How this publication decides what to believe
Two marks per claim, a rubric that has been revised three times because real compounds broke it, and a review date on every grade.
About
The Compound Codex reads the published research on peptides, SARMs, hormones, nootropics, longevity compounds and supplements, and reports what it actually says. Every claim gets a mark. Every mark is assigned by a written rule you can read, check, and argue with.
Two marks, not one
Most coverage of these compounds collapses into a verdict — it works, it doesn't, it's a scam. That hides the more useful question, which is how much anyone actually knows. A compound can have excellent evidence that it does nothing, and terrible evidence that it does something wonderful. Those are opposite situations, and one number cannot describe both.
So every claim here carries two marks, assigned independently.
Set by counting trials, independent research groups, total participants, and whether a meta-analysis exists. Not by how convincing the findings feel.
The direction of the result, kept separate from its weight. A Strong · Not supported means the question was settled, and the answer was no.
Since version 2.3 a third mark appears where warranted — a safety flag recording where a harm signal came from, not how bad it is: ⚑ Identified in trials ⚑ Documented in case reports ⚑ Restricted by a regulator. Provenance is checkable; severity is a judgement call, and judgement calls are what this system exists to avoid.
The full rule — every threshold, every definition, the four-step procedure for when trials disagree — is published at How we grade the evidence.
The rubric has been wrong three times
A grading system nobody ever revises is not rigorous; it is just unexamined. This one has changed three times, each because a real compound broke it, and each revision is logged with the article that caused it.
Each of those revisions changed marks on articles already published. Those articles were re-graded and say so. A rubric that only ever ratifies what was already written isn't doing any work.
Every grade has a review date
Evidence moves. A claim graded Emerging today may be Moderate after the next trial reports, and one graded Supported may not survive a larger replication. A publication that grades once and never looks back is producing an archive of things that used to be true.
So every breakdown carries a next review date, and the working file behind the whole site — every claim, with the trial counts, participant totals and independent-group counts that produced its mark — is maintained as a single ledger rather than scattered through the prose.
That ledger also records, for each claim not yet at the top of the scale, the exact criterion holding it there: 442 more participants, or one more independent research group, or replication in a second population. Which means the moment a qualifying trial publishes, it is already known which marks it moves.
What this publication will not do
- Sell anything it grades. No supplements, no affiliate links, no sponsored breakdowns, no discount codes. The only revenue is voluntary reader support, which is the entire reason the grades can be unfavourable.
- Recommend doses. Where a dose appears, it describes the protocol a cited trial used. That is a report, not advice, and the distinction is not decorative — several compounds covered here are prescription-only or controlled substances.
- Grade on mechanism. A plausible pathway is not a result. Compounds with elegant mechanisms and no human trials are graded Preliminary, however good the story is.
- Repeat a figure it cannot trace. If a number cannot be followed to the paper it came from, it does not appear — and the article says openly that it was left out.
That last one comes up more than it should. Three examples from published breakdowns:
Quoted everywhere, including by sellers. It could not be traced to a figure reported in the trial it is attributed to, so the breakdown reports what the paper does say and notes the discrepancy.
A precise-sounding number with no locatable source in the published literature. Omitted, and flagged as omitted.
Widely circulated splits of the population into fast and slow metabolisers, at odds across sources. The breakdown grades the underlying claim Mixed and declines to pick a figure.
Who writes it
Breakdowns are published under The Archivist. The byline is deliberate: the argument here rests on the rule and the citations, both of which are published in full, and neither of which should be more or less persuasive depending on who assembled them. Every figure traces to a named paper with a PMID. Check the sources rather than the author.
Corrections are made in the open. If a mark is wrong, the correction and its reasoning are published alongside the original grade, not quietly swapped in.
Support
Everything here is free, and stays free. Every breakdown, the full rubric, the Grade Ledger, the tracked trials — permanently, with nothing held back for readers who pay.
That is a decision rather than a launch promotion. A publication that grades what other people sell should not be selling access to the grades.
What support funds is the part that costs the most and shows the least: keeping the grades current. Watching for the trials that move a mark, re-running the rubric when they land, and publishing what changed.
Free to read, funded by readers
Patrons do not buy access. They pay for the maintenance, so that nobody has to buy access.
- Every breakdown, in full
- The complete grading rubric and its revision history
- The Grade Ledger and the Tracked Trials
- The right to challenge any grade
- All sources, with PMIDs
- Fund the maintenance — the registry monitoring, the re-grading, the published adjudications
- Receive nothing others don't — no early access, no private pages, no unlocked tier
- Monthly, yearly, or a one-off tip — and cancel whenever you like
Become a Patron, or leave a one-off tip if a standing commitment isn't for you. Neither unlocks anything, because nothing is locked.