22/07/2026
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Every bite of food you eat now comes with an invisible side of plastic. Scientists just found that something living inside kimchi may help your body fight back.
Researchers in South Korea discovered that a probiotic bacterium found in kimchi can latch onto microplastics and nanoplastics in the intestine, bind to them, and help carry them out of the body through waste before they spread further. In lab tests, the bacterium removed up to 87% of nanoplastics, and in living trials, subjects given the probiotic passed more than twice as much plastic out of their bodies compared to those without it.
Why this matters so much comes down to how small these particles are. Nanoplastics are less than a thousandth of a millimeter across, small enough to slip through the wall of your gut, enter the bloodstream, and accumulate in organs like the kidneys and even the brain. We now find them in blood, in lungs, in placentas. Until recently, we had learned how thoroughly plastic had invaded our bodies, but had almost no idea how to get it out.
That is what makes this discovery so quietly powerful. The bacteria act like microscopic magnets, gripping the plastic particles in the intestine and escorting them out, cutting down the time those particles spend in the body and lowering the chance they migrate deeper inside.
And it fits a bigger truth about fermented foods. For centuries, cultures around the world prized kimchi, yogurt, sauerkraut, and miso for gut health long before anyone understood why. Modern science keeps uncovering that these traditional foods are packed with beneficial microbes that do far more than aid digestion.
There is something poetic in it. Humanity created a pollution crisis the planet had no natural answer for, plastic that nothing could break down. And part of the solution may have been sitting quietly in a jar of fermented cabbage the whole time, a humble food our ancestors made for thousands of years.
Nature, once again, offering a quiet answer to a problem we created.
Would you start eating more fermented foods knowing they might help clean the plastic from your body?
