Every fact on The Protein Index carries a date, a source, and a verification status. This page explains how a product record is built, what each stamp means, and what we will not claim.
An index describes. It doesn’t certify.
We record what manufacturer labels and public testing registries say, when we checked, and what changed since the last check. We award no badges of our own, and nothing here is an endorsement or a guarantee. The distinction matters most in the negative: when a product doesn’t appear in a testing registry, our record says not listed. It never says “not certified.” A product missing from a registry may simply not be enrolled in it.
Where the data comes from
The source of record for every product is the manufacturer’s own label and product page. We extract facts from three places, in order of preference: structured data the brand publishes on its own site, the printed nutrition panel, and label photography read by optical character recognition. An OCR value only enters a record when two independent reads of the image agree. No value is ever guessed, estimated, or paraphrased by software. If a fact isn’t stated on the label or page, the record shows it as pending. We don’t fill it in with a best guess.
- Ingredient and allergen statements are reproduced verbatim from the manufacturer’s declaration, with the source and the date we captured it. We never derive, infer, or summarize an allergen claim: cross-contact facility statements are quoted word for word.
- Conflicts are flagged for a person to resolve. Sometimes two sources on the same brand page disagree; we’ve found pages carrying two formulations at once. When that happens the record is flagged for human review; software never picks a winner.
- One record covers one product line. The label data shown was read from the specific flavor named on the record; other flavors in the line can carry different macros and different allergens, and the record says so.
Third-party testing status
For each product we check the public registries that matter to drug-tested athletes (NSF Certified for Sport, Informed Sport, and Informed Choice) and store the result as a dated row: “Listed on NSF Certified for Sport (checked 1 Aug 2026),” or “Not listed in the Informed Sport database (checked 1 Aug 2026).” The date is part of the fact; registries change, and an undated claim is a stale claim waiting to happen.
Two things we will never say. First: “WADA approved,” “WADA certified,” or “WADA compliant.” No such thing exists. WADA publishes a Prohibited List; it does not test, approve, or certify products, and any product that claims otherwise is misusing the name. Second: that any product is “banned-substance free” or “safe.” A registry listing means the certifying body tested batches under its program on the dates it says. That is the whole claim, and it is the registry’s to make. If you compete under code, verify against the registry itself before you rely on anything, including us.
What the stamps mean
- Verified, with a date: a human reviewed every field on the record against the label and source on that date.
- Pending review: the record is machine-extracted or incomplete. Missing fields display as “pending”; we don’t hide them or fill them in.
- Discontinued: the manufacturer no longer sells the line, as best we can tell; the record stays up for reference.
When we re-check a record and nothing has changed, the verification date renews. When the label has changed, the record’s formulation version increments, the change is noted, and the record drops back to pending until a human re-verifies it. A reformulation we find is tracked and shown on the record. Your protein bar can change without telling you, and that’s precisely the kind of fact this site exists to catch.
How we make money, and how it can’t touch the data
Some outbound links are affiliate links: if you buy after clicking one, the brand or its network may pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. Those links are marked, they carry rel="sponsored", and the full policy lives on the affiliate disclosure page. The rules that keep the money away from the data are built into how the site works: commissions never affect a record’s contents, a verification stamp, or the order of any ranked list; featured placements are labeled as such and never appear inside ranked lists; and no brand can pay to create, edit, or remove a record. Indexing is free and cannot be bought.
Corrections
If we have a fact wrong, we want it fixed more than you do. Tell us. Corrections are reviewed first, the record is fixed against the source, and the verification stamp is reset to the date of the fix.