Men’s Vitality Guides: Two Long Reads With Nothing To Sell

• NCCIH on using dietary supplements wisely — the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the NIH. Short, practical and has nothing to sell.
• The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements — what a supplement is in regulatory terms, and what the label is and is not telling you.
• The FDA's questions and answers on dietary supplements — the regulatory position, including what approval does and does not mean in this category.
• The American Urological Association's guideline on erectile dysfunction — written for clinicians and readable by anybody, and it starts with evaluation rather than with a product.
• The Endocrine Society on testosterone therapy — what low testosterone is, how it is measured and what treating it actually involves.

Those five are the ones this desk would send a friend to before it sent them anywhere on this website. None of them sells anything and two of them are occasionally difficult to reach from a script, which is a bot block rather than a dead link.

Both were written the same way and the method is worth setting out, because a guide is only as good as the procedure behind it and most guides in this category describe none.

Every ingredient in the aisle was searched on PubMed for randomised controlled trials in men. Where trials existed, the summary record for each one was pulled and the author list, journal, year and volume were taken from that record rather than from any secondary source. Where the search returned nothing, that was recorded as a finding rather than filled in with mechanism papers dressed up as evidence — which is the single most common failure in writing about this shelf, and the reason horny goat weed gets described in the same confident tone as tongkat ali on almost every page you will find.

The dose from each trial was captured alongside it, because a trial result belongs to the amount the trial used. That single discipline is what makes the comparison in both guides possible, and it is the thing a reader can most usefully copy.

Five steps, and the fourth is the one that separates a guide from a brochure.

Somebody standing in front of two bottles, or two browser tabs, trying to work out which one is telling the truth. That is the whole audience, and it shapes both documents.

It means neither guide assumes any chemistry. The hardest thing either one asks a reader to do is multiply a percentage by a milligram figure, and both explain why the multiplication matters before asking for it. It also means both are written to be usable against products this desk does not sell, which is the test of whether a guide is a guide: the eight questions in the choosing method work on any bottle in the aisle, and the ingredient guide covers plants that are not on this website's own label.

What neither guide is written for is somebody who has already decided. A reader looking for reassurance about a purchase they have made will find the product pages more comfortable, and will find both of these mildly irritating.

There is a third group worth naming: people who have been sent here by somebody else, usually a partner. The ingredient guide is the one to read first in that case, because it explains what the aisle is actually offering before any question of buying arises, and because it is honest about the two or three things in it that have genuine evidence behind them as well as the several that do not.