One product, one panel, one record.
Nature's Bounty Acidophilus Probiotic, 120 tablets, 100 Million Organisms — label audit
The physical bottle names its strain — La-14 — and guarantees CFU through the expiration date. The brand's own website shows a species-only panel with a 2016 copyright and an at-the-time-of-manufacture qualifier. A buyer doing due diligence on the manufacturer's site is handed the weaker, uncheckable version of the label, and the stronger one exists only on the carton and on a retailer's page.
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.
- How deep this went
- Full forensic teardown Panel transcribed, every strain designator queried, every certification chased to its issuer’s own register, and the literature behind each marketing claim opened and read.
- What did not survive verification
- Part of this page was refuted or could not be reproduced Three bounded items. First, the brief's own source URL was never read: amazon.com/dp/B0014CVXMW returns a CAPTCHA challenge on direct request and through a reader proxy, and it was not bypassed — so the listing's price, its bullet copy and its 78,166-rating count are unverified, and no claim-crossing verdict on Amazon's seller-authored copy is published here. The listing title quoted in the men's-product section comes from a search-result snippet, not from a fetched page, and is labelled as such. Second, the price rests on a single reachable retailer: Walmart, CVS, Vitacost and iHerb were all 403 or bot-walled, Nature's Bounty does not sell direct, and the Walgreens listing is recorded by product id rather than by URL, so the price field points at the retailer's domain with the product id alongside it. Third, the CFU basis is recorded as through-expiry because the physical label governs — and the same retail listing simultaneously carries an at-time-of-manufacture qualifier from 2016 brand copy, which is not a resolvable disagreement but the finding itself. What did survive verification in full: the UPC match between the retailer transcription and DSLD 277021; the La-14 designator and its 24 species-qualified records with 5 RCT-tagged, every one of them multi-strain; the through-expiration guarantee on the current label; the decade-long DSLD trail showing a designator added, refrigeration dropped and the basis upgraded; and DSLD's targetGroups field carrying no sex marker on either the 120-count record or its 100-count sibling.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
86.0 out of 100
Rank 23 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score. This rank is shared with 3 other products — 4 products sit on 86.0 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 | 1 claimed certification queried at the issuer’s register and not listed there. | 0 / 1 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
0.8600 — the last column added up — divided by 1.00, the weight this record could answer, is 0.8600. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 86.0 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 | Lactobacillus Acidophilus La-14 (100 million CFU) — 0.5 mg |
| What that count is measured against | Through expiry |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 1 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
From the current physical label, transcribed identically in DSLD 277021's storage statement and in the Walgreens warnings block: "Guaranteed quality and CFU through expiration when continuously stored in the original packaging as directed." Recorded on the same retail listing, in the description block and also carried on naturesbounty.com, is the brand's 2016 marketing copy: "…contains over 100 million active Lactobacillus Acidophilus (including the naturally occurring metabolic product produced by Lactobacilli) at the time of manufacture." Both statements appear on one page, from one seller, about one bottle, and they are mutually exclusive. The basis recorded here is through-expiry because the physical label governs — and the contradiction is itself a published finding.
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 Acidophilus | La-14 | 100 million CFU (0.5 mg) | Human RCT | "Lactobacillus acidophilus La-14"[tiab] · "La-14"[tiab] AND (randomized[pt] OR "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.
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 277021 (opens in a new tab) captured NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record, on-market, entered 2022-09-22, 120 count. UPC cross-check passed against the retailer transcription - "0 74312 02610 2" versus "07431202610". Source for the single ingredient line naming La-14 at 100 million CFU in 0.5 mg, servingsPerContainer 120, the "Guaranteed quality and CFU through expiration" storage statement, the label statements ("Friendly bacteria for the digestive system", "Digestive health", "Guaranteed quality / Laboratory tested", "Suitable for vegetarians"), DSLD's Structure/Function classification of the claims, and the targetGroups field that carries no sex marker. The record's siblings document a decade of change - 74278 (2017, off-market, species-only, at-manufacture, refrigerate after opening) and 236913 (2020, on-market, La-14, no basis stated).
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — walgreens-prod6110362-2026-07-31 captured Walgreens product listing, product id prod6110362, "Acidophilus Probiotic Tablets, 120.0 ea" — a retailer transcription of the current physical label, including its Supplement Facts and its storage statement, and the only reachable retail price for this SKU. Recorded without a URL on purpose: the source identifies the listing by product id rather than by address, and this project does not reconstruct a URL it did not fetch. This is also the page that carries both CFU bases at once — the through-expiration guarantee in the warnings block and the 2016 at-manufacture qualifier in the description block.
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
$0.12 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $14.99 USD
- What that buys
- 120-tablet bottle (120 servings, 1 tablet daily). Price read at Walgreens, product id prod6110362.
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.walgreens.com/ — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
What certification it holds, checked at the issuer’s own register
A badge on a bottle is a claim like any other. Every row below was checked — or not checked — at the certifier’s own public register, never at the badge. Across the frozen founding cohort, 2 of 27 products hold a certification we could confirm at the issuer — a founding-cohort figure, not a count over every teardown on this site.
| Programme | Status at the issuer | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| NSF GMP registration and NSF/ANSI 173 finished-product certification | Absent from register | 31 July 2026 |
| "Guaranteed quality" / "Laboratory tested" (label statements) | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
NSF GMP registration and NSF/ANSI 173 finished-product certification
The register was queried and this product is not listed on it.
Not claimed by the brand, and checked for completeness. NSF's GMP register was queried at four spellings — Nature's Bounty, Bounty, NBTY, Bountiful — all returning No Matching Companies Found, with positive controls (Thorne, Designs for Health, Nestle) returning live listings in the same query format. The finished-product register with CompanyName=Bounty returns No Matching Companies Found. Recorded as: none claimed and none found.
"Guaranteed quality" / "Laboratory tested" (label statements)
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
"Laboratory tested" names no laboratory, no standard, no accreditation and no scope. It is not a certification and does not claim to be. To be fair to the brand: it is not making an unverifiable certification claim, it is making no certification claim at all. That is more honest than an unnamed-issuer claim and less protective for the buyer than a verified one.
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-brands-own-website-shows-a-weaker-label-than-the-bottle
naturesbounty.com renders a species-only panel — "Lactobacillus Acidophilus — 0.5 mg" with no designator — qualified "at the time of manufacture" and carrying "© 2016 Nature's Bounty, Inc". The physical package names La-14 and guarantees CFU through expiration. That is the difference between a checkable product and an uncheckable one: La-14 is a real designator with 24 species-qualified PubMed records, while an undesignated species name is unverifiable in principle. Due diligence on the brand's own site returns the unusable version.
The record: naturesbounty.com product page (2016 copyright panel) versus DSLD 277021 and the Walgreens transcription of the current label — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 2 two-contradictory-cfu-bases-on-one-retail-listing
One Walgreens listing carries, in its warnings block, "Guaranteed quality and CFU through expiration when continuously stored in the original packaging as directed" — and, in its description block, the 2016 brand copy qualifying the count "at the time of manufacture". Those are mutually exclusive, and a consumer cannot resolve them. The weaker one is the version carried on the brand's own website.
The record: Walgreens prod6110362 warnings block versus description block; DSLD 277021 storage statement — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 one-hundred-million-cfu-is-ten-to-a-hundred-times-below-its-own-strains-trial-range
100 million CFU is 0.1 billion. The L. acidophilus literature generally, and La-14 specifically inside the mixtures it has been studied in, runs at 1–10 billion CFU and above. This product delivers a tenth to a hundredth of the studied dose, and delivers it as the only organism, without the co-strains present in every trial that exists for it.
The record: PubMed "Lactobacillus acidophilus La-14"[tiab] = 24, RCT-filtered = 5; PMIDs 34111674, 33765904, 31250099, 25855055, 18422632 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 4 worst-cost-per-billion-cfu-in-its-batch-despite-being-the-cheapest-per-day
$0.12 a day is the cheapest per day in its batch by five times. At 0.1 billion CFU a day that is $1.25 per billion CFU — the worst in the batch by thirty-two times, against $0.039 for a 50-billion practitioner SKU. Cheapest per day and cheapest per unit of anything are different questions.
The record: $14.99 ÷ 120 tablets versus 0.1 B CFU/day, compared across the batch's three SKUs, 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 5 the-cfu-count-is-qualified-as-including-a-non-viable-fraction
"over 100 million active Lactobacillus acidophilus (including the naturally occurring metabolic product produced by Lactobacilli)" — a 0.5 mg ingredient line whose count is qualified as including a non-organism metabolic fraction, in undisclosed proportion. A CFU is by definition a viable colony-forming unit; a metabolic product cannot form a colony. The construction blurs the only unit that matters, and it survives on the current bottle.
The record: naturesbounty.com panel and the current label's ingredient line — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 6 laboratory-tested-and-guaranteed-quality-name-no-lab-standard-or-body
Both are label statements with no laboratory, no standard, no accreditation and no scope behind them. Neither is a certification, and there is no NSF mark, no USP verification, no Informed Choice and no Non-GMO Project claim on this label.
The record: DSLD 277021 label statements; NSF registers queried at four spellings with positive controls passing — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 7 stale-url-slug-on-a-120-tablet-product
The brand's URL slug reads /products/acidophilus-probiotic-100-tablets and renders a page whose body says "120 Tablets" and "Servings Per Container 120".
The record: naturesbounty.com product page, 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 8 la-14s-rct-evidence-is-entirely-multi-strain
All five RCT-tagged records for La-14 are multi-strain interventions — a rheumatoid-arthritis mixture, a nine-strain infant-colic synbiotic, an adiposity study, the Respecta vaginal complex and a seven-strain immune study. None is single-strain, none is at this dose, and none is an adult digestive-health efficacy trial.
The record: PMIDs 34111674, 33765904, 31250099, 25855055, 18422632 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 9 the-brief-url-is-unreadable-to-automation
amazon.com/dp/B0014CVXMW returns a CAPTCHA challenge rather than a product page, on direct request and through a reader proxy. It was not bypassed, so the listing's price, bullet claims and rating count sit outside this audit entirely.
The record: HTTP 200, 3,781 bytes, validateCaptcha form, direct and via reader proxy, 2026-07-31 — open ithttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B0014CVXMW — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
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.
- "Guaranteed quality" / "Laboratory tested" (label statements) status
- "Laboratory tested" names no laboratory, no standard, no accreditation and no scope. It is not a certification and does not claim to be. To be fair to the brand: it is not making an unverifiable certification claim, it is making no certification claim at all. That is more honest than an unnamed-issuer claim and less protective for the buyer than a verified one.
- The Amazon listing at the brief's URL
- amazon.com/dp/B0014CVXMW returned a CAPTCHA challenge page (HTTP 200, 3,781 bytes, a validateCaptcha form) on direct request and through a reader proxy. It was not bypassed and no attempt to solve it was made. The listing's price, its bullet copy and its 78,166-rating count are therefore unverified at source. Amazon listing copy is authored by the seller and frequently claims more than the physical label, so no claim-crossing verdict on that copy is published here.
- What proportion of the "100 million" is live organism
- The label qualifies the count as "including the naturally occurring metabolic product produced by Lactobacilli", and does not state what fraction of the 0.5 mg or of the 100 million is viable organism versus metabolite. A CFU is by definition a viable colony-forming unit; a metabolic product cannot form a colony.
- The exact Walgreens product page address
- The source records the retailer listing by product id (prod6110362, "Acidophilus Probiotic Tablets, 120.0 ea") rather than by URL, and this project does not reconstruct a URL it did not fetch. The price field therefore points at the retailer's own domain, with the product id recorded alongside it.
- Any second retail price for this SKU
- walmart.com, cvs.com's product API, vitacost.com and iherb.com were all 403 or bot-walled, and Amazon returned a CAPTCHA. Price triangulation rests on one reachable retailer. Nature's Bounty does not sell direct — its Shopify feed returns $0.00 on every one of 186 variants and the product page CTA is "Where to Buy".
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.
The problem with this product is not what it says. It is one of the most restrained labels in the project.
There is exactly one benefit claim on it: “Friendly bacteria for the digestive system.” No immune claim, no gut-brain claim, no mood claim, no “clinically studied”, no efficacy superlative, no gender claim. DSLD classifies the whole claim set as structure/function and the FDA disclaimer is present. Nature’s Bounty makes no third-party certification claim at all — which is more honest than claiming one whose issuer is never named, and less protective for a buyer than a verified one.
And the physical bottle does two things the two practitioner-channel SKUs in its research batch, at four and sixteen times the price, do not both manage: it names a strain designator, La-14, and it guarantees CFU through the expiration date.
Then you go to the manufacturer’s website.
naturesbounty.com shows a different, weaker label. Species-only Lactobacillus Acidophilus, no designator, qualified “at the time of manufacture”, under a © 2016 copyright line. That is not a small discrepancy. La-14 is a real designator with 24 species-qualified PubMed records and 5 RCT-tagged hits; an undesignated species name is unverifiable in principle, because efficacy is strain-specific. A buyer doing due diligence on the brand’s own site is handed the uncheckable version of the panel — while the checkable one sits on the bottle and on a retailer’s page.
The same retail listing then carries both CFU bases at once: “Guaranteed quality and CFU through expiration” in the warnings block, and “at the time of manufacture” in the description. Mutually exclusive, on one page, from one seller, about one bottle. The label governs, so the basis recorded here is through-expiry — but the contradiction is the finding, and the weaker half of it is the half the brand publishes itself.
And then there is the dose. 100 million CFU is 0.1 billion. The L. acidophilus literature, and La-14 specifically inside the mixtures it has actually been studied in, runs at 1–10 billion CFU and above. This product delivers a tenth to a hundredth of the studied dose — and delivers it as the only organism, without the co-strains present in every one of the five trials that exist for it. Not one of those five is a single-strain La-14 trial. Not one is an adult digestive-health efficacy trial.
So: 1 of 1 strains has a human RCT. 0 of 1 has a human RCT at this dose, as a single strain, for this outcome.
One thing to hold onto in the brand’s favour, because the label history documents it. Across three DSLD records — 2017, 2020, 2022 — Nature’s Bounty added a strain designator, dropped the refrigeration requirement, and upgraded the CFU basis from at-manufacture to through-expiry. All three are genuine improvements, made over a decade, on a $14.99 drugstore tablet. Its own website has not caught up.
And it does not pretend to be a men’s product. Its own listing title says “for Women/Men.”