One product, one panel, one record.
Transparent Labs Probiotic Advanced Gut Health Formula — label audit
The panel's footnote reads: "At time of manufacture. Guaranteed to maintain an effective potency until date of expiration." The 100 billion is an at-manufacture number, and "an effective potency" is defined nowhere on the label or the page — it is not a number, so the sentence stays literally true whether what survives is 100 billion or one billion.
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
86.8 out of 100
Rank 22 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score.
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 | 10 of 10 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 10 / 10 = 1.0000 | 0.2400 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 10 of 10 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 10 / 10 = 1.0000 | 0.2000 |
| What the CFU count is measured against | 0.22 | Potency basis "at-manufacture": CFU figure printed yes, single basis stated yes, basis reaches expiry no — 2 of 3. | 2 / 3 = 0.6667 | 0.146667 |
| Printed designators that lead to a human trial | 0.20 | 8 of 10 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. | 8 / 10 = 0.8000 | 0.1600 |
| 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 |
0.746667 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, the weight this record could answer, is 0.8682. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 86.8 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 billion CFU (per-strain split disclosed) |
| What that count is measured against | At manufacture only |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 10 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
At time of manufacture. Guaranteed to maintain an effective potency until date of expiration.
The panel’s own words on potency, verbatim.
The count is stated at time of manufacture only. The panel makes no commitment about what is alive when you swallow it.
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 | 25 B | Human RCT | — |
| Lactobacillus rhamnosus (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus) | LR-32 | 15 B | Human RCT | — |
| Lactobacillus casei (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus casei) | LC-11 | 10 B | Human RCT | — |
| Lactobacillus plantarum (correct name: Lactiplantibacillus plantarum) | LLP-115 | 10 B | Human RCT | — |
| Lactobacillus paracasei (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus paracasei) | LPC-37 | 10 B | Human RCT | — |
| Bifidobacterium lactis (correct name: Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis) | BL-04 | 10 B | Human RCT | — |
| Lactobacillus salivarius (correct name: Ligilactobacillus salivarius) | LS-33 | 5 B | Human RCT | — |
| Streptococcus thermophilus | ST-21 | 5 B | Animal or in-vitro only | — |
| Bifidobacterium bifidum | BB-02 | 5 B | Human RCT | — |
| Bifidobacterium breve | BB-03 | 5 B | No records | — |
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 — Gut_Health_SFPhttps://www.transparentlabs.com/cdn/shop/files/Gut_Health_SFP.png — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The brand's own 1200x1200 Supplement Facts PNG, downloaded and read visually. There is no HTML table, no structured data and no text alternative, and no DSLD record exists for this product, so this image is the only source for every number on this page.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — transparentlabs-probiotic-pdp-2026-07-30https://www.transparentlabs.com/products/probiotics-for-gut-health — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Live page and products.json: $45.99, available true, 70 products in the catalogue, no gendered probiotic in either direction.
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, 8 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
$1.53 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $45.99 USD
- What that buys
- 60-capsule bottle (30 servings, 2 capsules per serving)
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.transparentlabs.com/products/probiotics-for-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 |
|---|---|---|
| Informed Choice | Register unreachable | 30 July 2026 |
| Published third-party test results | Brand-asserted, unverified | 30 July 2026 |
| NSF / USP | Not checked | not checked |
Informed Choice
The certifier’s register could not be queried at all. That is a finding about the verification infrastructure, not about the brand.
A badge is displayed on the page, rendered with empty alt text, no certification number, no date and no link to the registry. Verification at the certifier's own database failed: both the product-specific path and the brand index returned HTTP 403 behind a Cloudflare interstitial. A search-engine snippet suggested a certifier-hosted page exists with a 2023-11-08 date for a "Digestive Aid/Probiotic/Prebiotic" product, but the certifier's page could not be read directly, so the product name, the date and the current status are all unconfirmed. Do not read this as "Informed Choice certified".
Published third-party test results
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
The page says "we provide full access to our third-party test results". The linked page is a search interface, not a results list, and no certificate of analysis for this product was retrievable. No testing laboratory is named on either page. Critically, the named test types are purity, ingredient verification and gluten — nothing that tests CFU potency, which is the only number a probiotic buyer is paying for.
NSF / USP
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
Neither is claimed. Twenty-seven apparent "nsf" matches in the page HTML were all the CSS keyword "transform".
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 effective-potency-is-not-a-number
The through-expiry half of the footnote guarantees "an effective potency" — a term defined nowhere on the label or the product page. It could be 100 billion, or 10 billion, or one billion, and the sentence would remain literally true in each case. Compare NOW's construction on the same question: "formulated to deliver a potency of 25 billion CFU through the Best By date" — a number bound to a date. That is falsifiable. This is not.
The record: Brand Supplement Facts PNG, read directly 2026-07-30 — open ithttps://www.transparentlabs.com/cdn/shop/files/Gut_Health_SFP.png — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
Finding 2 scientifically-validated-applied-to-strains-with-no-trials
The page claims "100 billion CFUs from 10 scientifically-validated probiotic strains". ST-21 and BB-03 have zero human randomised trials between them, and a third (BB-02) has one n=18 microbiological study with no clinical outcome. Those three supply 15 billion of the 100 billion.
The record: PubMed queries re-run 2026-07-30; the strict ST-21 species query returns 2 non-human records and the BB-03 query returns a fungal isolate paper
Finding 3 machine-unreadable-label
The Supplement Facts panel is delivered as a flat 1200x1200 raster image with no HTML table, no structured data and no text alternative. Automated retrieval of the page returns marketing prose and not a single strain name. A blind or low-vision consumer using a screen reader cannot access the ingredient list at all, and the badge images on the same page also carry empty alt text. Combined with the DSLD absence, the panel is archived nowhere outside the brand's own CDN. From a brand named Transparent Labs.
The record: https://www.transparentlabs.com/cdn/shop/files/Gut_Health_SFP.png
Finding 4 no-third-party-cfu-potency-testing
The named test types are purity, ingredient identity and gluten. Nothing found tests the live count — which is the only number that distinguishes a probiotic from a capsule of dead biomass.
The record: transparentlabs.com/pages/third-party-tests, verified live 2026-07-30
Finding 5 per-strain-doses-not-matched-to-trialled-doses
Even in this unusually well-disclosed product, the amounts are not systematically matched to the doses that produced the evidence. The trial underwriting LA-14 and BL-04 dosed 20 billion CFU of a single strain; BL-04 here is 10 billion, half of it. LS-33 is 5 billion against a trial that was null on its clinical outcome anyway. The 100-billion headline is achieved by stacking ten strains, three of which contribute 15 billion backed by essentially nothing.
The record: PMID 18422632 · PMID 23510724 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 6 informed-choice-badge-with-no-certificate-number
The badge is rendered with empty alt text, no certification number, no date and no link to the registry, and the certifier's database is Cloudflare-protected.
The record: transparentlabs.com product page, verified live 2026-07-30
Finding 7 price
$1.53 a day for a formula sharing nine of its ten strains with a mass-retail product at a fraction of the price. The delta buys four times the CFU count, which the field's own consensus body says is not itself a benefit: "A greater number of colony forming units (CFU) does not always equate with enhanced effects.""
The record: ISAPP consumer infographic "Probiotics: Dispelling Myths", quoted verbatim
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.
- Informed Choice status
- A badge is displayed on the page, rendered with empty alt text, no certification number, no date and no link to the registry. Verification at the certifier's own database failed: both the product-specific path and the brand index returned HTTP 403 behind a Cloudflare interstitial. A search-engine snippet suggested a certifier-hosted page exists with a 2023-11-08 date for a "Digestive Aid/Probiotic/Prebiotic" product, but the certifier's page could not be read directly, so the product name, the date and the current status are all unconfirmed. Do not read this as "Informed Choice certified".
- Published third-party test results status
- The page says "we provide full access to our third-party test results". The linked page is a search interface, not a results list, and no certificate of analysis for this product was retrievable. No testing laboratory is named on either page. Critically, the named test types are purity, ingredient verification and gluten — nothing that tests CFU potency, which is the only number a probiotic buyer is paying for.
- NSF / USP status
- Neither is claimed. Twenty-seven apparent "nsf" matches in the page HTML were all the CSS keyword "transform".
- The Informed Choice listing
- The certifier's database is Cloudflare-protected and returned 403 to every route attempted.
- Any certificate of analysis for this product
- The brand's third-party-tests page is a search interface; no COA for this SKU was retrievable.
- Whether "LLP-115" is a deliberate alternate designation or a label typo for Lp-115
- Unverified. Recorded as a probable typo.
- The Supplement Facts panel against any independent source
- There is no NIH DSLD record for any Transparent Labs probiotic — the only Transparent Labs record in DSLD is a creatine and vitamin D powder. The brand's own PNG is the sole source of truth, and if the formula changes there is no public record of what it used to be.
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.
Read the footnote twice. It is doing two different jobs in one sentence.
** At time of manufacture. Guaranteed to maintain an effective potency until date of expiration.
The first half is unambiguous and honest: the 100 billion is an at-manufacture number. The second half looks like a through-expiry guarantee and is not one, because “an effective potency” is a phrase defined nowhere on the label or the product page. It is not a number. If what survives to the expiration date is 100 billion, the sentence is true. If it is one billion, the sentence is still true.
Compare the construction NOW Foods uses on exactly the same question: “formulated to deliver a potency of 25 billion CFU through the Best By date.” A number, bound to a date. You can be wrong about that. You cannot be wrong about “an effective potency”.
Which is a shame, because on the axis that usually matters most this product is the best in its batch. It publishes per-strain CFU — LA-14 at 25 billion, LR-32 at 15, LC-11 at 10, and so on down to 5 billion each for the last four — summing exactly to the claimed 100 billion. That is precisely what a proprietary blend conceals, and it beats every product in the first three batches of this research.
That disclosure is also what makes the next problem visible. Two of the ten strains, ST-21 and BB-03, have zero human randomised trials. A third, BB-02, has one 18-person microbiological study with no clinical outcome. Those three supply 15 billion of the 100 billion, and the page describes all ten as “scientifically-validated”. BB-03 is a particularly good demonstration of why strain searches must be read rather than counted: its only title/abstract hit is a paper about UV-B tolerance in Beauveria bassiana, an insect-killing fungus, where “Bb 03” is an isolate code. A naive search would have scored that as evidence.
One structural note. The Supplement Facts panel exists only as a flat PNG — no HTML table, no structured data, no text alternative, and the badge images on the same page carry empty alt text. A screen-reader user cannot access the ingredient list at all. There is no NIH label record for this product either, so if the formula changes there will be no public record of what it used to be. From a brand called Transparent Labs.