Can a supplement remove microplastics from your body?

No. The human literature on this is a single preliminary study, published in Foods in June 2025, in ten healthy volunteers given 0.8 g of chitosan derived from the crayfish Procambarus clarkii before a standardised meal. It counted microplastic particles in stool: 656 ± 110 without the supplement and 965 ± 165 with it, with more excretion for nine of the sixteen plastic types analysed. The authors' own conclusion is that the findings are preliminary and that "further controlled studies are needed to validate these results". Nothing has been shown to lower the amount of microplastic in a person's tissues.

It is the whole question, and the study could not answer it. Counting particles in stool measures what left through the gut on one morning; it says nothing about what was already in blood, lung, liver or placenta, and nothing about what would have passed anyway. A supplement that binds plastic in the gut can only act on what is still in the gut. Reading a higher stool count as a lower body burden is an inference the data does not support — and it is the inference the marketing depends on.

The postbiotic claim currently being marketed has no human trial behind it at all. What exists is animal work: sodium butyrate reduced hypertension and kidney dysfunction in juvenile rats exposed to microplastics, and a Lactobacillus brevis strain reduced oxidative stress and reproductive toxicity in male rats given polystyrene. Both are about limiting harm in rats, not about clearing plastic from a human. A 2026 critical review of probiotic and postbiotic detoxification describes the field as an approach under investigation, not an established one.

That was not what the study was designed to establish. It gave a single 0.8 g dose to ten non-smoking, non-drinking volunteers and looked at one stool sample the next morning — a design that can detect a change in excretion, not a safety profile. Chitosan is derived from shellfish, which matters if you have a shellfish allergy, and it is a binder, which is the same property that makes bile-acid binders interfere with the absorption of other medicines. Anyone taking prescription medication should ask a pharmacist before adding a binding agent to the same schedule.

This page deliberately stops where the evidence does. We can tell you what the supplement studies measured, because we read them; we are not going to append a list of household tips dressed up as clinical advice, which is what most pages on this query do. If a product claims to clear microplastics from your body, the question to ask is which human study measured that, and in how many people.