Why we publish our sources

Microplastics are a young field. The first paper describing microplastics in human blood was published in 2022. The first identifying them in placental tissue came just before that. Most of what is known about how these particles behave in a living human body has been learned in the past five years, and much of it is still being argued about in the scientific literature right now.

That means a lot of what you read online about microplastics, including some of what you might read here, is being written while the science itself is still being performed.

In a moment like this, the difference between a claim you can trust and a claim you cannot often comes down to one thing. Can you see where it came from?

What a source list actually does

A numbered citation is a small promise. It says: this sentence is not the author's opinion. It is a statement that another person, in another lab, wrote down in a peer-reviewed paper, and you can go find that paper and read it yourself.

A numbered source is checkable. You can click it. You can read the abstract. You can decide for yourself whether the paper says what the article claims it says.

That is the point.

What Winnow publishes, and what it does not

Every article on this site carries a numbered source list at the bottom. Each entry links out to PubMed or a DOI so a reader can go directly to the original paper. When a number appears in the body of an article (e.g., a rate, a percentage, a study finding) it is tied to a specific citation, not a general gesture.

There are a few things Winnow tries hard not to do.

We do not use "studies show" without saying which studies.

We do not use images of white-coated researchers, stock lab equipment, or generic "science" graphics to make a claim feel more credible than the evidence behind it actually is.

We do not describe laboratory findings as if they had already been proven in humans, and we do not describe animal findings as if they had already been proven in humans either. We name the kind of study each finding comes from, because the kind of study matters as much as the result.

And we do not cite papers we have not read. That sounds obvious. It is not universal.

Why this matters more in an emerging field

In a mature field, the shape of the evidence is fairly settled. Textbooks exist. Meta-analyses exist. You can quote a summary of a summary and be roughly correct.

Microplastic health research is not that field yet. It is closer to the early years of studies on lead, tobacco smoke, or air pollution; moments when the evidence was accumulating faster than the consensus, and where careful reading of individual papers was the only way to see what was actually known.

In a field like that, a source list is not a formality. It is the difference between joining a public scientific conversation and simply narrating on top of it.

It is also the difference between a brand that expects to be trusted and a brand that expects to be checked.

Winnow would rather be checked.

The commitment

Winnow's product is a probiotic supplement. Some of its strains have been shown in laboratory testing to bind micro- and nanoplastics. That is a real and specific claim, and it rests on a real and specific body of research, which is why every article that mentions it links to the studies behind it.

Everything else — the exposure science, the human epidemiology, the mechanistic work on how these particles interact with tissue and gut and immune cells — is drawn from the same public scientific literature that any reader, journalist, or physician can access.

The commitment is simple. If Winnow writes it, a source stands behind it. If a source does not exist, the sentence does not go in.

That is not a marketing choice. It is the only honest way to write in a field this new.

For more on how Winnow reads the evidence itself — what weight goes to a lab study versus an animal model versus a human trial — see our companion piece on how we evaluate scientific evidence. For a broader statement of what Winnow is and is not, see our earlier note on transparency. And for a companion view on the language side of the same commitment, see what responsible supplement claims look like.