Thirty-one questions, answered off the label itself

Ten reviews were supplied with this product and all ten are published in full on the reviews page, along with what this desk found when it checked them. 8 of the 10 portraits are byte-for-byte identical to portraits presented under different names, ages and cities on other brands’ sites, and the digests are printed so the check can be repeated with one command. Two of the ten match nothing this desk holds, which is reported with the same care. The ten closing sentences also follow a fixed rotation shared with unrelated products.

This desk will not answer that with a verdict, because the supplied material does not support one in either direction. What it supports is a description, and here the two halves of it are unusually far apart. The label is the best this desk has read in this series: nine ingredients, nine printed amounts, no proprietary blend, species and plant parts named, two standardisations, a complete caution block and a real named distributor. The marketing carries a badge the label contradicts, a refund window printed two ways, and eight reused review portraits. Weigh both lists.

Nothing in the supplied material lets anyone answer that for the finished product, and no trial of this formula exists in anything supplied. What can be done here is narrower and more useful. Because every amount is printed, each row can be set against the published work on that ingredient, and four of the nine fall a long way short: lycopene at a thirtieth of the trial dose, pygeum at under half the trial’s sterols, nettle as the leaf where the literature is on the root, and saw palmetto below the lowest arm of a trial that found nothing.

No complaints procedure is published, which is a separate problem from whether complaints exist. Nothing in the supplied material names an escalation route, a second-tier contact, a named officer or a trade body, and no response-time commitment appears for the telephone line or any of the three email addresses. The order desk is both the first and the last published step. Keep your own dated record of every request, because it is the only record certain to exist.

The shop is a real site that takes orders; what people usually mean is who runs it. Three names appear in one purchase: Nutrova, Tallmadge, OH 44278, USA is printed on the bottle, prostacylsupport.com is the shop, and the refund line is [email protected], a generic support domain belonging to neither. The sales page is a different second-level domain again, prostacyl.com, reached at a path ending /flow-warning/. None of that is evidence of wrongdoing, and all of it means there is no single name to look up once.

On disclosure this one wins, and that is worth knowing before you compare anything else. Nine rows, nine printed amounts and no proprietary blend put it ahead of most of the category, and two printed standardisations put it ahead of nearly all of it. On dose against the published work it does badly. The category guide on this site is written for exactly this question: it sets out how to read any prostate supplement label, so you can compare the products that do publish figures rather than deciding whom to believe.

The honest answer from the best available trial is that the question may not have a useful answer. CAMUS gave 369 men saw palmetto starting at 320 mg a day, doubled it to 640 mg at 24 weeks and tripled it to 960 mg at 48, and ran for 72 weeks. Mean AUA Symptom Index fell 2.2 points on saw palmetto and 2.99 on placebo, P = .91. No difference at any of the three doses, and no benefit on any secondary outcome. This product’s 300 mg sits below the lowest of them.

That is the starting arm of the CAMUS trial, published in JAMA in 2011 by Barry and colleagues. 369 men, 72 weeks, dose escalated from 320 to 960 mg a day. The result was null: mean AUA Symptom Index fell 2.2 points on the extract against 2.99 on placebo, P = .91. It is the most serious trial behind any ingredient on this panel, and it is the reason the dose question for saw palmetto is less interesting than it looks.

The clinical literature on pygeum uses extract standardised to 13% total sterols, at around 100 mg a day or 50 mg twice daily. One hundred milligrams at 13% delivers 13 mg of sterols. This product prints 200 mg standardised to 3%, which delivers 200 × 0.03 = 6 mg. So it prints twice the trial’s milligram figure and delivers roughly 46% of its sterols. The bigger number loses, and the label printing its percentage is what lets you see that.

They are two different materials and only one of them has a prostate literature. The clinical work on nettle and benign prostatic hyperplasia is on Urtica dioica root: aqueous root extract at 360 mg a day for six months, methanol root extract at 600 to 1,200 mg a day. Nettle leaf has its own literature — topical use for rheumatic complaints, trials in osteoarthritis pain and allergic rhinitis — and none of it concerns the prostate. This panel declares the leaf, at 50 mg.

The commonly cited trial gave 15 mg of lycopene a day for six months to 40 men with BPH. Set that against food rather than against a capsule and the figures get easier to reach: USDA puts one cup of canned tomato juice at 21.96 mg and one cup of canned tomato puree at 54.39 mg. This product delivers 0.5 mg a day, which is about a thirtieth of the trial dose and about a forty-fourth of a cup of juice.

The shop this site documents is prostacylsupport.com, and the sales page named in the material is a different second-level domain, prostacyl.com, reached at a path ending /flow-warning/. Order links on this site point at the checkout and are marked as sponsored. The label names a third party again, Nutrova, Tallmadge, OH 44278, USA, as the distributor. Nothing supplied explains the split between the domains.

Nothing in the material supplied to this desk mentions any marketplace, reseller or retail stockist, so no listing anywhere can be confirmed or denied from it. One purchase route is named in the supplied material and that is the one this site documents. The practical point if you find it elsewhere: the refund window, whichever of the two figures it turns out to be, is published by this seller, and a guarantee from one seller does not travel to another.

That is the path the sales page sits at: prostacyl.com/flow-warning/. It is worth knowing because context changes how a claim reads. Two of the three claims on the label front are ordinary structure/function statements. The third, Supports Healthy Prostate Size, sits closer to the line between supporting a normal function and treating a condition, and it sits on a page reached at a URL ending in a warning about flow. The label itself carries the required FDA statement in full, which is correct and to the merchant’s credit.

The label prints Distributed By: Nutrova, Tallmadge, OH 44278, USA with the email [email protected]. A distributor sells a product; a manufacturer makes it. No manufacturer and no packer is named anywhere in the supplied material, and no facility address appears either. What is unusual is that a real named party with a place of business is printed on the bottle at all, which most products in this series do not manage.