VapoFil Ingredients: All Seven Rows, In The Order The Bottle Prints Them

The plant this whole category was built on, and the one with the largest evidence base attached to it. Trials used a lipidosterolic extract at 320 mg a day, almost without exception, and at that amount the 2023 Cochrane review concluded at high certainty that it does little to nothing for urinary symptoms. A 2018 meta-analysis of one specific hexanic extract reached a friendlier conclusion about that preparation in particular.

Here it is 20 mg, and the extract is described only as a berry extract with no standardisation stated. On this panel it reads as the category signature rather than as an active amount.

Wild yam carries diosgenin, a plant steroid that a laboratory can convert into hormones. A human body cannot, which is the single most repeated misunderstanding about this ingredient. The 2022 pharmacological review covers what diosgenin does do, most of it in cell and animal work.

The only controlled human trial applied a wild yam cream for three months and measured no change in any hormone it looked at. It was run in menopausal women, and there is no male trial. On this panel wild yam is a traditional inclusion.

A traditional male tonic with a long history and no clinical trial. What the literature holds is chemistry: the steroidal saponins the root carries and, in a 2018 pharmacology review, the laboratory activity attributed to them.

Nobody has taken sarsaparilla into a randomised trial for desire, stamina or hormone levels at any amount. That is a gap in the evidence, not a mark against the plant, and it is stated here because a reader comparing labels deserves to know which rows have a trial behind them.

Nettle is on this panel because of the SHBG story: lignans that bind to sex hormone binding globulin in a laboratory assay, leaving in theory more unbound testosterone in circulation. The lignans in that work were isolated from nettle root.

This label prints nettle leaf. They are different parts of the same plant with different chemistry, and the twelve-month trial everybody cites, Schneider and Rübben's Bazoton study, used root at 459 mg a day. The review of nettle root is explicit that root is the researched part. The one controlled trial of nettle leaf was about blood sugar in type 2 diabetes.

Read the row carefully: 20 mg of a chelate declared at 5% boron is about 1 mg of boron. Reviews of boron in human nutrition put an ordinary mixed diet in roughly that range, so this row supplies about a normal day's worth rather than a supplemental dose.

An earlier review framed the open question as whether boron is nutritionally relevant at all in people who eat fruit and vegetables. No claim is made for this row on this website.

The row with the most human evidence behind the plant, and the row where the extract ratio does the most work. The label states 10 mg of a 100:1 extract, equivalent to approximately 1,000 mg of dry root powder, and that arithmetic is correct.

A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis pooled clinical trials and found an increase in serum total testosterone. The trials it pooled — Ismail 2012, Udani 2014, Chinnappan 2021 and Leitão 2021 — used standardised extracts at 100 to 400 mg a day, characterised by their marker compounds rather than by a ratio. A ratio and a standardisation are not the same measure, and two 100:1 extracts can differ several-fold.

The row missing from the vendor's own ingredient list and graphic, and the one carrying the most suggestive mechanism. Icariin, the marker compound, inhibits human PDE5 in a test tube — the same enzyme prescription erectile medicines act on. Work on synthetic icariin analogues has since mapped which structural features drive that potency.

What does not exist is a randomised trial of Epimedium or icariin in men. The erectile work is in rats, and a review of Epimedium standardisation describes how variable the raw material is between batches. Eight milligrams of a 10:1 extract is stated as 80 mg of dry herb.