What we know, and what we don't

There are three kinds of evidence, and they are not the same thing

Evidence about an ingredient. Someone studied a substance and published what happened. This is what exists for most of our ingredients.

Evidence about a formula. Someone studied this exact product, at this exact dose, in people just like you. Almost nobody has that. We don't either — yet.

A brand saying something confidently. Confidence is not evidence, and it is easy to mistake for it.

We'll always tell you which kind we're citing.

What has been published about our ingredients

All of the below was done by other people, on ingredients, not on Oratide products. Every one is cited in full so you can read it yourself — and read what it doesn't say. Each card carries the date we last checked the citation against the publisher, and what we checked it against. Where we went looking and found less than we expected, we've said that too.

Protein, and why we say 20 grams

Protein quality is scored by a method called PDCAAS, which corrects the raw gram figure for how well the body can actually use the amino acids. Whey scores 1.0 — the top of the scale. That is why Daily's panel prints 40% of the protein Daily Value without a correction, and why the same 10 grams of collagen in Restore prints no percentage at all.

That is nutrition arithmetic, not a research finding, and we are not going to dress it up as one. We are also not going to point you at somebody's satiety study: Daily doesn't claim to make you feel full any more. It used to, when it contained a viscous fiber. We took the fiber out, and the claim came out with it.

Vitamin D, zinc and vitamin B12 when intake drops

Three 2026 reviews looking at hair loss during rapid weight loss reach the same conclusion about mechanism: the shedding tracks the speed and size of the weight loss rather than being a direct effect of any medication, and it travels with nutritional shortfall. The first states that this population is associated with "micronutrient deficiencies including vitamin D, iron deficiency, and insufficient dietary calcium and protein," and recommends ensuring adequate intake of protein, iron, zinc, vitamin D, B12 and A.

The second is shorter — three pages — and lands in the same place on mechanism.

The third pools the cohort data, and puts the same conclusion more bluntly: the risk is "primarily mediated by weight loss-induced micronutrient deficiency." Not the medicine. The eating less.

That is a statement about nutrition, not about our product. We put vitamin D, zinc and B12 in Daily because these reviews name them. We have not tested whether supplying them changes anything for anyone, and none of them looked at a product like ours.

Here is the part that decides whether any of this is evidence about you. Every one of these reviews recommends making sure intake is adequate. Not one of them is reporting a study that tested whether supplementing actually changes what happens to anyone's hair. Nobody has run that trial — not for protein, not for vitamin D, zinc or B12, not in this population. Including us.

What we know is that a nutritional gap opens when intake drops sharply, and that doctors are being told to close it. What nobody knows is whether closing it with a scoop of powder changes an outcome. We would rather you bought this, understanding that distinction, than not understanding it.

L-cystine with botanicals — the closest published work, and how far away it is

A six-month double-blind placebo-controlled trial in 80 people reported hair density up 9.9 hairs per cm² at three months and 12.3 at six, against placebo. It is the nearest thing in the literature to a formula like Roots, so here is the distance between them, measured.

Ten ingredients to our four. That supplement contained L-cystine, Serenoa repens, pumpkin seed oil, Pygeum africanum, zinc, nicotinamide, vitamin B6, pantothenic acid, biotin and Equisetum arvense. We share four, and one of those is a different preparation — we use milled pumpkin seed where they used the oil. The paper publishes no doses at all, only a list of names, so nobody can honestly say their formula matches it. And 60 of the 80 participants had androgenetic alopecia and 20 had diagnosed chronic telogen effluvium: patients at a clinic, not people browsing a website.

So that result is not evidence about Roots, and we are not going to borrow it. What Roots actually rests on is simpler and better established: hair is largely keratin, keratin is largely built from cystine, and copper, biotin and pantothenic acid are essential nutrients with Daily Values set by regulation. That is a nutritional argument, and it holds without anyone's trial.

Biotin — the evidence is weak, which is why we say nothing about it

Roots contains 300 mcg of biotin, and we make no claim for it anywhere. This is the reasoning.

The paper most often reached for is a 2017 review of case reports. It found eighteen reported cases of biotin used for hair and nails — and in every one of them the patient had an underlying pathology: an inherited metabolic cause, a proven deficiency, or a similar identifiable reason. The authors note the lack of sufficient evidence for supplementation in healthy people.

A 2026 systematic review across ten studies reaches the same place, and says it without hedging.

And the doses those reviews examined were 1.25 to 10 mg a day. Roots contains 0.3 mg — less than a quarter of the smallest amount anyone studied. So the negative evidence is not measuring our amount. That is not a defence of biotin, and we are not offering it as one; it is the reason we neither claim it works nor pretend the question is closed.

One thing about biotin is well established, and it has nothing to do with hair: it interferes with a range of laboratory blood tests that use the biotin–streptavidin binding system. That is why the Roots label carries a lab-test warning — it was on the pack before this page discussed it.

Collagen peptides

A 2026 meta-analysis pooled 35 randomized controlled trials and 2,534 participants taking 500 mg to 10 g of collagen peptides a day for four to sixteen weeks. It found a modest improvement in skin hydration and in skin elasticity — standardized mean differences of 0.44 and 0.62 respectively, both statistically significant.

If you are buying collagen for wrinkles, buy something else. The same review reports "a complete lack of therapeutic efficacy across all time points" on wrinkle depth — an apparent effect at week eight turned out to be driven entirely by one extreme outlying study, and once that was removed the result was, in the authors' words, "statistically indistinguishable from placebo." Dermal density showed no significant benefit either.

We are telling you that because it is the thing most people assume collagen does, and because we would rather lose the sale than have you find out in twelve weeks. Skin hydration and elasticity are what the evidence supports, so those are the only two things Restore claims. Not hair. Not nails. Not connective tissue — we had those on the page and took them off when we read the review properly, because it covers skin and nothing else.

Our 10 g is at the top of the range those trials used. That is why it is 10 g.

Copper tripeptide-1 — where we found the least

This is the one we expected to be able to support and could not, so here is exactly what happened when we looked.

Searching the published human literature for this peptide and hair returns very little. The only indexed randomized controlled trial we could find was not a study of copper tripeptide-1. It tested a combination of 5-aminolevulinic acid and a copper-free version of the peptide, as a topical spray, in 45 men with diagnosed male pattern hair loss over six months. The peptide was never tested on its own. It reported increases in hair count.

Two other studies get cited constantly in this category — a 2015 trial in postmenopausal women and a 2018 comparison against minoxidil. We went looking for both and could not verify either in the medical literature index. They may exist somewhere we did not reach. We are not going to cite a paper we could not find.

So: copper peptides have been used in cosmetics for decades, which is a real fact about safety and history and not a fact about results. That is the entire basis for our serum, and it is why the Scalp page promises less than any other page on this site. It is a cosmetic. It is allowed to talk about how hair looks, and we do not have evidence that would let us say more than that even if the law allowed it.

What we have not proven

We have not run a clinical trial on any Oratide product. Not one.

Which means:

• We can't tell you whether you'll lose weight, or how much, because we haven't measured it
• We can't tell you whether your hair will change, or by how much, because we haven't measured it
• We can't tell you our products work better than anyone else's, because we haven't compared them
• We can't tell you ours absorbs better, because the published data doesn't support that for anyone

The only thing that would change any of those sentences is a trial. Until we have run one, they stand.

What didn't work

This section is empty, because we haven't finished a study yet. When we have, anything that failed goes here in the same detail as anything that succeeded — the endpoints that didn't move, the things we hoped for and didn't get.

We're telling you this now, while the section is empty, so you can hold us to it later.