What would you want before trusting a number on one of these labels?

An assay run by someone with nothing to sell, publishing its method, testing products it did not make. That is a low bar and as far as we can find it has not been cleared.

Does it matter whether the product is porcine or plant derived?

For some readers it settles the question before potency does, and that is a legitimate basis for choosing. Porcine products are animal derived, which rules them out on dietary or religious grounds for a number of people. What the origin does not tell you is how much active enzyme is in the capsule, because the two product types publish their figures on scales that cannot be compared.

We do not know, and neither does the published work we could find. The assay that gets cited about this category measured potency, not safety, and we could not find independent safety data at a standard we would report. Absence of reported harm is not the same as a safety record, and a product whose contents are uncertain is uncertain in both directions.

DAO supplements

By BeatSIBO editorial team · Updated August 6, 2026

This category has a specific and unusually clean problem, and understanding it takes about a minute.

The hundredfold gap

The short answer

Porcine-derived products typically publish potency in the tens of thousands of units per capsule. Plant-derived products publish figures in the millions. That is not a statement that one is a hundred times stronger. The numbers come from different assays measuring different things, so the gap is a measurement artefact and the two scales are not comparable.

Almost every comparison you will find online ranks these products in one table by that number. Doing so puts plant products at the top by a wide margin for a reason that has nothing to do with what they do in a person.

Why these two scales are never ranked against each other

Porcine kidney extract
Typical published potency:
Tens of thousands per capsule
Unit basis:
One assay method
Comparable to the other row?:
No
Plant derived, pea sprout
Typical published potency:
Millions per capsule
Unit basis:
A different assay method
Comparable to the other row?:
No

Two scales, shown separately because they cannot be compared
Product type	Typical published potency	Unit basis	Comparable to the other row?
Porcine kidney extract	Tens of thousands per capsule	One assay method	No
Plant derived, pea sprout	Millions per capsule	A different assay method	No

The hundredfold gap between these rows is a measurement artefact. It is not a statement that one is a hundred times stronger, and a single ranked table would say exactly that without meaning to.

A merged ranking would be actively misleading, so the two rows carry their unit basis and an explicit note that they cannot be compared. That is a deliberate constraint rather than an oversight: the way to stop a misleading comparison being made is to remove the thing that invites it rather than to caption it.

The evidence problem

Alemany-Fornes M et al., bioRxiv 2023 Preprint, not peer reviewedAll five authors work for the manufacturer of the two products that passed. The three products measuring zero activity were competitors. Treat the direction of this result as marketing until replicated independently.

Read the caveat attached to that citation, because the caveat is the finding. Measured activity across commercial products ranged from 0% to 244% of label claim. Every author was employed by the manufacturer of the two products that passed, and the three products measuring zero activity were competitors.

What is not settled here

We report that range because a spread from zero to two and a half times label is genuinely informative about how variable this category is. We do not report the direction as established, because a manufacturer testing its own products against competitors and finding its own products superior is the least surprising result in science. What this category needs is an assay by someone with nothing to sell, and as far as we can find it does not have one.

What this page will not do

No ranking, no dosing, no recommendation. Ranking products whose potency figures are not comparable across types, in a category whose main published assay has an unresolved conflict, would imply a basis for comparison that does not exist.

If you are considering one, the useful question for a pharmacist or clinician is not which brand but whether anything you already take interacts, and what you would expect to observe if it were working. A supplement with no expected observable is a supplement nobody can tell you to stop.

Common questions

What would you want before trusting a number on one of these labels?: An assay run by someone with nothing to sell, publishing its method, testing products it did not make. That is a low bar and as far as we can find it has not been cleared.
Does it matter whether the product is porcine or plant derived?: For some readers it settles the question before potency does, and that is a legitimate basis for choosing. Porcine products are animal derived, which rules them out on dietary or religious grounds for a number of people. What the origin does not tell you is how much active enzyme is in the capsule, because the two product types publish their figures on scales that cannot be compared.
Is it safe?: We do not know, and neither does the published work we could find. The assay that gets cited about this category measured potency, not safety, and we could not find independent safety data at a standard we would report. Absence of reported harm is not the same as a safety record, and a product whose contents are uncertain is uncertain in both directions.