Scientists Found a Food That May Help Your Body Flush Out Microplastics
You've probably heard the statistic. A credit card's worth of plastic enters your body every week. Whether the exact number holds up or not, the reality is uncomfortable — microplastics are in our food, our water, our air, and apparently our organs.
Researchers think kimchi might help get some of it out.
What the Study Actually Found
A team from the World Institute of Kimchi isolated a specific strain of lactic acid bacteria found in the fermented Korean staple. They called it leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656 — CBA3656 for short — and tested its ability to bind to polystyrene nanoplastics, one of the most common forms hanging around in human bodies.
Two groups of mice. One got CBA3656, one didn't. When researchers looked at the feces from both groups, the CBA3656 mice had more than double the nanoplastics in their waste.
The bacteria was latching onto plastic particles in the gut and dragging them out of the body. Kimchi helping you poop out microplastics is apparently a real thing that science is now saying.
Why Microplastics Are Worth Taking Seriously
This isn't just about feeling icky. Nanoplastics accumulate in the brain, liver, and placenta and do serious damage to the gut specifically — disrupting the bacterial balance that keeps the whole digestive system functioning. That disruption connects to inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, and leaky gut, and bumps up the risk of diabetes and colorectal cancer.
Global cases of inflammatory bowel disease went from 3.7 million in 1990 to over 6.8 million in 2017. Microplastic exposure and gut disease are both trending the same direction.
The gut tries to fight back on its own but without probiotic support the plastics alter the chemistry of good bacteria and knock their populations down. A 2022 study out of Spain backed that up.
What makes the kimchi research stand out is that previous studies showed probiotics could neutralize some of the toxicity of microplastics. This one suggests they can actually remove them — not just disarm the damage but physically carry the plastic out when you flush.
Fermentation experts describe the mechanism simply — the bacteria latch onto microplastics through surface proteins, acting like tiny magnets that grab the plastic and stop it from burrowing deeper into tissue.
What To Actually Do About It
Nobody is saying eat kimchi by the bucket. Start with a tablespoon a day. Throw it on eggs. Pile it on a sandwich. Stir it into whatever you're already making. The important thing is buying raw unpasteurized versions with live cultures — and getting them in a glass jar, not plastic, because that would somewhat miss the point.
Sauerkraut and yogurt work too. Any fermented food loaded with live lactic acid bacteria is going to move things in the right direction. Pair it with high-fiber foods and your gut will have more to work with.
The research is still early and there are open questions — like where exactly the flushed nanoplastics end up after they leave your body, which is its own unsettling thread to pull. But the core finding is solid enough to act on, and eating more fermented food has enough other benefits that the bar for trying it is pretty low.
A jar of kimchi sitting in your fridge doing quiet battle with the microplastics in your gut is maybe not the wellness journey anyone expected to be on — but here we are.
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