Our First Look at How Sifts Handles Microplastics

The Short Version

We ran an early experiment to answer a simple question: when microplastics sit in the gut alongside Sifts, does less of that plastic make it through the lining and into the body? We started small on purpose, testing the smallest, hardest-to-block particles available, because a strong result here provides a strong datapoint for the efficacy of Sifts on larger, easier-to-block particles.

The early answer is genuinely exciting. Where Sifts was present alongside 50 nanometer plastic particles, meaningfully less plastic crossed the gut lining than plastic on its own – up to 42% less in our best sample. 

Here's the full breakdown.

How Do You Even Test Something Like This?

A Franz diffusion cell ("Franz diffuser") is two small glass chambers stacked one on top of the other, separated by a thin membrane, similar in concept to the gut lining. The top chamber holds what you're testing, here, polystyrene, a plastic common in food packaging and one of the most-detected types in human tissue. The bottom chamber is fluid, standing in for your bloodstream.

You let time pass, then measure how much crossed into the bottom chamber, telling you how "leaky" or "tight" the barrier was. It's the same instrument scientists have used for decades to test how creams or drugs cross skin and tissue: a well-established, standard way to measure whether something crosses a biological barrier, which is exactly the question we needed answered here.

Why does this matter for your body? The gut lining does this exact job every day: let nutrients through, keep everything else out. Microplastics are small enough to slip through more easily than we'd like, which is how they end up in blood, organs, and brain tissue, and that's when researchers believe microplastics may start to do real harm. So the question we were testing: can Sifts change how much plastic gets through that gate?

The Setup: Starting as Small as Possible, On Purpose

For this first round, we used 50-nanometer polystyrene microspheres. A human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers wide, so our particle is about 1,600 times narrower than a hair, and roughly 150 times smaller than a red blood cell. Stacked end to end, it would take about 35 million of these particles to reach the average height of an adult man, closer in size to a virus than to anything visible to the naked eye.

That size also puts it in a harder-to-block category than the "microplastics" most people hear about. Particles under 1,000 nanometers are technically nanoplastics, not microplastics. Ours is 20 times smaller than that line, meaning we tested against the smallest, hardest-to-block category that exists, the one research increasingly flags as most capable of slipping through biological barriers.

Choosing polystyrene was also somewhat conservative in another way: research on surface charge across common plastics (Lin et al., 2024) found polystyrene trends less negatively charged than polyethylene, polypropylene, and PVC. Since a more negative charge can promote stronger binding to biological surfaces, polystyrene may be somewhat less prone to binding than other plastics, making a strong result against it a meaningful signal.

We ran four kinds of samples through the Franz diffuser:

• Plastic Only: just the plastic, no Sifts. Our baseline.
• Sifts + Plastic: plastic and Sifts together.
• Sifts Only: just Sifts, to check whether it sheds any detectable plastic.
• Blank Control: the lining alone, nothing added.

The Results

Less Plastic Got Through When Sifts Was in the Mix

Comparing the average of Plastic Only to Sifts + Plastic, the amount of plastic that made it through the lining dropped by roughly 30%. That's the headline number, averaged across our small sample set.

The more striking number: 6 micrograms of plastic got through with no Sifts present, versus 3.5 micrograms when Sifts was added, a 42% drop. Seeing that on the first attempt, at the smallest and hardest particle size, is the kind of signal that makes you want to run it again immediately, which is exactly what we're doing.

Sifts Didn't Make Things Worse, Which Was Its Own Important Test

One thing we watched closely: does Sifts itself introduce any plastic into the picture? We wanted to rule out any chance Sifts was itself a source of the very thing it's designed to help with.

The Sifts Only samples (0.76 and 0.87 micrograms) landed almost exactly where the Blank Control did (0.87 micrograms). Adding Sifts alone didn't move the needle, a clean result that means the reduction we saw in the Sifts + Plastic samples is likely doing real work against the plastic itself, not just adding background noise.

Why This Matters

Microplastics are already inside almost everyone's body. Here's what the research shows, and why the question isn't if plastic accumulates, but how much it takes before it causes harm:

• Already everywhere in the body. Detected in blood, lung tissue, placenta, and the cardiovascular system.
• Linked to a 4.5x higher risk of heart attack, stroke, or death. A 2024 New England Journal of Medicine study found this in patients with microplastics in their carotid artery plaque, over a 3-year follow-up. (Researchers note this shows a strong association, not proof of causation.)
• Up to 10x higher concentration in dementia patients' brains. A 2025 Nature Medicine study found dementia patients had far more microplastic in their brain tissue than people without dementia.
• Tied to chronic inflammation and oxidative stress in the body, biological processes linked to cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, and reduced testosterone and fertility.
• Brain concentrations rose 50% from 2016 to 2024, per the same study. Whole-body burden is estimated to double roughly every 10 to 15 years as global plastic production grows.

None of this means any single product reverses these trends, and we're not claiming Sifts does. But it's the backdrop that makes our core question worth asking: is Sifts' core value prop defensible at even the smallest, hardest particle size available for testing? Based on this first round, the answer looks like yes, and that's what gets us, and hopefully you, excited about what's next.

What's Next

This was a small, exploratory experiment designed to see whether the core idea holds up before we invest in a larger study, promising enough to justify going bigger, not yet the final word, and we're moving forward with excitement for future rounds of testing.

We're already planning our next round with our research partner at the University of New Mexico to build on this, digging deeper into the variables that matter most. We'll share what we learn as we learn it.

A quick, honest note for the science-minded among you: because this was a small first-round experiment (not yet run at the scale needed for statistical significance), we're treating these results as an encouraging early signal rather than a settled conclusion. That's normal for a first experiment, and it's exactly why we're already running the next round to build a bigger, more rigorous dataset.