The uncomfortable one

Two Of The Nine Names On This Bottle Have No Controlled Human Trial

Muira puama leads the ingredient list and catuaba sits third. Between them they have a couple of centuries of reputation and not one controlled trial in a human being. That gap costs the product more than anything else on its panel, and a buyer is better off seeing it before paying than after.

By Jelly Force Team · Last updated September 21, 2026 · 9 min read · The uncomfortable one · Reviewed by Dr. Lindsay Ogle

What is being claimed, and who is claiming it

The Jelly Force Supplement Facts panel lists nine names in a fixed order, and the seller's ingredient graphic and written list repeat five of them: muira puama extract, maca extract, catuaba extract, ashwagandha, L-arginine. The seller's page gives each a one-line description. Muira puama is described as commonly used for male libido, energy and performance support. Catuaba is described as a traditional Brazilian herb associated with libido enhancement.

Both descriptions are accurate as statements about tradition. Neither is a statement about evidence, and it is worth noticing how carefully they are worded: commonly used, associated with. Nothing in either sentence claims a trial, because there is no trial to claim.

What follows is what the indexed literature actually contains for each, which is not nothing, and is not what a buyer would assume from the position these two names occupy on the list.

Muira puama: what the record actually holds

Muira puama is Ptychopetalum olacoides, an Amazonian shrub whose root and bark have been traded since the nineteenth century as marapuama or potency wood. Searching the indexed literature for a controlled trial of it in human beings returns nothing — not for sexual function, not for fatigue, not for anything else.

It does turn up in people twice, inside other products and without a placebo group: a one-month study of a muira puama and ginkgo formula in 202 women, and a three-month pilot in fifty-four men of a mixture that also held ginger, guarana and L-citrulline. Both compared people with their own starting point, and neither can say what muira puama did on its own.

What it does return is a body of work from a Brazilian pharmacology group, and the work is real. An extract inhibited acetylcholinesterase in mouse brain tissue, which is a genuine mechanism and the same one several dementia drugs use. The root's chemistry has been catalogued qualitatively and quantitatively, which is more than can be said for most tonic botanicals on the market.

And one finding deserves printing because it points the wrong way for a tonic. A behavioural study in mice found the extract was anxiogenic — anxiety-producing — rather than calming. That is a single animal study and it may mean nothing at a dose a human being would take. It still belongs beside the flattering animal studies, because a record that keeps only the results pointing one way is not a record at all.

Catuaba: rodent pharmacology and one awkward finding

Catuaba is harder to pin down than muira puama, because the name is a trade description rather than a species. At least two unrelated plants are sold under it commercially. The published pharmacology works on Trichilia catigua, so that is the plant this website names — and a label saying only catuaba is naming a market category.

The rodent record is genuine. A 2005 study in Psychopharmacology found antidepressant-like effects in mice with evidence for a dopaminergic mechanism, which is at least a plausible route to something a buyer would notice. A later study found antioxidant, anticholinesterase and antifatigue effects in rodents. Its one appearance in people is a twenty-eight-day safety study of Catuama, a Brazilian tonic that mixes catuaba with muira puama, guarana and ginger. It watched healthy volunteers for toxicity, found no severe reaction, and measured no benefit.

There is also a finding no page selling this bottle has any business omitting. A 2015 study in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology found that exposure to crude catuaba extract impaired fertility in adult female rats, while not causing reproductive damage in male offspring. This product is sold to adult men and the doses in that study bear no relation to a gummy, so it is context rather than a warning. It is also one more reason this is not a bottle to share, and it is the kind of thing this desk would want to have been told rather than to discover.

The two names with no controlled human trial sit first and third. Maca, second, has three randomised trials; the other three names with controlled results sit sixth, seventh and eighth, below the caffeine.

Why the weakest names lead the panel

On a seller's graphic, the order of the names is a design choice. On a Supplement Facts panel it is not: the federal rule for proprietary blends requires the ingredients inside one to be declared heaviest first.

So if this panel follows the rule, muira puama is the largest share of the blend and catuaba the third largest. Three of the four names carrying controlled results sit lower: ashwagandha, arginine and tribulus all come after the 5 mg of caffeine, which puts each of them at 5 mg or less. That is a ceiling read from the printed order rather than a measurement, and it is still the most telling fact on the panel.

Why a formula would be weighted that way is the manufacturer's to explain. What matters to a buyer is the effect: on this panel the weight and the evidence mostly run in opposite directions, and the first name is the one with the least behind it.

What traditional use is actually worth

It is worth something, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. A plant used in one form for two centuries by people who had every incentive to notice whether it worked is a reasonable candidate for investigation. That is how a great many drugs started.

What it is not is a finding. Traditional use tells you a hypothesis is worth testing; it does not tell you the hypothesis survived the test, because in these two cases the controlled test has not been run. The gap between those two statements is where most of the marketing in this category lives.

The category-level version of this is measurable. An audit published in Nutrients scored marketed erectile-dysfunction supplements against the minimum effective daily dose of each ingredient they named, and found most of the market naming rather than dosing. Names with no dose at all are the extreme case of the same habit.

What to do with this information

Not necessarily anything dramatic. Most of the nine names on this bottle have human evidence of some kind, the product prints a full Supplement Facts panel, and the format is the kind people actually keep up. Two names with no controlled trials do not make a product fraudulent; they make a specific part of its pitch unsupported.

• Do not buy it for the first name on the list. If muira puama is the reason you are interested, there is no controlled human evidence to be interested on behalf of.
• Do weigh the names that do have evidence. Maca, ashwagandha, arginine and tribulus carry the trials, and the dose question on the label page applies to all four.
• Do not treat animal pharmacology as a smaller version of a human trial. It is a different kind of evidence and most of it does not survive translation.
• Do notice which pages tell you this. A product page with a glowing line for every ingredient and no note about which have been tested is telling you something about the page, not about the bottle.

What would change this article

It is worth being explicit about what evidence would move muira puama or catuaba out of the untested column, because a criticism with no exit is just a position.

1. A randomised placebo-controlled trial in men, at a stated dose, with a pre-specified outcome. Even a small one. The maca literature is three such trials and it is enough to make maca the best-evidenced botanical here.
2. A published pharmacokinetic study in people. Knowing what reaches the bloodstream, and at what dose, would at least establish that an oral route does anything.
3. A standardisation marker. If the trade settled on a compound to measure, products could be compared with each other, which is currently impossible.
4. For catuaba, a species definition. The name covers at least two unrelated plants, so even a good trial would only apply to labels naming the same one.

Until any of that exists, the honest description of both is a well-regarded traditional botanical with animal pharmacology and no controlled human outcome data of its own. This page will be updated if it changes, and the review date at the foot of it will move when it does.

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