Free One-Pager · Print It, Tape It to the Fridge
Before You Buy Any Prostate Supplement, Run This Checklist
This is the checklist we print on every review on this site, collected on one page you can print. It exists because of a pattern we kept finding in our audit: in this category, more money is lost to checkout design — bundles, pre-checked add-ons, quiet auto-ships — than to bad formulas. Six steps is all it takes to close most of those doors.
— the printed version is the one-pager our readers put on the fridge. It is also the exact document we share with buyer communities, unchanged.
Five red flags — walk away when you see them
- "Shrinks your prostate." No supplement has been shown to do this. Not one.
- A countdown timer on the checkout page. Pressure marketing, not science. Refresh the page — if the timer resets, you have your answer.
- A "proprietary blend" with no milligram amounts. You cannot tell a studied dose from a dusting, and neither can we. That is the point of hiding it.
- A smiling "doctor" endorsing the brand. In this category, those are overwhelmingly stock photos and actors. Real urologists do not endorse supplement brands.
- A subscription you can't find the cancel button for. The single most common complaint in this industry, by a wide margin.
The doses that matter (from the published research, not the ads)
Step 5 of the checklist tells you when to judge. This table tells you what you are judging — the amounts the research actually used, so you can hold any label up against them:
| Ingredient | What the evidence says | Studied dose |
|---|---|---|
| Beta-sitosterol | The most consistent trial evidence in the category: improved flow rate, reduced post-void residual. Does not shrink the prostate. | 30–91 mg/day |
| Pygeum africanum | An 18-study review found symptom and nighttime-urination improvement over placebo. Older studies, uneven designs — a supporting player. | Varies by extract |
| Pumpkin seed extract | A 12-week trial found roughly 30% symptom-score reduction, including nighttime urination. | Extract-dependent |
| Saw palmetto | The most marketed, and the most disappointing in high-quality trials — about the same as placebo. Only credible in one specific form: | 320 mg/day, extract standardized to 85–95% fatty acids |
If a label hides its amounts inside a proprietary blend, you cannot verify a single row of that table. Independent testers have caught worse than opacity in this category — including an "extra strength" saw palmetto product delivering under half its claimed content. Exact milligram labels and recognized third-party testing (ConsumerLab, USP, NSF) are the green flags; their absence is data too.
Why this page is free (and how it makes money anyway)
No catch, but there is a business model, and we print it like everything else: this site earns an affiliate commission when readers buy through our links, at no cost to them. A reader who runs this checklist is a reader who doesn't get auto-shipped against his will, doesn't refund in anger at a trap we failed to name, and comes back for the next audit. Protecting the buyer is the business model — the full mechanics are on our disclosure page.
Start with the audit the checklist was built for: the four category leaders, compared head to head — or the flagship review, where a contributor's $180 auto-ship story is printed at the top of the page it happened on: the ProstaVive review.
This checklist is general information, not medical advice. Prostate symptoms can have serious causes — infection, diabetes, and, rarely, prostate cancer among them. If your symptoms are new, worsening, or costing you sleep most nights, the most useful appointment is a urologist's, and no checklist outranks it.