On September 10, 2026, University College London researchers published "What is in the bottle? An analysis of the ingredients in menopause supplements" in Climacteric (DOI 10.1080/13697137.2026.2719016), authored by Poppy Sullivan, Anne-Marie Boylan and Joyce Catherine Harper. The team analysed 201 menopause supplements sold by nine major UK retailers, comparing ingredients, doses and monthly cost. FemTech World reported the findings on September 11.

Why It Matters

Menopause has been the femtech category's most reliable growth story for three years — the one segment that attracts mainstream retail shelf space, celebrity founders and conventional consumer-health capital without the friction sexual wellness usually carries. This paper is the first systematic look at what the supplement wing of that market is actually selling, and the answer is: 201 different things, priced across two orders of magnitude, with no shared active. For brands, the immediate exposure is claims risk. A peer-reviewed audit naming influencer marketing as a driver of unsupported claims is exactly the kind of citation that regulators (the ASA in the UK, the FTC in the US) reach for. For the credible end of the category, it's an opportunity: any brand that can point to vitamin D and calcium at meaningful doses, published dose rationale and a clean botanical profile now has a differentiator that an academic paper handed it for free. And for the broader sexual wellness business, menopause supplements are the leading edge of a structural question the whole sector faces — vaginal dryness products, libido supplements and intimate-care actives all sit on similar evidentiary ground. A category that wants to be taken seriously by pharmacy buyers and insurers eventually has to answer "what is in the bottle, and does it work?" This is what that question looks like when a university asks it.

The topline is a category with no center. Not a single ingredient or ingredient class appeared across all 201 products. Roughly 80% contained herbs, 77% contained vitamins and 74% contained phytoestrogens — the plant compounds found in soy and flaxseed. Vitamin B6 was the most common vitamin; red clover and sage were the most frequently identified botanicals. Monthly cost ranged from £1.50 to £95, a 63x spread, with the researchers finding little empirical evidence that the expensive end buys anything the cheap end doesn't.

More pointed is what's missing. Half the products contained no vitamin D at all, and fewer than 24% contained calcium — the two nutrients the British Menopause Society and International Menopause Society specifically flag for maintaining bone health and preventing post-menopausal osteoporosis. So a category that markets itself on menopause support largely omits the two ingredients with the clearest menopause-specific evidence base, while loading up on botanicals with thinner support.

The safety findings are not merely academic. First author Poppy Sullivan singled out black cohosh, noting it "is known to carry a potential risk of liver toxicity," and flagged that widely varying vitamin and mineral doses create their own exposure risk: "Some nutrients can have adverse effects when consumed in excess over time. For example, excessive vitamin D intake can theoretically lead to high calcium levels, which could cause adverse effects such as vomiting and confusion." Senior author Professor Joyce Harper was direct about the demand side: "The menopause supplement market is growing rapidly, despite limited scientific evidence that many of these products improve menopause symptoms. Some social media influencers promote these products as effective solutions, despite many claims not being supported by scientific evidence."

The authors called for high-quality research including clinical trials to determine whether menopause supplement ingredients are effective and safe, and suggested the ingredient mapping could help clinicians make sense of the formulation chaos their patients arrive with.

Sources

Update — 2026-09-13

Initial entry — story first created.

Update — 2026-09-30

Which? puts prices on it. On September 30, 2026 (reported by the Guardian and the Independent), UK consumer watchdog Which? published an analysis of 26 popular menopause supplements sold through retailers including Holland & Barrett, Boots and Amazon. Its nutritionists cross-referenced more than 78 active ingredients against current evidence and concluded that none contained the right nutrients at the right doses to justify menopause-specific use. The price gap is large. Asda's A–Z Multivitamins & Minerals costs 6p a day (£22 a year) and contains 200mg calcium and 100mg magnesium. Love Mushrooms' Empower costs £1.33 a day (£485 a year) and, per Which?, contains none of the menopause-relevant nutrients such as magnesium and calcium. Wild Nutrition's Women's 45+ Daily Multi Nutrient (£468 a year) contains 1.5µg vitamin D, 60mg calcium and 30mg magnesium, well under NHS recommended amounts. The highest-scoring product, Vitabiotics' Menopace Max, still costs £340 a year, more than 15 times the Asda multivitamin.

"The supplements industry has become a wild west," said Which? public health nutritionist Shefalee Loth. The Guardian explicitly ties the findings to the UCL audit of 201 supplements covered in this story. UCL's Dr Xand van Tulleken called the products "a massive rip-off for consumers who desperately want to be well." The Health Food Manufacturers' Association responded that menopause "may create increased nutritional demands" that supplements can help meet. The Guardian cites a global menopause-supplement market of nearly $17 billion, projected to reach $25 billion by 2030.

Read: With two independent UK analyses in three weeks, supplement brands in the midlife and libido-support category should expect retailer and ASA scrutiny of claims, and a stronger case for evidence-led competitors.

New Sources