Introducing the Agen Evidence Score

Walk down any supplement aisle and you will meet the same three words a hundred times: supports, promotes, helps. They sound like evidence. Almost none of them are. A compound with a shelf of large human trials behind it and one with nothing at all can legally make the same promise, in the same font, on the same shelf. The shopper is left to guess — and usually guesses on the strength of the packaging.

We built something to end that guessing. It is called the Agen Evidence Score, and today we are publishing the whole method as a free whitepaper.

One number, seven areas of health

The Evidence Score reads the actual science behind a supplement — or a habit — and turns it into a plain 0–10 rating across seven areas people actually care about: heart and circulation, digestion, physical performance, rest and recovery, mood and focus, skin and hair, and vitality. Two more scores, for safety and product quality, are kept deliberately separate so a strong benefit can never quietly hide a real risk.

High means proven and repeated. Low means hopeful. And a zero is not a gap in our data — it is an honest statement that a product does nothing for that particular area.

Why the honest zeros matter

Most rating systems pick a product's best angle and advertise it. Ours does the opposite: it makes every product answer for all seven areas, and it prints the zeros as loudly as the sevens. Fish oil earns a strong score for heart health and an honest zero for sleep. A creatine tub does nothing for your skin, and says so. That willingness to say "we don't know" — or "this isn't what it does" — is the whole point. It is what makes the high scores believable.

It borrows medicine's discipline — for the messier world of supplements

The score adapts the same families of evidence-grading standards clinicians already trust — how certain the research is, how large the effect, whether it holds up when other teams try to repeat it — and weights them so that a single rigorous trial outweighs ten small, sponsor-funded ones. It grades the weight of evidence, not the volume of marketing. You can read exactly how in the whitepaper; nothing is hidden behind a verb.

Beyond the bottle

A supplement is only one lever, and rarely the strongest. The most powerful things you can do for your health are usually free — how you move, sleep, eat and manage stress. So the same lens travels to habits and activities. Scored honestly on the same scale, a daily walk quietly out-scores most of the shelf. The whitepaper works through a real example end to end, hands you a five-question checklist for the aisle, and includes a quick-reference cheat sheet of where common supplements and habits actually land.

It is written for the person who simply wants to know, in five seconds: does this actually do anything, and is it safe for me?

You can also read the short version of how our scoring works on our Science page, or see how it feeds the measure–analyse–act loop that runs through everything we make.

This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Agen products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult your doctor before starting any supplement, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, or taking medication.