Editorial policy

The governing rule

We report what has been documented. We do not prescribe what should be done.

Every rule below follows from that sentence. BRAK Labs is a publisher, not a clinic and not a store. Our job is to put the record in front of a reader in language they can follow, mark how strong each part of it is, and let them decide what to make of it.

Two standing lines appear across the site because they are load bearing and should read identically everywhere:

How a page is produced

Six steps, in order. A page that skips one does not publish.

1. Scope. We list every claim area the compound is actually discussed for, including the weak ones and the ones we expect to disappoint the reader. A claim area the reader came looking for and cannot find sends them to a worse source.
2. Source. We search the primary literature and the trial registries first, then regulatory records, then everything else. What counts as a source and in what order is set out on the methodology page.
3. Tier. Every claim about what a compound does gets one of five evidence tiers, assigned from the strongest source that tested that specific claim: [Human RCT], [Human open-label], [Animal], [In-vitro], [Anecdote]. A scientific claim with no tier does not ship. Regulatory and legal facts carry no tier and cite the source document and its date instead.
4. Draft. The writer works from the tiered claim list, not from other websites. Constraints are applied while writing rather than caught in review, because a draft that reaches review carrying a banned format has already cost more than it should.
5. Check. Every draft runs the pre-publication checklist below. Every box is a blocker.
6. Date and publish. The page carries a visible Last Reviewed date matching the machine-readable one, and the date is the day a human actually went through it.

What counts as a source

In descending order of weight: completed randomized human trials, published; other published human studies; registry entries with posted results; published animal and cell work; regulatory documents such as FDA warning letters, compounding category decisions, and prohibited-substance lists; and community reports, which are cited as what people say rather than as evidence of anything.

Three source classes are named and handled carefully:

• Vendor marketing copy is never a source for a factual claim. It can be quoted as an example of what is claimed in the market, attributed as such.
• Other content sites are never a source. Numbers that circulate widely in this category and trace only to affiliate publishers are not published here at all, whatever their citation count. If the trail ends at a content site, the number does not ship.
• Preprints are usable, labeled in the same sentence as not peer reviewed.

On a compound page or a guide, every claim is cited by number to the reference list on that page, and reference lists give the identifier: a PMID, a DOI, an NCT number, or a regulatory document number. Site-level pages like this one carry no reference list; they state the rules and the category facts, and they name the source in the sentence.

How claims are worded

Claims fall into five types and each type has a required construction. The full table lives in the editorial standards that govern this site; the short version is here so a reader can hold us to it.

One consequence is worth stating on its own. We never say a compound is safe. For most compounds covered here the published record does not support a safety conclusion in either direction, and a site that links to sellers cannot make one without turning its own words into evidence about what those sellers intend. What we can do is report exactly what has been measured, which is more useful anyway.

A second consequence: we never omit a documented negative. Where an adverse effect, a failed or withdrawn trial, or a regulatory action exists, it appears on the page. Selective positive coverage of a health topic is deceptive whatever the disclaimer says.

Tone

Educational and confident. The site teaches; it does not warn. Compound pages and guides open with what a compound is and what it is used for, then work outward to the evidence. Policy and disclosure pages like this one are the exception, and they say the hard thing in the heading. Uncertainty is presented as something the reader is gaining rather than as an alarm, because knowing that a claim rests on rodent studies is genuinely useful information.

That posture never becomes reassurance. Negatives are published in full; they simply do not open a page. The distinction is between how a fact is framed and whether it appears, and only the framing is negotiable.

What we never publish

• A dose, schedule, cycle, or titration stated as an instruction, in any unit, for any route.
• Reconstitution steps, volumes, or a reconstitution calculator.
• Injection technique, site selection, needle gauge, or any administration procedure.
• A results timeline or a claim about how quickly something takes effect.
• A contraindication list or a "who should avoid this" section.
• Before-and-after imagery, user progress imagery, product packaging, or vial photography.
• A statement that a compound is safe, or that it works, heals, treats, cures, prevents or reverses anything.
• A testimonial, a user review, or an endorsement presented as evidence of effect.
• An adverse or laudatory claim about a named company or product brand.
• A purity or quality statistic that cannot be traced to a primary source.
• Bacteriostatic water, syringes, swabs, or any injection supply named as something to acquire.
• A comparison of an unapproved compound to an approved brand drug as a substitute for it.
• Prices, carts, order buttons, or stock indicators. There is no commerce markup anywhere on this site.
• A named author or reviewer who is not a real, consenting person with checkable credentials.

Some of these cost us traffic. Dosage and reconstitution queries are among the largest in the category, and we are choosing not to serve them in the form that ranks. The reasoning is in the conflict of interest section: content published here can be read as the words of the businesses this site is connected to, so a protocol published here is not just advice, it is evidence about a product we do not even sell.

Authorship and review

BRAK Labs publishes under an organization byline. The organization is the author and the reviewer of record for every page, and the organization is accountable for every claim.

We do not invent people. There is no persona, no stock headshot, no placeholder credential, and no content attributed to a third party who has not written it. Those three patterns are all live in this category and each one is worse than publishing without a named reviewer.

When a credentialed reviewer is retained, that person will be named, their credentials will be verifiable, and every page they reviewed will carry their name and the date of review. Until then the byline stays honest about what it is.

Updating and Last Reviewed

Every page carries a visible Last Reviewed date, and it matches the dateModified in the page's structured data. It means a person went through the page on that date, checked the citations still resolve, checked the trial statuses, and checked the regulatory section against the current record.

It does not mean the page was rewritten. It also does not get moved to make a page look fresh. Whole-corpus date re-stamping is common in this category and it is a manipulation signal with no upside; we re-date pages we actually reviewed, and nothing else.

The regulatory section is the part that genuinely changes. Compounding categories move, warning letters land, prohibited lists get revised. That section is checked on every review and it carries its own date.

Corrections

When something published here turns out to be wrong, we fix the page and publish the correction. The entry names the date, the page, what was wrong, and what it now says. Corrections are never quietly edited away, and the log is never pruned.

Send anything you believe is an error to corrections@braklabs.com, pointing at the page and the sentence. The corrections log is public and permanent.

Conflict of interest and ownership

BRAK Labs is published by people who also have a commercial interest in the sale of peptide products. That is the single most important thing to know about this site, so it is stated here rather than buried.

What that means in practice:

• BRAK Labs sells nothing. No cart, no prices, no product pages, no payments, no inventory. This site earns nothing from any transaction that happens on it, because no transaction happens on it.
• It is expected to link to storefronts under common ownership with its publishers. When that begins, every such link will say so at the link. Not in a footer, not behind an asterisk, not inside a hyperlink labeled "disclosure". Visible text, in the same block as the link, naming the relationship as common ownership rather than the softer "we may earn a commission".
• Every commercial link carries rel="sponsored nofollow" in the markup, so search engines are told the same thing readers are.
• As of the review date on this page there are no such links. There is no advertising, no sponsored content, and no affiliate relationship live on this site. The commitment is published in advance because that is the only time such a commitment means anything.
• Coverage is not conditioned on the relationship. A compound sold by a connected storefront gets the same evidence tiers, the same claim strength matrix, and the same negative-space section as any other. A compound none of them sells gets covered if it is worth covering.
• We do not write about competitors, favorably or otherwise. No vendor rankings, no star ratings, no "best of" lists, no claims about the quality of a named company's product. A site that attacks its owners' competitors while linking to its owners' stores is a marketing brochure, and would be read as one.

An honest description of the limits of this arrangement: disclosure reduces the problem, it does not remove it. A reader who wants a source with no commercial connection to this category should use one, and we would rather say so than pretend the connection is neutral. What we can offer is that the connection is stated, the content rules are stricter because of it, and every rule is written down here where you can hold us to it.

The pre-publication checklist

Run on every page before it ships. Every item is a blocker, not a suggestion.

1. Every claim about what a compound does carries an evidence tier, and the tier matches what the cited source actually is. Regulatory and legal facts carry a dated source document instead.
2. Every claim uses the required construction for its type.
3. Nothing from the never-publish list appears.
4. Every commercial link has rel="sponsored nofollow" plus adjacent visible disclosure.
5. No named company carries an adverse or laudatory claim.
6. On the homepage, a compound page, or a guide: no page title, headline, subhead, or opening sentence leads with an absence. This governs where a page opens, not whether it publishes negatives: the sections on what is not known, deeper in the page, are required, and their headings may say so plainly. Policy and disclosure pages like this one are exempt entirely, because a disclaimer whose headings dodge the negative defeats itself.
7. Every documented negative that belongs on the topic is present.
8. Every figure taken from elsewhere has been traced to a primary source or removed.
9. Last Reviewed is visible, matches the structured data, and is the date the page was actually reviewed.
10. Structured data validates and contains no commerce or drug markup.
11. The breadcrumb is on the page and mirrored in the structured data.

Questions about this policy

Write to editor@braklabs.com. If a rule here is unclear, or a page appears to break one, we want to hear it. Both outcomes end in an edit: either the page changes or the policy does, and if the policy changes the change is dated on this page.