Can you get microplastics out of your body? The detox claims, checked

The pitch goes like this. Plastic is in your blood, your brain, your arteries. Here is a machine, a capsule or a sweat session that takes it out. The fear is reasonable; our graded review of the health evidence explains why scientists take it seriously. The cure is another matter.

This piece looks at what the detox industry sells, the studies it leans on, and what those studies actually measured. Short version: one approach has early data, one has very thin data, and the rest have none. If you want the background on where plastic turns up in the body, start with microplastics are inside you.

What the body already does with plastic

Plenty of the plastic you swallow comes out the other end. Plastic has been found in all 8 stool samples in a small 2019 study, at a median of 20 particles per 10 grams. Smaller particles turn up in urine too: four fragments of 4 to 15 micrometres in four of six volunteers in the first study, and in a 2026 study of 98 volunteers in Mexico, every participant tested positive for at least one plastic, with plastics detected more often in urine than in blood.

What nobody knows is the part the detox pitch depends on: whether particles that make it into blood and organs ever leave, and how fast. Both our health review and our FAQ list this as an open question, and nothing below settles it. Finding plastic in urine shows some gets out. It doesn’t tell you how much stays.

Plastic chemicals are different. BPA has a half-life in the body of about six hours: in a 14-person dosing study, most people passed more than 90% of it within a day. Many phthalates clear within a day or two (see our phthalates explainer). For these, your liver and kidneys are already the detox programme. The problem is that you keep topping them up.

Blood-filtering clinics: apheresis and plasma exchange

This is the expensive end. In therapeutic apheresis, blood is drawn through a machine that separates out the plasma, filters it or swaps it for a replacement fluid, and returns it. Hospitals use it for specific conditions, such as some autoimmune and blood disorders. Some private clinics now sell it as plastic removal. In 2025, ITV News reported on a London clinic charging nearly £10,000 for a two-hour procedure that “may need to be repeated every year”. The clinic, ITV reported, promises to remove “between 90 and 99% of microplastics”. The NHS doesn’t cover it. As one GP told ITV: “In general practice and in most of the NHS we would want evidence.”

Here’s the evidence we found, in order of publication:

• 2025, 21 patients. A German team analysed the filtered-out material from people with chronic fatigue syndrome who had apheresis and found substances resembling nylon and polyurethane. The authors say plainly that the method “does not quantitatively measure” plastic, and that the nylon signal could partly come from proteins. Three of the authors work at a clinic that sells apheresis.
• 2026, a handful of patients. The same group measured blood before and after treatment. In four patients, polyethylene fell in all four and PVC in three. Polypropylene fell in one and rose in two; polystyrene rose in the one person where it was found. A dye-based count in four other samples fell by about 70% on average, but that method can’t confirm the particles are plastic. The authors say the treatment “may reduce or redistribute” plastic, and list small numbers, exploratory tests and contamination risk among the limitations. Several authors work for or advise apheresis companies.
• 2026, 114 patients. The biggest study so far measured blood before and after 174 plasma exchange sessions and found microplastics went down. It also found something awkward: in people who started with low levels, the drop was hidden “because of leaching of MP back into the circulation from the plastic apheresis tubing set”. Most of the authors list a company that sells plasma exchange. The same abstract says: “There is currently no established method for removing MP from the human body.”

Put together: there’s early evidence that apheresis can lower the plastic measured in blood on the day. That’s not nothing. But blood is only one of the places plastic has been reported, and nobody has shown that a session lowers what’s in the brain, liver or artery walls, or that anyone feels or does better for it.

Why the apheresis results are shakier than they look

Four reasons to hold the headlines loosely.

The machine is made of plastic. The 114-patient study saw tubing shed particles back into patients. Separately, saline pumped through heart-lung bypass and ECMO circuits picked up PVC, PET, polyethylene and polystyrene particles, with more over time. A treatment that adds plastic while removing it has to prove the net.

Measuring plastic in blood is hard. The German team’s main numbers for polyethylene and PVC come from pyrolysis GC-MS, which burns a sample and reads the fragments. An Australian team testing that method concluded it is “currently not a suitable analysis method for PE and PVC in biological matrices”. Those are the two plastics that fell most. Our measurement explainer covers why this matters.

Who did the studies. Every human apheresis study we found had authors working for or advising companies or clinics that sell the procedure. That doesn’t make the data wrong. It does mean nobody independent has repeated it.

It isn’t risk-free. In a registry of more than 169,000 apheresis procedures from 2013 to 2024, adverse events ran at 1.6 mild, 2.0 moderate and 0.20 severe per 100 procedures, mostly low blood pressure, tingling and problems with the needle or line. Those patients were mostly seriously ill, so the rate in healthy clients may differ. But a small risk is still a poor trade for an unproven benefit.

Chitosan and other “binder” supplements

Chitosan is a fibre made from crustacean shells, long sold as a weight-loss aid. The idea is that it grabs plastic particles in the gut and carries them out.

• In rats (six per group), chitosan raised the share of swallowed polyethylene that came out in faeces over six days from 83.7% to 115.6%. A figure over 100% is impossible in reality; the authors put it down to their counting method, because they couldn’t analyse whole stool samples. Two other fibres and an eggshell protein the team tried made no significant difference.
• In 10 people, an Italian team gave a standard meal with and without 0.8 g of chitosan and counted plastic in stool the next morning: an average of 656 particles without it and 965 with it. There was no placebo. The meal itself contained 356 particles, so more plastic came out than went in, which the authors put down partly to air and other background intake.
• In 21 people, the same group gave 11 people chitosan for 15 days and 10 a placebo. Blood microplastics fell from 1.84 to 1.34 µg/mL (26%) in the chitosan group, with no significant change in the placebo group. People were matched rather than randomly assigned. The authors also estimated that particles stay in the blood for about 58 days on average, a first estimate from one small study that nobody has yet checked.

Both human studies declare no conflicts of interest, and they’re more careful than most of what’s on supplement shelves. But they are pilot studies of one chitosan product in 31 people combined, run by one group, and neither looked at organs or health. Treat chitosan as “interesting, unproven”. If you’re allergic to shellfish, it’s a reason for caution, not a reason to experiment.

For the rest of the binder aisle (activated charcoal, zeolite, bentonite and other clays), we found no human study of any of them against microplastics, as of November 2026. Those products bind plenty of things in a lab beaker. That isn’t evidence they do anything for plastic in your body.

Saunas and sweating it out

The sauna claim borrows from a small Canadian study that found BPA in the sweat of 16 of 20 people, including some with none detected in blood or urine, and a phthalate breakdown product in everyone’s sweat. That shows sweat is one exit for some plastic chemicals. It doesn’t show that sweating more lowers your body’s total load, and BPA already leaves through urine within a day.

For microplastic particles, we found no study measuring them in sweat after a sauna, or any other kind of induced sweating, as of November 2026. Enjoy a sauna if you like one. It isn’t a plastic treatment.

What actually lowers the plastic in you

You can’t yet take plastic out with confidence. You can put less in, and for plastic chemicals there’s a real trial showing it works fast. In the Australian PERTH trial, a small pilot, a week of food produced with minimal plastic contact plus plastic-free kitchenware cut urinary BPA by 59.7%, and two phthalate breakdown products by 37.5% and 53.5%, compared with a control group that changed nothing. The groups were small and the error margins wide, but the direction was clear. No particle study has run the equivalent test, but the same swaps cut the obvious sources of both.

We’ve covered the steps in detail elsewhere, so here’s where to go:

1. Stop heating food and drinks in plastic. The best-evidenced single change. See microwaving plastic containers.
2. Drink tap water, not bottled. See bottled water and what filters and boiling actually remove.
3. Swap what you cut, stir and store with. See our kitchen swap guide and plastic-free food storage.
4. Deal with dust. Indoor air is a big, underrated route. See microplastics in household dust.
5. Eat less heavily processed, plastic-packaged food. See microplastics in food.

All of these cost less than one session in a clinic. The thing that would cut exposure for everyone, which is less plastic being made and less of it touching food, isn’t for sale in a clinic either. It’s a policy fight.

Common questions

Is there a test that tells me how much plastic is in my body?

No validated one. Labs can find plastic in blood, urine or stool, but methods disagree widely and some can’t reliably measure common plastics in blood. A before-and-after number from a clinic is only as good as its method, and there’s no agreed normal range to compare it with.

Should I be worried that I can’t get it out?

Worry about the part you can change. Whether particles in tissue cause harm is still graded as early or unknown for most outcomes in our health review. Plastic chemicals are better studied and clear quickly, so cutting intake pays off within days.

Will eating more fibre help?

Possibly, but it hasn’t been shown. Fibre adds bulk and speeds things through the gut, which is the logic behind chitosan. In the rat study, two other fibres didn’t significantly increase plastic excretion; chitosan did (Liu and Shimizu). Eat fibre for the reasons it’s already good for you.