One product, one panel, one record.
Puritan's Pride Daily Probiotic Acidophilus, 250 Tablets (Item 2613) — label audit
The Amazon title says 100 million live cultures, a bullet on the same page says 3 billion, and the description on the same page says 3 billion in rapid-release capsules. The UPC-matched federal label record says 100 million, in tablets — a thirty-fold contradiction inside one listing.
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 Audited 2026-07-31, outside the frozen founding cohort of 27 and outside every D27 denominator.
- How deep this went
- Label audit — the lighter pass What the label says, what basis it gives for its CFU number, whether the strains are coded, whether a government label record exists — checked and published. No full claim inventory was written for this SKU. It is a real result, and it is a shallower one than the teardowns above it, which is why the page says so before you weigh it against them.
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 | 100 million live cultures (Lactobacillus acidophilus La-14, 0.5 mg per tablet) |
| What that count is measured against | Through expiry |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 1 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
"Guaranteed quality and CFU through expiration when continuously stored in the original packaging as directed." The honest form of the claim with a real-world condition attached. Storage: "Store in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight."
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 | 0.5 mg per tablet (label states 100 million live cultures) | Human RCT | PubMed E-utilities, exact designator with 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 250806 (opens in a new tab) captured On-market. Three-way UPC match — Amazon UPC 074312126130, DSLD UPC 0 74312 12613 0 and Walmart item 372380719 UPC 074312126130. Item #2613, 250 Tablets. Source for the strain and amount (Lactobacillus acidophilus La-14 at 0.5 mg per tablet, with the separate on-label statement "100 million live cultures"), the at-expiry guarantee, the other-ingredients list (vegetable cellulose, silica, stearic acid, vegetable magnesium stearate) and the free-from statement ("No artificial flavor, flavor or sweetener, no sugar, no starch, no milk, no lactose, no soy, no gluten, no wheat, no fish. Sodium free."). A superseded record, DSLD 207162, carries the same UPC as "250 Capsule(s)" and is off-market — the pack changed from capsules to tablets, which matters when reading the Amazon description.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — amazon-B004R68ZQ4-2026-07-31https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004R68ZQ4 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Fetched directly, HTTP 200, no CAPTCHA. Source for the UPC used in the three-way identity check, and the artefact behind the three contradictions documented in the findings — the 3-billion bullet, the rapid-release-capsule description and the gelatin-bearing ingredient block, all on the same page as a title that says 100 million tablets. Price not usable: the fetch is geolocated outside the US and Amazon returned EUR carousel figures rather than the buy-box. The brand's own site, puritan.com, returns HTTP 403 to automated requests, so all label data here comes from the UPC-matched federal record and the price from the UPC-matched Walmart listing.
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
$0.04 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $8.99 USD
- What that buys
- 250 tablets, 1 tablet daily, 250 servings. Walmart primary offer, item 372380719, reduced from $17.99. Walmart's own unit price of 3.6 cents each reconciles exactly — $8.99 ÷ 250 = $0.03596. At the $17.99 regular price the cost per day is $0.072.
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.walmart.com/ip/372380719 — 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/ANSI 173 Dietary Supplements (contents certification) | Absent from register | 31 July 2026 |
NSF/ANSI 173 Dietary Supplements (contents certification)
The register was queried and this product is not listed on it.
The register returns "No Matching Products Found" for "Puritan". This is context and not a contradiction, because the brand claims nothing. Recorded separately and accurately: the parent company NHS U.S., LLC (d/b/a Nestlé Health Science, Solgar, Nature's Bounty, Puritan's Pride, Rexall, Sundown) IS listed in NSF's GMP register under NSF/ANSI 173 Section 8, with facilities at 6735 Inter-Cal Way and 1066 Spire Drive, Prescott, AZ. That is a corporate facility registration, it is not claimed on this product, and it certifies process — not contents, not CFU, not strain identity.
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 thirty-times-cfu-contradiction-inside-a-single-amazon-listing
The listing title says "250 Tablets | 100 Million Live Cultures." A bullet on the same page says "3 BILLION LIVE CULTURES PER SERVING: Delivers 3 billion live probiotic cultures with guaranteed CFU potency through expiration." The description on the same page says the product "has 3 billion live cultures … in a convenient one supply of rapid-release capsules." The UPC-matched label says 100 million, in tablets. The bullets appear lifted from a different Puritan's Pride SKU — DSLD 284973 is a 100-count Rapid Release Capsule product, UPC 0 74312 11540 0.
The record: amazon.com/dp/B004R68ZQ4 title, bullet and description against DSLD 250806, all 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 2 amazon-ingredient-block-contradicts-the-upc-matched-label
Amazon lists "Lactobacillus Acidophilus, Dicalcium Phosphate, Gelatin, silica, vegetable magnesium stearate." The label record lists vegetable cellulose, silica, stearic acid and vegetable magnesium stearate — no gelatin and no dicalcium phosphate. A consumer avoiding gelatin gets the wrong answer from whichever source they happen to read.
The record: amazon.com/dp/B004R68ZQ4 ingredient block versus DSLD 250806 other ingredients, 2026-07-31
Finding 3 amazon-drops-the-strain-designator
The label says La-14. Amazon's ingredient block says only "Lactobacillus Acidophilus", erasing the single most useful fact on the panel.
The record: amazon.com/dp/B004R68ZQ4 ingredient block versus DSLD 250806, 2026-07-31
Finding 4 hundred-million-cfu-is-the-lowest-dose-in-the-audited-universe
Roughly two orders of magnitude below category norms. Not automatically wrong for a single well-characterised strain — but it belongs in the same sentence as the price, because this is also by a wide margin the cheapest product per day in the audited universe, roughly 28 times cheaper per day than the 50-billion SKUs audited alongside it and about 500 times weaker by CFU.
The record: DSLD 250806 label statement, 100 million live cultures; Walmart item 372380719 at $8.99 for 250 tablets
Finding 5 no-third-party-certification-of-any-kind
The only seal on the label is "QA Quality Assured", Puritan's Pride's own mark. No NSF, USP, IPRO, Non-GMO Project or Informed Choice claim appears on the label or in the label record.
The record: DSLD 250806 label transcription, 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.
- Any brand-direct price
- puritan.com returns HTTP 403 to automated requests, on both curl and WebFetch. The price published here is Walmart's, on a listing whose UPC matches the label record.
- Amazon's current US price
- The fetch is geolocated outside the US and Amazon returned EUR carousel figures rather than the buy-box.
- Whether 100 million CFU is a studied dose for La-14
- Not verified in this pass. Six human RCTs exist under the designator; none was pulled, so dose-adequacy must not be asserted either way.
- Whose brand the archived puritan.com gendered listings belong to
- puritan.com returns 403, so the retail listings ppmen-s-once-daily30cap-064246 and ppwomen-s-once-daily30cap-064244 could not be resolved to a brand. Recorded as unresolved.
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 facts about this product belong in the same sentence, and neither one means much without the other. It costs 3.6 cents a day — by a wide margin the cheapest thing in this entire audit, roughly 28 times cheaper per day than the 50-billion SKUs audited alongside it. And it delivers 100 million CFU, roughly 500 times less, and the lowest dose recorded anywhere in this project.
On disclosure structure the label is cleaner than most things twenty times its price. One organism, named to strain — Lactobacillus acidophilus La-14, six human randomised trials under that code — with its amount printed, no proprietary blend, and an at-expiry guarantee in the honest form: “Guaranteed quality and CFU through expiration when continuously stored in the original packaging as directed.” It simply contains far less than its shelf-mates. Whether 100 million is a studied dose for La-14 was not checked here, and this page does not assert it either way.
The failure is not on the label. It is on the listing selling it. The Amazon title says “250 Tablets | 100 Million Live Cultures.” A bullet on the same page says “3 BILLION LIVE CULTURES PER SERVING.” The description on the same page says 3 billion “in a convenient one supply of rapid-release capsules.” The UPC-matched federal label record says 100 million, in tablets. Those bullets look lifted from a different Puritan’s Pride product — there is a 100-count rapid-release capsule SKU that fits them.
It gets more practical than a number. Amazon’s ingredient block lists gelatin and dicalcium phosphate; the label lists vegetable cellulose and stearic acid, with neither of those. A shopper avoiding gelatin gets the wrong answer depending on which source they happen to read. And Amazon’s block drops La-14 entirely, erasing the single most useful fact on the panel — the one thing that makes this product checkable at all.
No third-party certification is claimed. The only seal is the brand’s own “QA Quality Assured”. Worth recording accurately for anyone who goes looking: the parent company is in NSF’s GMP register, but that is a corporate facility registration about process, it is not claimed on this product, and it says nothing about CFU, strain identity or contents.