One product, one panel, one record.
Pendulum Akkermansia — label audit
The most-distributed sentence about this product — its meta description, its og:description and its Twitter card — says it is "clinically shown to fortify the gut lining, reduce gut permeability, and support gut health". The brand's own accordion footnotes those same outcomes as "*Based on preclinical studies." Preclinical is by definition not clinical.
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
59.7 out of 100
Rank 72 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score. This rank is shared with 7 other products — 8 products sit on 59.7 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 | 1 of 1 organism slot carries a printed strain designator. | 1 / 1 = 1.0000 | 0.2400 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 1 of 1 organism slot has an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 1 / 1 = 1.0000 | 0.2000 |
| What the CFU count is measured against | 0.22 | Potency basis "none-stated": CFU figure printed yes, single basis stated no, basis reaches expiry no — 1 of 3. | 1 / 3 = 0.3333 | 0.073333 |
| Printed designators that lead to a human trial | 0.20 | 0 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. | 0 / 1 = 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 |
0.513333 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, the weight this record could answer, is 0.5969. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 59.7 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 | 100 million AFU |
| What that count is measured against | No basis stated |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 1 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
The panel prints "100 million AFU" with no at-manufacture or through-expiry qualifier. "Store at room temperature" is the only stability-adjacent statement on the label.
The panel’s own words on potency, verbatim.
A CFU number appears with no temporal basis of any kind. A count with no basis is not a quantity; there is no date at which it is claimed to be true.
Every organism on the panel carries a printed strain designator. Whether those designators lead anywhere is a separate question, answered below.
| Organism as printed | Designator as printed | Quantity as printed | What the designator resolves to | The query we ran |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Akkermansia muciniphila | WB-STR-0001 | 100 million AFU | No records | "WB-STR-0001" |
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 — Akkermansia_Carousel_06_668x668_2x-minhttps://pendulumlife.com/cdn/shop/files/Akkermansia_Carousel_06_668x668_2x-min.jpg — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The brand's own Supplement Facts image, read directly and fully legible at native 1336x1336. There is no government label record for this product, so this image is the only source. Note the panel discloses more than the website does: the strain designator WB-STR-0001 is on the label and missing from the website's ingredient accordion.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — pendulum-akkermansia-pdp-2026-07-30https://pendulumlife.com/products/pendulum-akkermansia-probiotic-gut-health — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Live page and Shopify JSON: SKU AMUC-01-MEM-02 at $54.00 with a compare-at price of $75.00, the meta description, and the preclinical footnotes.
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
$1.80 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $54.00 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle (30 servings, 1 capsule per serving), membership price
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://pendulumlife.com/products/pendulum-akkermansia-probiotic-gut-health — 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 | Not checked | not checked |
None claimed
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
No third-party testing or certification claim of any kind appears for this SKU.
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-shown-attached-to-preclinical-outcomes
"The only live Akkermansia probiotic clinically shown to fortify the gut lining, reduce gut permeability, and support gut health." That sentence is the product's meta description, its og:description and its Twitter card — the sentence that propagates to every search result and every social share. The same three outcomes are footnoted elsewhere on the same page as "*Based on preclinical studies." Preclinical is by definition not clinical. And "clinically shown" is an establishment claim: it asserts a level of proof, and preclinical data do not substantiate it.
The record: pendulumlife.com product page meta description and Details accordion, both verified live 2026-07-30 — open ithttps://pendulumlife.com/products/pendulum-akkermansia-probiotic-gut-health — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 2 strain-designator-with-zero-literature
"WB-STR-0001" returns zero PubMed records and corresponds to no public accession. The species has 52 randomised-trial records; none of them can be attributed to the strain as sold.
The record: PubMed query returning 0, re-run 2026-07-30
Finding 3 cfu-basis-unstated-and-cfu-withheld
No at-manufacture or through-expiry qualifier appears anywhere, while the brand's own blog argues that through-expiry labelling is what matters. Pendulum also states that it measures CFU for this product and elects not to publish the number.
The record: Brand label image and pendulumlife.com, verified 2026-07-30
Finding 4 one-time-purchase-penalty
The membership price is $54.00 and the one-time price is $75.00 for the identical bottle — a 38.9% premium for declining a recurring order. The membership listing sets its compare-at price to the one-time price so that the subscription reads as a discount, and the one-time purchase is a separate Shopify product with its own SKU.
The record: Shopify JSON for AMUC-01-MEM-02 and AMUC-01-OTP-02, verified 2026-07-30
Finding 5 glp-1-weight-tile-with-its-own-retraction
A carousel tile quotes the brand's CEO: "Akkermansia naturally increases GLP-1 production*, which helps maintain a healthy weight." The asterisk in the same frame reads "*Based on preclinical studies. This product is not intended for weight loss." A weight claim and its own retraction in one image.
The record: Brand carousel image, verified live 2026-07-30
Finding 6 no-government-label-record
No DSLD record and no readable UPC, so the label is unverifiable against any independent database.
The record: DSLD brand query returning 0, re-run 2026-07-30 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 7 no-third-party-testing-claimed
None claimed for this SKU, so none to verify.
The record: pendulumlife.com product page, verified live 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 status
- No third-party testing or certification claim of any kind appears for this SKU.
- The label itself against any independent source
- Pendulum has no NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — a DSLD brand query returns zero. (A query for the organism returns seven records, from Codeage, Solaray, SuperSmart, The Akkermansia Company and Plexus, and none of them is Pendulum.) The panel exists only as a brand-hosted JPEG, and the product's UPC could not be read, so there is nothing to cross-check.
- What the 100 million AFU figure is measured against
- No basis is stated. Note that Pendulum does publish a shelf life for its other SKU, so the brand is capable of stating something and did not, for this one.
- Whether Pendulum measures CFU for this product
- The brand states that it measures CFU and elects not to publish the figure.
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.
Two sentences from the same page, about the same three outcomes.
The meta description — which is also the og:description and the Twitter card, so it is the sentence that travels to every search result and every share:
“The only live Akkermansia probiotic clinically shown to fortify the gut lining, reduce gut permeability, and support gut health”
The Details accordion, listing the same outcomes:
“Fortifies the gut lining* / Reduces gut permeability*” “*Based on preclinical studies.”
Preclinical is, by definition, not clinical. And “clinically shown” is not a claim about the body — it is a claim about evidence, which is why it carries a higher substantiation bar than the outcomes themselves do. Pendulum’s own footnote is the counter-evidence, and it is on the same page.
Two things this product does better than most of its cohort, and both should be said.
It has no proprietary blend. The single active is fully quantified: Akkermansia muciniphila WB-STR-0001, 100 million AFU, plus 276 mg of chicory inulin. Nothing is hidden inside a pooled figure.
And the panel discloses more than the website does — the inverse of the usual failure mode. The strain designator WB-STR-0001 is printed on the label and missing from the website’s ingredient accordion, so a reviewer who read only the site would wrongly score this product as species-only.
What the designator buys you, though, is nothing checkable: "WB-STR-0001" returns zero PubMed
records and corresponds to no public accession. The species has 52 randomised-trial records; none of
them attaches to the strain in this capsule. And for the exact outcome the headline sentence claims —
gut permeability — the species-level randomised-trial count is zero.
On pricing, note the structure rather than the number. The membership price is $54.00 and the one-time price is $75.00 for the identical bottle: a 38.9% penalty for declining a recurring order. The one-time purchase is a separate Shopify product with its own SKU, and the membership listing sets its compare-at price to the one-time price, so the subscription renders on-site as a discount.