One product, one panel, one record.
Nature Made Probiotics Extra Strength 15 Billion CFU — label audit
Two organisms, both with real strain designators, both with their own CFU count and their own milligram amount — the best disclosure in its batch by a distance. And the brand's own fine print concedes what "clinically studied" rests on: studies of LGG "alone or in combination with other probiotic strains". There is no randomised trial of this combination.
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
- D₂₇ founding teardown One of the 27 products taken apart at label level. That cohort is frozen and dated, so the audit’s published percentages cannot silently move.
- 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
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 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 | 2 of 2 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 2 / 2 = 1.0000 | 0.2400 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 2 of 2 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 2 / 2 = 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 | 2 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. | 2 / 2 = 1.0000 | 0.2000 |
| 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 |
0.8600 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, 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 | 15 Billion CFU (13 billion L. rhamnosus GG, 2 billion B. lactis HN019) |
| What that count is measured against | Through expiry |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 2 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
Formulated to provide at least 13 billion live cells per capsule of Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG and 2 billion live cells per capsule of Bifidobacterium lactis HN019 if continuously stored in a cool, dry place at or below 77°F (25°C) and consumed prior to expiration date. Storage and handling conditions can vary and may affect the total amount of cells delivered at time of consumption.
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 rhamnosus (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus) | GG | 13 Billion CFU / 104 mg | Human RCT | "Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG" AND randomized controlled trial[pt] |
| Bifidobacterium lactis (correct name: Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis) | HN019 | 2 Billion CFU / 12 mg | Human RCT | "Bifidobacterium lactis HN019" 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 — NM_3011_PK002685_EXTRA_STRENGTH_PROBIOTICS_backhttps://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0066/7569/3639/files/NM_3011_PK002685_EXTRA_STRENGTH_PROBIOTICS_back.jpg — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The brand's own back-label render, read at 1800x1800 with the Supplement Facts and the ♦ footnote both fully legible, and independently re-read during the audit. There is no DSLD record for this SKU.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — naturemade-extra-strength-pdp-2026-07-30https://www.naturemade.com/products/probiotics-extra-strength-capsules — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Live page: item 3011, $28.69, subscribe $25.82, the ‡ footnote, the "Guaranteed potency" marketing line and the 75°F FAQ figure.
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, 2 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
$0.96 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $28.69 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle (30 servings, 1 capsule per serving)
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.naturemade.com/products/probiotics-extra-strength-capsules — 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 |
|---|---|---|
| None claimed for this SKU | Not checked | not checked |
| "#1 Pharmacist Recommended Vitamin & Supplement Brand" | Not checked | not checked |
None claimed for this SKU
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
Notable precisely because Nature Made carries USP Verified marks on many of its products — this probiotic does not display one, on either the page or the label. A scripted search of the product page found exactly one occurrence of the string "USP", inside a bot-detection script, not a certification claim. What is claimed is first-party: "Encapsulated and quality tested in the USA. Made to our guaranteed purity and potency standards" — Nature Made's own standard, not an external certifier's.
"#1 Pharmacist Recommended Vitamin & Supplement Brand"
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
Footnoted only as "Based on a survey of pharmacists who recommend branded vitamins and supplements" — no survey name, no fielding year, no sample size, no sponsor disclosure. A brand-level marketing award claim, not a product quality certification, and it should never be presented as the latter.
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 clinically-studied-where-no-study-used-this-formulation
The lead sentence calls these "clinically studied probiotic supplements". The brand's own ‡ footnote, on the same page, reads verbatim: "Based on publicly available information. Includes studies that use Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG alone or in combination with other probiotic strains." Independently confirmed: the query "rhamnosus GG" AND "HN019" AND randomized returns zero. There is no randomised trial of the 13-billion LGG plus 2-billion HN019 combination. Each strain is well studied alone; the product as formulated has never been tested.
The record: Nature Made ‡ footnote, quoted verbatim · PubMed query returning 0, re-run 2026-07-30 — open ithttps://www.naturemade.com/products/probiotics-extra-strength-capsules — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 2 guaranteed-on-the-website-formulated-to-provide-on-the-label
The label footnote says the product is "formulated to provide at least" 13 billion and 2 billion live cells — a formulation statement conditioned on storage, not a potency guarantee. The website upgrades this to the flat assertion "No refrigeration required: Guaranteed potency until expiration". The word "Guaranteed" appears in the marketing and not in the footnote it points at.
The record: Brand back-label render versus naturemade.com product page, both verified 2026-07-30
Finding 3 lgg-gas-and-bloating-claim-over-reaches
The page assigns LGG the job of relieving occasional gas, bloating, abdominal discomfort and diarrhoea in the small intestine. The strict bloating query returns three trials: an antibiotic-adjunct study in H. pylori eradication whose own conclusion is that probiotic supplementation did not significantly reduce new or aggravated symptoms; a four-strain mixture in diagnosed IBS run by a manufacturer's research centre, where only borborygmi was individually significant; and a randomised crossover of LGG alone with a flatulence and bloating scale that found no difference from placebo. Directionally defensible, materially over-stated.
The record: PMID 23838939 · PMID 16128676 · PMID 15472792 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 4 two-storage-thresholds
77°F (25°C) on the label, 75°F (23°C) in the on-page FAQ — and storage is the exact variable the potency footnote is conditioned on.
The record: Brand back-label render versus naturemade.com FAQ, both verified 2026-07-30
Finding 5 pharmacist-recommended-badge-with-an-unnamed-survey
"#1 Pharmacist Recommended Vitamin & Supplement Brand*" footnoted only as "Based on a survey of pharmacists who recommend branded vitamins and supplements". No survey name, no year, no sample size, no sponsor.
The record: naturemade.com product page, verified live 2026-07-30
Finding 6 no-third-party-certification-on-a-usp-brand
The absence is notable precisely because Nature Made verifies many other SKUs with USP. This one carries no USP mark on the page or the label.
The record: naturemade.com product page string search, verified live 2026-07-30
Finding 7 no-dsld-record
The UPC returns zero hits in the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database, so the panel has no government-transcribed copy and the brand's own render is the sole source.
The record: DSLD UPC query, re-run 2026-07-30 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 8 not-a-mens-product
The brand says so itself: "These mens and womens probiotics work in both the small and large intestines…", and the Amazon listing is titled "Probiotics for Women and Men". Nature Made's 194-product catalogue contains men's and women's multivitamins but no gendered probiotic in either direction.
The record: naturemade.com product page and products.json, 194 products, fetched 2026-07-30
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.
- None claimed for this SKU status
- Notable precisely because Nature Made carries USP Verified marks on many of its products — this probiotic does not display one, on either the page or the label. A scripted search of the product page found exactly one occurrence of the string "USP", inside a bot-detection script, not a certification claim. What is claimed is first-party: "Encapsulated and quality tested in the USA. Made to our guaranteed purity and potency standards" — Nature Made's own standard, not an external certifier's.
- "#1 Pharmacist Recommended Vitamin & Supplement Brand" status
- Footnoted only as "Based on a survey of pharmacists who recommend branded vitamins and supplements" — no survey name, no fielding year, no sample size, no sponsor disclosure. A brand-level marketing award claim, not a product quality certification, and it should never be presented as the latter.
- The "#1 Pharmacist Recommended" survey
- Unnamed, undated, unsized, sponsor undisclosed.
- Any government label record
- None exists — the UPC returns zero hits in DSLD, so the panel rests on the brand's own 1800x1800 back-label render, read directly and independently re-read during the audit. Brand-filtered DSLD returns eight Nature Made probiotic records, none of them this SKU.
- Which storage temperature governs
- The label specifies at or below 77°F (25°C); the on-page FAQ says at or below 75°F (23°C). Two different thresholds from the same brand for the same product. Note the 77°F figure is also a website footnote, so this is a footnote-versus-FAQ inconsistency rather than a label-versus-web one.
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 among the best-labelled probiotics in this research, and it is a drugstore product with two organisms in it.
Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG — 13 Billion CFU♦ 104 mg Bifidobacterium lactis HN019™ — 2 Billion CFU♦ 12 mg
Two strains. Both designated. Each with its own CFU count and its own mass. No proprietary blend, no pooled number, no ambiguity about which fraction of the 15 billion is which organism. That is what the whole category is asked for and almost nobody delivers.
The HN019 dose is the rarest thing in this project: a label amount that matches a published trial dose for the exact claimed outcome. The dose-response study tested 17.2 billion and 1.8 billion CFU/day against placebo, and the low dose worked — whole-gut transit fell from 60±33 to 41±39 hours, p=0.01, against no change on placebo. Nature Made supplies 2 billion for the same regularity claim.
Now the thing the brand tells on itself.
“‡Based on publicly available information. Includes studies that use Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG alone or in combination with other probiotic strains.”
That footnote is attached to the phrase “clinically studied”, and it concedes that the studies are of LGG by itself or LGG mixed with other strains — not with HN019, and not as this product. Confirmed independently: the query for randomised trials containing both “rhamnosus GG” and “HN019” returns zero. Each strain is well studied alone. The combination has never been tested.
This is the textbook version of the “clinically studied” red flag, with an unusual wrinkle: Nature Made documented it in its own fine print. A hostile dietitian will hold that footnote up. An honest reviewer should note that most of this category would simply not have written it.
Two smaller inconsistencies worth naming. The label footnote says the product is “formulated to provide at least” its stated cell counts — a formulation statement, conditioned on storage — while the website says “Guaranteed potency until expiration”. And the storage condition that the whole footnote hangs on is given as 77°F on the label and 75°F in the FAQ.
Explicitly not red flags here, and worth saying so: no proprietary blend, full per-strain CFU and mass, a 100% designator rate, a through-expiry basis, label and website agreeing on the dose, and a subscription with no advance-notice window and no friction term worth flagging.