One product, one panel, one record.
Vital Planet Vital Flora Men's Daily Probiotic, Shelf Stable (30 ct) — label audit
Every Vital Planet men's label in the government database — 2023, 2024 and 2025 — prints its 60 billion CFU figure with no time basis at all. The same brand's women's labels in the same database state that potency is maintained until the expiration date. The brand demonstrably knows the sentence and prints it on some SKUs and not others.
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 the 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.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
41.6 out of 100
Rank 101 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score. This rank is shared with 1 other product — 2 products sit on 41.6 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 | 18 of 18 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 18 / 18 = 1.0000 | 0.2400 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 0 of 18 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 0 / 18 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| 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 | 4 of 18 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. | 4 / 18 = 0.2222 | 0.044444 |
| 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 |
0.357778 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, the weight this record could answer, is 0.4160. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 41.6 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 | 60 Billion CFU (50 billion Lacto, 10 billion Bifido) |
| What that count is measured against | No basis stated |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 18 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Marketed to men |
No basis is stated anywhere. Not "at time of manufacture", not "at expiration". Searched and found absent in four independent places: the brand's own 1500x1500 panel image (whose only footnote is "Daily Value (DV) not established"), the complete 26-block DSLD statement set for record 320722, the 1.21 MB product page HTML, and the brand's own site search for "expiration". /pages/faq, /pages/faqs and /pages/quality all return HTTP 404.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lactobacillus plantarum | VPLP-5, VP-98, VP-99, VP-47, VP-36 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus rhamnosus | GG, VP-6, HN001, VP-101, VP-34, VP-11 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | "Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG" OR "Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GG"; "Lactobacillus rhamnosus HN001" OR "rhamnosus HN001" |
| Lactobacillus acidophilus | VPLA-4, NCFM, VP-96, VP-35, VP-97 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | "Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM" OR "acidophilus NCFM" |
| Lactobacillus casei | VPLC-1, VP-103, VP-9, VP-16 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus paracasei | Lpc-37, VP-100, VP-33 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | "Lpc-37" OR "LPC-37" OR "paracasei Lpc-37" |
| Lactobacillus gasseri | VP-20, VP-40, VP-107 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus reuteri | VPLR-1, VP-24, VP-108 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus salivarius | VP-4, VP-104, VP-18 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus bulgaricus | VPLB-7, VP-23, VP-109 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus brevis | VPLB-5, VP-102 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus fermentum | VP-48, VP-106 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus delbrueckii | VP-10, VP-31 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Lactobacillus helveticus | VP-105, VP-44 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Bifidobacterium lactis | VPBA-4, Bl-07, B-420, HN019, VP-110, VP-111 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | "Bi-07" OR "Bl-07"; "B420" OR "B-420"; "HN019" OR "DR10" |
| Bifidobacterium bifidum | VPBB-6, VP-112, VP-113 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Bifidobacterium infantis | VPBI-6, VP-117, VP-118 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Bifidobacterium longum | VPBL-5, VP-114, VP-115 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
| Bifidobacterium breve | VP-7, VP-116 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | — |
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 — 815RqNpRayL.jpghttps://www.vitalplanet.com/products/vital-flora-probiotic-men-shelf-stable-30ct — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The brand's own 1500x1500 Supplement Facts image from its Shopify CDN, transcribed visually. Count reconciliation — 43 Lacto plus 17 Bifido equals 60, and 13 Lacto species plus 5 Bifido species equals 18, both matching the brand's own stated figures. The "60 strains" claim is arithmetically correct on the label.
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 320722 (opens in a new tab) captured On-market. Used for the statement set and the men's-versus-women's basis comparison, not as ground truth for the panel — see the audit flag. DSLD's PDF endpoint returns HTTP 403 to automation, so panel data comes from the JSON API plus the brand image.
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, 7 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
$1.57 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $46.99 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle (30 servings, 1 capsule daily). 60 ct is $79.99, $1.33/day.
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://www.vitalplanet.com/products/vital-flora-probiotic-men-shelf-stable-30ct — 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 |
|---|---|---|
| "cGMP Certified, Third-Party Tested" (schema.org Certification field) | Not checked | 31 July 2026 |
| Non-GMO | Not checked | not checked |
"cGMP Certified, Third-Party Tested" (schema.org Certification field)
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
No certifying body is named anywhere. The full 1.21 MB page was searched for NSF, USP Verified, Informed Choice, Informed Sport, Non-GMO Project, BSCG, UL Solutions, NPA and ConsumerLab — standalone NSF token count zero (a naive substring search returns 339 "nsf" hits, every one inside minified JS transform keys; recorded because that is exactly how a fabricated certification claim gets made). There is no issuer register to check because there is no issuer. This is not "register unreachable" — it is an unfalsifiable claim. Separately, cGMP for dietary supplements is a legal baseline under 21 CFR Part 111 that every US supplement facility must already meet; it is not an achievement and not a third-party certification. And the label's own wording is "Assembled in a facility in the USA that is GMP", so the GMP assertion attaches to the assembly facility.
Non-GMO
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
A self-claim on both label and page. No "Non-GMO Project Verified" mark is claimed — worth stating precisely, because the two are routinely conflated and here the brand has not made the stronger claim.
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.
Compared against Vital Flora Women's Daily Probiotic (DSLD 292775, 2023 refrigerated generation). Diffed .
What the two panels differ by
- The women's label states the CFU time basis and the men's does not. DSLD records the women's rows verbatim as "60 Billion CFU, Formulated to maintain potency until expiration date under recommended storage conditions", on the total and both subtotals. Every men's record — 292777 (2023), 320721 (2024), 320722 (2025), 320717 and 320718/322845 (55+) — carries the number and nothing else. DSLD 292775 and 292774 versus DSLD 292777, 320721, 320722, 320717, 320718, 322845
- The stated men's rationale is "a specific ratio of beneficial bacteria with more Lacto for men". In the directly comparable 2023 generation the men's split is 50 B Lacto : 10 B Bifido and the women's is 55 B : 5 B. The women's product is more Lacto-forward than the "Lacto-forward for men" product. DSLD 292777 versus DSLD 292775
- Blend mass 196 mg on the men's versus 232 mg on the women's. DSLD 292777 versus DSLD 292775
What is identical across the pair
- The same 18 organisms in the 2023 generation — the only apparent difference is a nomenclature variant, DSLD rendering B. longum infantis on the men's record and B. infantis on the women's
- Same 60 billion CFU headline
- Same price point across the family, $46.99 for 30 ct
Every finding on this page, with the record behind it
Finding 1 cfu-basis-unstated-while-the-womens-line-states-it
60 billion is the headline number, printed twice on the front of the box, and it is unanchored in time. This is the strongest form of disclosure finding available, because it forecloses the "nobody does this" defence — the same brand prints the at-expiry sentence on its women's labels. For scale, Hyperbiotics discloses its own decay as 5 B at manufacture to a 1.5 B minimum at expiry, a 70% loss.
The record: DSLD 320722 (26 statement blocks, no potency basis) versus DSLD 292775 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 2 clinically-studied-applied-to-all-sixty-strains
"60 Diverse, clinically studied probiotic strains", in the page's schema.org additionalProperty and in body copy. Seven of the 60 have clinical literature. Fifty-three have none under either spelling.
The record: PubMed: ("VP-98" OR "VP-99" OR "VP-47" OR "VPLP-5" OR "VPLA-4" OR "VPBA-4" OR "VPBL-5") AND (Lactobacillus OR Bifidobacterium OR probiotic) → 0; unhyphenated spelling → 0
Finding 3 house-codes-under-a-true-strain-transparency-mark
Both labels carry a "TRUE STRAIN Transparency" seal, and DSLD records it as a formulation statement. Fifty-three of the 60 designators are Vital Planet house codes that cannot be ordered from a culture collection, cannot be looked up, and cannot be independently verified as distinct organisms. They sit in the same parentheses, in the same typography, as the seven real ones. This is a distinct failure mode from species-only labelling — designator-level appearance with sub-species-level information content.
The record: DSLD 320722 [Formulation re Other] "True strain transparency", against 53 house codes returning 0
Finding 4 real-strains-that-cannot-be-dose-matched
GG, HN001, NCFM, Lpc-37, Bl-07, B-420 and HN019 are genuinely well-studied, and naming them is real disclosure that most of this category does not offer. Their clinical literature was generated at specific doses of single strains. Whether this product delivers any of those doses is unknowable from the label — real strains, real literature, undisclosed dose, blanket claim.
The record: Panel image 815RqNpRayL.jpg — 196 mg blend, 60 B total, two subtotals, no per-strain figure
Finding 5 more-lacto-for-men-is-uncited-and-self-contradicted
The men's claim rests entirely on a 50:10 Lacto:Bifido ratio, with no prostate, urinary, androgen or male-specific organism anywhere in the formula, and no citation for the proposition that men need more Lactobacillus. Across the family the ratio takes four different values — Men's 50:10, Women's 55:5, Men 55+ 25:35, Women 55+ 45:15. It tracks the SKU, not the sex.
The record: DSLD 320722, 292775, 320718, 292774
Finding 6 supplement-facts-published-only-as-a-jpeg
Zero label data in 1.21 MB of page HTML. Every number here required a human or a vision model to read an image. No price-comparison or evidence tool can read this panel programmatically, and a screen-reader user cannot access the Supplement Facts at all.
The record: vitalplanet.com product page fetched 2026-07-31, HTTP 200, no bot protection
Finding 7 same-price-same-organisms-as-the-55-plus-sku
Men's Daily and Men 55+ contain the exact same 60 strains, with the same designators, in the same order, at the same $46.99. The 55+ product is not a different formula — it is the same culture bank re-proportioned between two subtotals, with a different prebiotic blend.
The record: Panel images 815RqNpRayL.jpg and 51uJkeq6klL.jpg, transcribed strain-by-strain 2026-07-31
Finding 8 delivery-claim-with-no-data
"Delayed release delivery capsules designed to resist stomach acid and help more probiotics reach the intestinal tract" — no in-vitro or in-vivo data is cited anywhere. Two label typos are worth noting as a quality signal, both verbatim in the government's transcription of the brand's copy — "60 billion life probiotic cultures" and "reach the intestinal tact".
The record: DSLD 320722, brand copy 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.
- "cGMP Certified, Third-Party Tested" (schema.org Certification field) status
- No certifying body is named anywhere. The full 1.21 MB page was searched for NSF, USP Verified, Informed Choice, Informed Sport, Non-GMO Project, BSCG, UL Solutions, NPA and ConsumerLab — standalone NSF token count zero (a naive substring search returns 339 "nsf" hits, every one inside minified JS transform keys; recorded because that is exactly how a fabricated certification claim gets made). There is no issuer register to check because there is no issuer. This is not "register unreachable" — it is an unfalsifiable claim. Separately, cGMP for dietary supplements is a legal baseline under 21 CFR Part 111 that every US supplement facility must already meet; it is not an achievement and not a third-party certification. And the label's own wording is "Assembled in a facility in the USA that is GMP", so the GMP assertion attaches to the assembly facility.
- Non-GMO status
- A self-claim on both label and page. No "Non-GMO Project Verified" mark is claimed — worth stating precisely, because the two are routinely conflated and here the brand has not made the stronger claim.
- A machine-readable Supplement Facts panel
- Neither product page contains "Supplement Facts", "Serving Size" or "Servings Per Container" anywhere in the HTML, and not one species name appears as label data — the only occurrences are marketing prose. The panel exists only inside product-carousel JPEGs, which were downloaded from the brand's CDN and transcribed visually.
- A UPC cross-check against the government record
- Not a mismatch — an absence. DSLD's upcSku field is empty on all seven Vital Planet records examined, so a UPC match was impossible for this brand. The DSLD-to-SKU link rests on exact product name plus shelf-stable qualifier plus servings per container plus blend composition, and is stated that way so the linkage is not overclaimed.
- Per-strain CFU for any of the 60 organisms
- Undisclosed. With 43 Lacto organisms sharing a 50 billion subtotal, an even split would give about 1.16 billion each — but the split is not disclosed and need not be even. GG could be 45 of the 50 billion or it could be 0.1 billion. Nothing on the label, the page or the DSLD record constrains it.
- Whether the subscription price differs from the one-time price
- Subscribe & Save variants at 30/60/90-day cadence are listed at the same $46.99 and $79.99. Any saving is applied at cart or checkout and was not verified.
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.
Vital Planet prints sixty strain designators on this panel. That is far more than the category norm, and seven of them are real: GG, HN001, NCFM, Lpc-37, Bl-07, B-420 and HN019 are genuinely well-studied, commercially licensed strains, and naming them plainly deserves credit.
The other fifty-three are house codes. VP-107, VPLB-5, VPBI-6 — they look exactly like ATCC or DSM
deposits to a non-expert, same alphanumeric shape, same parentheses, same italic typography, often sitting
in the same parenthesis as the real ones. Lactobacillus rhamnosus (GG, VP-6, HN001, VP-101, VP-34, VP-11) puts two of the most-studied strains in the world in a list with four codes that identify nothing
outside the company, with no cue telling the reader which is which. All of it under a seal reading “TRUE
STRAIN Transparency™”. A house code is a label of a strain, not a disclosure of one: the test is whether
you can order it from a culture collection or find it in a paper, and for fifty-three of these the answer
is no to both.
The headline finding is about what the men’s label does not say. Sixty billion CFU is printed twice on the front of the box with no time basis anywhere — not at manufacture, not at expiry, nothing. That was checked in four independent places, including the brand’s own high-resolution artwork. And the reason it matters is the comparison: the women’s labels in the same database state it. “Formulated to maintain potency until expiration date under recommended storage conditions” appears on Vital Flora Women’s Daily and Women 55+. It appears on none of the six men’s records, across three label generations. The brand knows the sentence.
The men’s rationale is a ratio — “more Lacto for men”, 50 billion to 10 billion — with no prostate, urinary or androgen ingredient in the formula and no citation for the premise. The women’s daily product is 55 billion Lacto to 5 billion Bifido. It is more Lacto-forward than the Lacto-forward-for-men product.