SKU on the second channel, HTTP 200. Source for the soy allergen declaration, the "Total Servings Per Container 60" figure, the one-to-two-capsule direction and the "clinically proven" bullet. No price is taken from it: the response served EUR prices in its recommendation carousels, which means the request was geo-routed.
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
$1.90 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $56.95 USD
- What that buys
- 60-capsule bottle (30 servings at the label's two-capsules-daily direction)
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://castleremedies.com/products/ultraflora-intensive-care-probiotic-60-capsules.json — 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Gluten-Free Certification Organization (GFCO) | Confirmed at issuer | 31 July 2026 |
| Certified B Corporation (B Lab) | Confirmed at issuer | 31 July 2026 |
| NSF-certified facility / cGMP-certified facility | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
| Non-GMO Project Verified | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
Gluten-Free Certification Organization (GFCO)
Found on the certifier’s own public register.
Verified at the issuer's own register against the exact UPC. Querying ?s=755571938756 returns "UltraFlora® Intensive Care Probiotic (60 caps) | Metagenics | 755571938756 | US", and ?s=UltraFlora returns the same row a second way. Scope trap worth naming: GFCO certifies the absence of gluten. It says nothing about CFU count, strain identity, potency at expiry, or contaminants.
Certified B Corporation (B Lab)
Found on the certifier’s own public register.
Verified at B Lab's own register: certified entity Meta Parent LP, certified since June 2022, standards version 1.6, overall B Impact Score 81.2 against a qualifying threshold of 80 (median for ordinary businesses 50.9), sub-scores Governance 10.1, Workers 26.6, Community 14.6, Environment 19.5, Customers 10.2. Two things to report honestly: the certified entity is the parent holding company, not the product, and 81.2 against a floor of 80 is a 1.2-point margin. And the decisive point — B Corp certification measures social and environmental performance. It is not a product quality, potency or purity certification.
NSF-certified facility / cGMP-certified facility
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
Claimed by the brand ("Produced in NSF-certified facilities" on the sibling Balance page; "manufactured in a cGMP-certified facility" on the Amazon listing). nsf.org returns a Cloudflare 403 and listings.nsf.org serves an Angular shell whose API could not be reached, so the register could not be queried at all. Brand-asserted, unverified — never "does not hold it".
Non-GMO Project Verified
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
Listed among the certifications on Metagenics' Quality page. The Non-GMO Project's product finder returns HTTP 404 at /find-by-product/, /find-a-product/ and /verified-products/ — three URL spellings tried, site root 200. Register unreachable, so brand-asserted and unverified. Note the precision: the product label itself says only "This product is non-GMO", which is a plain formulation claim and not a Non-GMO Project claim.
How it differs from the same brand’s women’s version
Across the fourteen same-brand men’s-versus-women’s label diffs run inside the frozen founding cohort, zero men’s or default formulas contain a probiotic strain, identified by designator, that was selected on male-specific evidence. In eight of the fourteen the sex-specific differentiator is a botanical or a mineral, and in five of the fourteen the women’s SKU is better-specified, cheaper, or both — “better-specified” meaning the panel that discloses more, never the panel with more in it. The rule behind each of those counts, and all fourteen pairs classified against it , are published in full. Diffs run on teardowns added since sit outside this fourteen, and outside the sentence above.
Compared against Metagenics UltraFlora® Women's (DSLD 216583, UPC 755571937476). Diffed .
What the two panels differ by
- Different organisms selected for different reasons. This SKU is L. plantarum 299v alone; the women's SKU is L. rhamnosus GR-1 plus L. reuteri RC-14, two strains chosen against a named, mechanistically coherent, sex-linked indication. DSLD 295882 versus DSLD 216583, both on-market, read 2026-07-31
- The stated indications diverge accordingly. This SKU — "Support for intestinal distress and bowel discomfort". The women's SKU — "help maintain a healthy vaginal microflora and support urogenital health". DSLD 295882 versus DSLD 216583, 2026-07-31
- 20 billion CFU (at time of expiration) in a 170 mg single-strain fill here, against 2 billion CFU (At date of expiration.) in a 14.5 mg "A Probiotic Blend" there. DSLD 295882 versus DSLD 216583 Supplement Facts transcriptions, 2026-07-31
- The women's SKU is the cheaper one — $36.95 against $56.95, $1.23 a day against $1.90 — at one capsule daily rather than two. Blue Sky Vitamin (UltraFlora Women's, $36.95) and Castle Remedies (Intensive Care, $56.95), both fetched 2026-07-31
- The strain IP is disclosed on both, to different owners. This SKU names Probi AB. The women's SKU names "Under license from Chr. Hansen A/S and protected by Chr. Hansen A/S patents of the WO 00/35465 patent family, and others. RC-14 and GR-1 are trademarks of Chr. Hansen A/S". DSLD Brand IP statements on 295882 and 216583, 2026-07-31
What is identical across the pair
- Both print a strain designator for every organism they name.
- Both guarantee CFU at the expiration date on the physical label.
- Both are 30-serving containers with the strain owner disclosed on the label.
Every finding on this page, with the record behind it
Finding 1 brand-and-amazon-listings-disagree-about-an-allergen
The same brand's two storefronts give different answers on soy. The brand page declares no allergen and lists microcrystalline cellulose as the base; the Amazon listing for ASIN B00O9S6K0I lists potato starch, marks the organism "(soy)", and states "Contains: Soy." The same two listings also disagree about servings per container — 30 on the brand's own label against "Total Servings Per Container 60" on Amazon, which inflates the apparent value twofold — and about directions, "Take two capsules daily" against "Take one to two capsules daily". The servings error is an arithmetic problem. The allergen is the consumer-safety one.
The record: Amazon ASIN B00O9S6K0I fetched 2026-07-31 versus DSLD 295882 and the archived brand page (Wayback 20251029074819) — open ithttps://www.amazon.com/Metagenics-UltraFlora-Intensive-Care-Count/dp/B00O9S6K0I — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 2 every-footnote-marker-on-the-web-panel-is-undefined
The web Supplement Facts panel prints the number as "170 mg** (20 billion CFU)††" and no legend for ** or †† exists anywhere on the page. The at-expiry guarantee survives on this SKU only because the brand also states it in prose elsewhere on the same page. On the sibling Balance SKU, where there is no prose restatement, it does not survive at all.
The record: Archived brand page, Wayback 20251029074819; string counts on the sibling Balance page — "Daily Value" 0 occurrences, "not established" 0, "expiration" 0 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 the-pivotal-trial-is-funded-by-the-strain-owner-and-the-ingredient-supplier
Ducrotté 2012, the trial this product's evidence rests on, states its funding in the article footnotes verbatim — "Supported by Rosell-Lallemand Institute, France and Probi AB, Sweden." Probi AB owns the strain and is named on this very label ("Probi Digestis (LP299V) supplied by Probi AB"); Rosell-Lallemand supplied the study product. This is a checkable, on-the-record conflict retrieved from the full text, not an insinuation, and it is not a reason to discard the trial. It is a reason to print the funder next to the result, every time.
The record: PMID 22912552 (World J Gastroenterol 2012;18(30):4012-8), funding statement quoted from the article footnotes — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 4 the-dose-is-twice-the-dose-the-cited-trials-used
The label's two-capsule serving delivers 20 billion CFU per day. Ducrotté 2012 dosed 10 billion CFU per capsule once daily ("The test product contained 10 billion colony-forming units (cfu) per capsule"), and Krammer 2021 confirms the same convention ("LP299V (1 capsule/day; 1 x 10^10 CFU)"). "Clinically tested strain" on this label is therefore doing work at a dose the cited trials did not use. Above-dose is a far smaller problem than under-dose and should be reported at that proportion — the sibling Balance SKU is at one-thirteenth of its trial dose.
The record: PMID 22912552 (n=214, 10 billion CFU/day) and PMID 33556972 (n=221, 1 x 10^10 CFU/day) against the label's 2-capsule serving — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 5 practitioner-exclusive-on-the-label-sold-openly-on-amazon
The DSLD label transcription carries the statement "Practitioner exclusive." The SKU is sold on Amazon and by open online retailers with no practitioner gate — the price on this page came from one of them. Minor, but it is a label statement that is not operationally true.
The record: DSLD 295882 label statement versus Amazon ASIN B00O9S6K0I and castleremedies.com, both 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 6 clinically-proven-in-the-amazon-bullet-copy
The Amazon listing reads "As the #1 Doctor Recommended Professional Supplement Brand, Metagenics delivers clinically proven, precision-crafted formulas". "Clinically proven" is a materially stronger word than "clinically studied", and here it is attached to a brand-level statement rather than to any specific endpoint. Set against the ACG's 2021 IBS guideline — "We suggest against probiotics for the treatment of global IBS symptoms. Conditional recommendation; very low level of evidence." — it is the weakest-supported phrase in this product's copy. The label's own claim language, by contrast, stays inside structure/function grammar throughout.
The record: Amazon ASIN B00O9S6K0I bullet copy, 2026-07-31, against ACG Clinical Guideline, Management of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Am J Gastroenterol 2021 — open ithttps://www.amazon.com/Metagenics-UltraFlora-Intensive-Care-Count/dp/B00O9S6K0I — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 7 number-one-doctor-recommended-rests-on-an-unnamed-survey
The "#1 Doctor Recommended Professional Supplement Brand" claim does carry a footnote, and the footnote is better than most — "Based on 2024 study data from independent US survey showing which professional supplement brands are most recommended or sold by healthcare professionals. Professional-grade supplements are those typically sold through HCPs." Credit for dating it and for defining the universe. But the survey is not named and its sponsor is not disclosed: "independent US survey" is the entire attribution.
The record: Metagenics Quality page, Internet Archive snapshot 20260609213228 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 8 the-brands-own-mens-health-category-contains-no-probiotic
The archived Metagenics Men's Health category page reads "6 Results" and lists them: Concentrated Ultra Prostagen ("Supports prostate health and urinary function"), Wellness Essentials Men's Vitality Daily Packs, Axis Endo Hormone Balance Supplement, BioSom, Testralin ("Supports healthy testosterone balance") and HisSynergy ("Supports the male libido"). Not one is a probiotic. The page even carries a Probiotics facet under Health Interests; it returns nothing in this category. Confirmed independently in the government database: DSLD searched for UltraFlora Men's returns the whole UltraFlora family including Women's and Children's and no Men's; "Metagenics men" returns one record, Concentrated Ultra Prostagen (DSLD 26049), which is not a probiotic; "Metagenics prostate" returns the same single non-probiotic record.
The record: Metagenics Men's Health category, Internet Archive snapshot 20250913225057 ("6 Results"), plus three DSLD searches returning no men's probiotic — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 9 no-male-outcome-evidence-exists-for-this-strain-and-the-brand-claims-none
Two independent query formulations for a male outcome on this designator both return zero: ("Lactobacillus plantarum 299v" OR "Lactiplantibacillus plantarum 299v" OR "LP299V" OR "DSM 9843") AND (prostate OR testosterone OR "erectile" OR "male fertility" OR spermatogenesis) returns 0, and the MeSH-anchored variant returns 0. To the brand's credit it makes no such claim — the zero is recorded because listicles put this SKU on "best probiotic for men" pages, and the brand did not.
The record: PubMed E-utilities, two query formulations, both 0, run 2026-07-31 and printed verbatim in the teardown
Finding 10 a-four-review-five-star-rating-is-not-a-quality-signal
The brand page's JSON-LD carries reviewCount 4 and ratingValue 5, and the Amazon listing shows 62 ratings. A four-review 5.0 is not evidence in either direction and should not be presented as one. Recorded so that nobody reads the absence of complaints as the presence of quality.
The record: JSON-LD on the archived brand page (Wayback 20251029074819) and the Amazon ASIN B00O9S6K0I listing, 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.
- NSF-certified facility / cGMP-certified facility status
- Claimed by the brand ("Produced in NSF-certified facilities" on the sibling Balance page; "manufactured in a cGMP-certified facility" on the Amazon listing). nsf.org returns a Cloudflare 403 and listings.nsf.org serves an Angular shell whose API could not be reached, so the register could not be queried at all. Brand-asserted, unverified — never "does not hold it".
- Non-GMO Project Verified status
- Listed among the certifications on Metagenics' Quality page. The Non-GMO Project's product finder returns HTTP 404 at /find-by-product/, /find-a-product/ and /verified-products/ — three URL spellings tried, site root 200. Register unreachable, so brand-asserted and unverified. Note the precision: the product label itself says only "This product is non-GMO", which is a plain formulation claim and not a Non-GMO Project claim.
- Which of the brand's own two storefronts carries the current Other Ingredients and allergen statement
- They disagree, and the disagreement could not be resolved. The brand page lists microcrystalline cellulose, capsule (HPMC), silica and magnesium stearate, and declares no allergen. The Amazon listing for the same ASIN lists "Potato starch, capsule (HPMC), Lactobacillus plantarum 299v (soy), and magnesium stearate" and declares "Contains: Soy." One of the two is stale — the potato-starch base matches the older Ducrotté-era formulation — but metagenics.com is 403-blocked to automation and no 2026 snapshot exists, so which one is current cannot be established from this evidence. A soy-allergic reader should verify against the physical bottle.
- The NSF facility certification and the Non-GMO Project verification
- Both registers were unreachable: nsf.org returns Cloudflare 403 and listings.nsf.org serves an Angular shell with no reachable API; the Non-GMO Project's product finder 404s at three URL spellings. Neither claim can be confirmed or refuted, so both are recorded as brand-asserted and unverified rather than as absent.
- The "transparent batch-specific Certificates of Analysis" claim
- The sentence exists on Metagenics' Quality page. No COA portal, lot-number lookup or COA link appears anywhere on that page, so whether a COA is actually retrievable could not be tested — the mechanism is not offered. The site is 403-blocked to automation, so this is reported as what the page does not provide, not as a failed request.
- The SuppCo TrustScore that Metagenics lists among its certifications
- suppco.com did not resolve to a fetchable page this pass, so its methodology is unverified. That is separate from the disclosure problem, which stands regardless of the score's quality.
- Funding and author conflicts for two of the supporting LP299V trials
- Funding for Niedzielin 2001 (PMID 11711768) and Krammer 2021 (PMID 33556972) was not retrieved and is recorded as unverified. Funding for the pivotal Ducrotté 2012 trial was retrieved from the full text and is quoted verbatim in the findings below.
- A live read of the brand's own product page
- metagenics.com returns HTTP 403 to curl with full browser headers, 403 to WebFetch, and a Cloudflare "Performing security verification" interstitial through a reader proxy — three independent fetchers, three refusals. Every statement here about what the brand page says is scoped to the Internet Archive snapshot of 2025-10-29 and dated as such.
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 a control-group product, and it belongs on this site for the opposite of the usual reason.
Start with the disclosure, because it is one of the best single-strain disclosures in the project. One organism. One designator, printed on the panel: 299v. A trade designator in the body copy, LP299V®. A culture-collection deposit, DSM 9843, named in the full text of the trial the product leans on. And the commercial ingredient and its owner in the government label record — “Probi Digestis® (LP299V) supplied by Probi AB.” Four links, all verifiable, no proprietary blend, no second organism, no unallocated CFU. You can trace the number on the bottle to a deposited culture and to the trials run on it. That is the standard the rest of this category should be measured against, and almost nothing else in the audit meets it.
The potency claim is the honest form too: 20 billion CFU at time of expiration, on the physical label, restated in prose on the brand page. Two certifications were confirmed at their issuers’ own registers rather than taken off a badge — GFCO against the exact UPC, and B Corp at B Lab with the score (81.2), the date (June 2022) and the sub-scores on the record. Note what each one covers: GFCO certifies the absence of gluten; B Corp measures social and environmental performance at the parent holding company. Neither is a potency test, an identity test or a contaminant test.
Then ask the question this site exists to ask, and the answer arrives from an unexpected direction.
Searched across the archived brand page for men|male|prostate|testosterone|man: 0 hits. Not one.
This is not a men’s product and does not pretend to be. But the brand does run a Men’s Health category,
and the archived page reads “6 Results”: Concentrated Ultra Prostagen, Wellness Essentials Men’s
Vitality Daily Packs, Axis Endo, BioSom, Testralin, HisSynergy. A prostate product. A testosterone
product. A libido product. Not one probiotic — and the category page carries a Probiotics facet that
returns nothing.
Meanwhile the same brand sells UltraFlora Women’s: two designated strains, GR-1 and RC-14, chosen against a named, mechanistically coherent, sex-linked indication, at $36.95 against this product’s $56.95. A 40-year practitioner brand with every commercial incentive to launch a men’s probiotic, with a dedicated men’s shelf already built, has looked at the opportunity and declined. That is the single most persuasive artefact this audit has found, and it belongs to a company that never made a men’s claim in the first place.
Two things keep this page from being a clean recommendation. The first is the dose: the label delivers twice the 10 billion CFU per day used in Ducrotté 2012 and confirmed in Krammer 2021, while the copy says “clinically tested strain”. The second is worse, and it is not about probiotics at all. The brand’s own two storefronts disagree about an allergen. The brand page declares none; Amazon, for the same ASIN, says “Contains: Soy.” One of them is stale. Which one could not be established, because metagenics.com refuses to answer automated requests at all — and a soy-allergic shopper reading either page has no way to know which one they are reading.