Vapofil Ingredients and the Dose of Each One

Transcribed from the label artwork. Total actives: 118 mg a serving, where a serving is two capsules.

These two travel together in the literature, often in the same capsule. The phase III trial of the fixed combination used 160 mg of saw palmetto fruit extract and 120 mg of nettle ROOT extract per capsule, two capsules a day, in 257 men over 96 weeks. It reported a 53 per cent reduction in symptom score, and it is the best-run study of this pairing.

Two things follow. First, the doses there are 320 mg and 240 mg a day against 20 mg and 20 mg here. Second, and more important for reading this label: the nettle in those trials is ROOT. This panel prints LEAF. The comprehensive review of nettle root names its subject in its own title as urticae radix, and it is careful that the mechanism — sex hormone binding globulin, aromatase, prostate steroid membrane receptors — is still unclear even for the root.

On saw palmetto itself the evidence has moved. CAMUS escalated 369 men through 320, 640 and 960 mg a day over 72 weeks and found no benefit over placebo at any dose, and the current Cochrane review agrees. What saw palmetto does have is an unusually clean safety record at three times the standard dose, from the CAMUS safety report, and a meta-analysis of twenty studies finding no adverse effect on sexual function.

The panel reads 10 mg, from a 100:1 extract, equivalent to approximately 1000 mg of dry tongkat ali powder. Every word of that is accurate. It is also the flattering way to present the number, because it invites a comparison with raw root and the trials did not use raw root.

The six-month randomised trial gave 200 mg a day of extract to men with androgen deficiency of the aging male, in four arms crossing supplementation with concurrent training. Erectile function improved in both interventions and most in the arm doing both. The study’s own stated limitation is worth repeating: there was no arm taking only the extract, so the trial cannot separate the capsule from the three sessions a week.

The 2022 meta-analysis pooled five randomised trials and found a significant increase in total testosterone, strongest in hypogonadal men, while concluding that more research is needed before clinical use. The 2015 meta-analysis of erectile function found only two eligible trials, 139 participants between them, and no significant difference overall. So the fair summary is: the best-evidenced name on this panel, present at a twentieth of the dose that evidence used.

The vendor ships a set of botanical still lifes with the product pack, and this one names no species anywhere in its filename or its artwork. It is shown here as what it is, stock photography supplied with the pack, rather than captioned as one of the seven actives. Five of the seven do have a matching photograph and those are the ones used beside the ingredient entries.

The Other Ingredients line reads: microcrystalline cellulose (mcc), gelatin, magnesium stearate. Microcrystalline cellulose is a bulking agent that fills the rest of the capsule; magnesium stearate is a flow agent that stops powder sticking to the machinery. Both are ordinary and neither is an active.

Gelatin is the capsule shell and it is the one that changes who can take this. It is made from animal collagen. The vendor’s artwork also includes a vegetarian seal, and the two cannot both be right. The panel is the bottle, so the panel is what this website prints, and the mark is dealt with on the testing and quality page.