Seven Checks For Any Prostate Supplement Label

A list of recommended products is out of date the week it is published and useless in a shop that stocks none of them. A list of checks is portable: it works on a pack nobody has reviewed, on a website nobody has heard of, and on the product whose manufacturer wrote the review you are reading.

The seven below are ordered by how much they tell you for the effort. The first four are about the panel and they carry most of the weight. The last three are about the pack and the seller, and they matter when something goes wrong.

Each check has a pass condition and a fail condition written out, so that scoring is not a matter of impression. At the end all seven are applied to the product this website sells, which fails three of them.

Three passes, one partial and three failures. The failures are the reason the passes are worth anything.

Check three is the heaviest of them and it is worth stating without softening. This product is named for the prostate and not one ingredient on its panel has a human trial record in urinary symptoms. What it carries instead is arginine in two forms, citrulline in two salts, beta alanine, a vitamin and a mineral, aimed at the nitric oxide pathway.

The defence, such as it is, is that the pathway is real: it is present in the lower urinary tract and it is the target a prescription drug class reaches for this indication. The problem is that the one study measuring urinary symptoms on an arginine product, an open-label trial in 40 men, ran on a combination carrying 40 mg of Pycnogenol a day, and the pine bark was the nitric oxide donor in it. This panel has none.

Check four fails on arithmetic rather than on judgement. Roughly 333 mg of arginine against a pooled range of 1,500 to 5,000 mg a day. Under 200 mg of citrulline salts against the 1.5 g a day used in the trial that found something. Forty milligrams of beta alanine against a working range of four to six grams, where even the split dose used to reduce tingling is 1.6 grams, forty times this row.

Check two fails on one row out of seven, and it is the narrowest of the three failures. The label volunteers a 2:1 ratio on the arginine AKG row, which most packs in this category never do. It then prints citrulline malate with no ratio, so that row cannot be resolved. Calling it a pass because six of seven rows work would be generous in a way this page is trying not to be.

Check one is the one that makes the rest of this page possible. Seven rows with seven printed figures and no blend total means every failure above could be measured rather than guessed at. A great deal of this category prints a blend, and a blend cannot be scored on checks two, three or four at all: the scorecard simply stops at row one.

There is an irony in that worth naming. Checks two, three and four could only be run at all because check one was passed, so the three failures are a consequence of the disclosure rather than something the disclosure failed to prevent. A vaguer label would stop the scorecard at row one and come away looking tidier.

Check five is a small pass with a large consequence for some buyers. Gelatin is the default shell in this category and a hypromellose row on the inactive line settles a question that otherwise needs an email to a manufacturer.

Check seven is the one a buyer can test before deciding. A period, a start date, a written procedure and a telephone number is an ordinary-to-good policy rather than a remarkable one, and it is usable, which is the part that matters. The guarantee page sets the four questions to ask of any refund window.

The scorecard is more useful on a pack nobody has written about, so here is what to expect when you run it in a shop.

Most products fail check one, because a proprietary blend is still the industry default. That is the fastest way to halve a shelf, and it is not a close judgement: either a row has a number or it does not.

The second commonest failure is check two. A panel reading nettle extract with no plant part, or citrulline malate with no ratio, or a botanical with no standardisation percentage, has printed a weight whose meaning is unresolved. Check two catches all three.

Check six fails almost everywhere, which is worth knowing so that it does not distinguish anything. A pack with ten unnamed circles and a pack with four unnamed circles are in the same position, and the number of marks is not the measure.

Check seven is where direct sellers and shop brands diverge sharply. A shop product has a counter to return to; a direct-sold one has whatever procedure its seller wrote down. Read that procedure before buying rather than after deciding.

A product passing five of seven is doing well by the standards of this shelf. A product passing all seven is either unusually careful or selling a single ingredient at its trial dose, which is a perfectly good thing to buy and is what the companion guide would point a reader towards if they wanted the category's own evidence base.

• Whether a product works. Every check here measures disclosure or dose, and a well-disclosed correctly dosed product can still do very little.
• Whether the amounts printed are the amounts in the capsule. That is an assay, and no panel is one.
• Whether an ingredient suits you personally. Interactions and history belong to somebody who knows both, and this page knows neither.
• Whether the category is the right place to be looking at all. An initial assessment answers that and a scorecard cannot.
• Whether a seller will honour a policy. Check seven measures whether the policy is written down and reachable, which is the most a buyer can verify before paying.

Used inside those limits it does one thing well: it turns a shelf of packs that all say support into a set of products that can be ranked on what they actually tell you. That is a smaller claim than a recommendation and a more durable one.