If you take one practical skill from this site, make it this one. It applies to every probiotic product you will ever consider, not just this one.
Colony-forming units — the count of viable bacteria capable of reproducing. It's the standard measure of probiotic potency, and it's what clinical trials specify when they report a dose.
A typical probiotic trial might use 1 billion, 10 billion, or 50 billion CFU daily. Those are the numbers the research is built on.
A probiotic label giving only a weight — "probiotic blend 35 mg" — is describing the mass of powder in the capsule, not the number of living organisms in it.
Those are wildly different things. Freeze-dried bacterial powders vary enormously in cell density depending on the strain, the drying process, the carrier used and how the product has been stored. The same 35 mg could contain a hundred million viable cells or a few million.
Probiotics are living organisms, and manufacturing is hostile to them: heat, moisture, oxygen, time on a shelf, then stomach acid. Some strains survive that far better than others — spore-formers particularly — while anaerobes like Akkermansia muciniphila are oxygen-sensitive and technically harder to keep viable.
That's why CFU is usually specified "at time of manufacture" or, better, "at expiry." The second is the more honest figure, and the one worth asking for.
Email the brand before ordering. Four questions, all reasonable:
A company confident in its sourcing will usually answer these directly, and quickly. A vague answer, a deflection to "proprietary information," or no reply at all is itself information — not proof of anything wrong, but a reasonable input into your decision.
AlkaLean names all three strains individually, which is better than a generic "probiotic blend" description. It publishes the blend weight at 35 mg. It does not publish CFU counts anywhere reviewed.
That's a real gap for a probiotic-containing product, and it's the single most useful thing to resolve before ordering. Our contact page lists what else is worth asking at the same time.
Read next: the strain where this matters most, or the full label.