Chlorophyllin.
A water-soluble form of chlorophyll that works as an internal deodorant and may help neutralize certain toxins. Binds odor-causing compounds in your gut, reducing body and fecal odor. May also bind certain dietary carcinogens.
Reviewed March 2026
- Category
- Compound
- Also filed under
- Reduces body and fecal odor (well documented)May bind dietary carcinogens (aflatoxin)Antioxidant propertiesWound healing support (topical)
What Chlorophyllin is, and what it does.
- Does it work
- Suits people managing everyday body or stool odour, and anyone who wants a water-soluble green pigment rather than fat-soluble chlorophyll. Odour is where the evidence actually sits.
- How much to take
- 100-300 mg daily. Start at 100 mg and increase if needed.
- Time to feel it
- Green stool can show up the first day. Odour changes usually take three to five days of daily use to settle in.
- The first dose
- You might notice greener stool within the first day. Odor reduction takes a few days.
- With regular use
- Consistent daily use keeps odor under control. No tolerance buildup.
- How well tolerated
- Well tolerated. FDA-approved for internal deodorant use. Can cause green discoloration of urine and stool (harmless).
- How it feels
- You don't feel it working. What you notice is the absence of something: less odor.
- The overlooked benefit
- In the copper form the metal is held inside the ring, so the ingredient adds to the copper in your whole stack. Worth a glance if you also take a multivitamin.
100 to 300mg a day is where Chlorophyllin works.
Source: Egner et al., PNAS, 2001; Chernomorsky et al., Mutat Res, 1999
The proof, claim by claim.
These words describe the research, not the molecule's worth. Research strength is how much work stands behind one claim, and it is never a product score.
- Reduces body and fecal odor
- Binds aflatoxin and reduces cancer risk
- General detox and energy boost
Questions people ask about Chlorophyllin.
- Why is my poop green?
- That's the chlorophyllin. Totally normal and harmless. It means the supplement is reaching your gut.
- Will this actually help with body odor?
- For fecal and internal odor, yes. For armpit BO from sweat, not really. Different mechanisms.
- Does it really detox your body?
- It binds certain compounds in your gut. But the broad 'detox' marketing is overhyped. Your liver handles detox.
- Is this the same as eating greens?
- Similar source, different form. Chlorophyllin is modified to be water-soluble and more concentrated.
- Can I take it with medications?
- Space it 2 hours apart from meds. Its binding action could theoretically reduce drug absorption.
Why these belong in the same formula. Each row says what the basis is, from settled biochemistry through to a trial that measured the pair.
Sodium copper chlorophyllin and ascorbic acid were given alone and together in a rodent study of barium chloride exposure, and the combination arm was included specifically to test whether the two act on the same oxidative-stress markers. These were tissue markers in animals, not human outcomes. Both compounds are water soluble and are stable together in solution, which is why the pairing shows up in beverage and greens formulas.
Chlorophyllin holds a divalent metal in the centre of its chlorin ring, and sodium zinc chlorophyllin is the version where that position is filled by zinc rather than copper. The zinc is part of the molecule, so a formula using this salt is contributing zinc whether or not it says so. One published non-human experiment paired sodium zinc chlorophyllin with calcium and L-proline to look at intestinal calcium transport.
Iron can occupy the central metal site, and iron chlorophyllin has been examined in a digestion model coupled to Caco-2 monolayers for how much iron becomes available for cell uptake. That is a cell-culture measurement of bioaccessibility, not a human iron-status outcome. The relevance to a formulator is that the metal in the ring is a design choice with its own absorption behaviour.
L-proline was one of three components in the tested combination with calcium and sodium zinc chlorophyllin. The report describes the trio together, so the contribution of any single part is not separable from the design. Non-human model, mechanism-level endpoint.
Activated charcoal adsorbs a wide range of organic molecules without selecting among them, and a large planar pigment like chlorophyllin is exactly the sort of molecule it holds. Taken in the same dose window, charcoal can reduce how much chlorophyllin stays free in the gut lumen. Separating the two by a few hours is the ordinary formulation answer.
A swine feeding study measured faecal Escherichia coli counts with and without chlorophyllin in medicated and unmedicated diets, which puts chlorophyllin in contact with the gut bacterial community. Whether it helps or hinders a specific supplemented strain in a person has not been measured. The direction of the interaction is unsettled, so a formula pairing the two is making a bet rather than following data.
Rodent studies of chlorophyllin report changes in tissue glutathione and related redox markers rather than in clinical endpoints. Supplemental glutathione acts on the same marker set, so the two overlap in what they move. No human study has measured them together.
Chlorophyllin is water soluble and tocopherols sit in the lipid phase, so the two cover different compartments of the same oxidative chemistry. Animal reports on chlorophyllin track lipid peroxidation products, which is the marker tocopherols also affect. This is a mechanistic pairing, not a tested one.
Quercetin binds divalent metals and so does the chlorin ring system, which means the two can compete for the same free copper, zinc or iron in a mixed formula. That competition changes what each one is carrying, not whether either is present. Worth checking in a stability run rather than assuming it is inert.
Talk to a doctor before taking Chlorophyllin if any of these apply to you: Can cause green discoloration of urine/stool (harmless), Limited evidence for most 'detox' claims, May cause GI discomfort. These are flags to check first, not effects Chlorophyllin is known to cause.
Not medical advice. Show the label to your pharmacist.What Chlorophyllin actually does.
Chlorophyllin is a lab-modified, water-soluble version of chlorophyll, made by removing its fat-soluble tail and swapping out its central magnesium for another mineral, usually copper.
Chlorophyllin's flat ring structure can stack together with certain other flat molecules in the gut, forming loose complexes that leave less of that other molecule free to be absorbed.
In the copper version, that copper is built into the molecule itself, so this ingredient adds to your total copper intake from a formula.
Your body doesn't turn chlorophyllin back into chlorophyll, and the copper in it doesn't get built into heme. Chlorophyllin and heme are related in structure but are separate molecules with different metals at their center.
Where Chlorophyllin comes from.
It starts as green pigment from plants, but it does not stay that way. The pigment is cleaned up, its fatty tail is cut off, and the magnesium in its middle is swapped for copper or zinc so the whole thing dissolves in water. That swap is why the label says copper chlorophyllin and not chlorophyll.
Made from a plant. What ends up in the capsule tracks the harvest, so batch testing and a stated marker matter more here than with a made molecule.
Alfalfa, nettle, silkworm droppings or other high-chlorophyll green biomass, dried and milled before extraction.
The pigment is pulled into an organic solvent such as acetone or ethanol along with the plant lipids.
Treatment with sodium or potassium hydroxide cleaves the phytol tail and the methyl ester, opening the molecule to water and producing chlorin carboxylates.
A copper salt, commonly copper sulfate, displaces the magnesium from the centre of the ring. Zinc or iron salts are used when those centres are wanted instead.
Residual solvent, plant lipids and free metal salts are washed out and the carboxylates are converted to their sodium salts.
Spectrophotometric assay of the chlorin content plus a check on free versus complexed metal, since uncomplexed copper is a specification concern.
Dried to a water-soluble powder, then encapsulated, tabletted or dissolved into a liquid concentrate.
Getting Chlorophyllin from food.
The whole-food sources on file. A supplement closes the gap, it does not replace dinner.
A gram-for-gram figure (how much of each you would eat to match a dose) will appear here once it is sourced and reviewed. This page will not print a number it cannot cite.
The forms it comes in.
The essence, in one line each.
- In adults with high dietary aflatoxin exposure, 100 mg chlorophyllin three times a day lowered a urinary marker of aflatoxin binding to DNA by about 55% over three months.Randomised trial. Egner et al., 2001 (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). PMID 11724948 ↗
- Pooling trials of sodium iron chlorophyllin tablets in adults with low iron status, haemoglobin levels rose more than with control.Systematic review. Zhang et al., 2022 (Frontiers in pharmacology). PMID 36408243 ↗
- Chlorophyllin supplementation modulated oxidative-stress and apoptosis markers in liver tissue of the rodent model used.Animal study. Patar et al., 2018 (BioFactors). PMID 30303271 ↗
- Chlorophyllin added to medicated and unmedicated swine diets was assessed for its impact on faecal Escherichia coli, a microbiological count rather than a health outcome.Animal study. Feye et al., 2024 (Animals). PMID 38998066 ↗
- Sodium copper chlorophyllin reduced the metabolic disruption seen after diesel particulate exposure in this mouse model.Animal study. Radford et al., 2025 (Nutrients). PMID 40005045 ↗
- Sodium copper chlorophyllin, ascorbic acid, and the two together were reported to blunt oxidative-stress markers after barium chloride exposure.Animal study. Benayad et al., 2025 (Molecules). PMID 40807405 ↗
- Sodium copper chlorophyllin was compared with a silkworm excrement concentrate extract on growth and metabolic measures. The report describes both feed additives without establishing either as a substitute for the other.Animal study. Yang et al., 2026 (Animals). PMID 41681436 ↗
- Calcium given with L-proline and sodium zinc chlorophyllin kept transepithelial calcium transport elevated in this non-human model.In vitro study. Upanan et al., 2026 (Cell Biochemistry and Function). PMID 42383518 ↗
- Iron chlorophyllin showed measurable bioaccessibility and Caco-2 cell uptake in a digestion model, which is an uptake measurement in cells and not an iron-status result in people.In vitro study. Zhong et al., 2024 (The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry). PMID 38969147 ↗
- A review of chlorophyll and its derivatives, chlorophyllin included, gathering the mechanistic and preclinical work on blood sugar regulation and noting that human data remain limited.Narrative review. Sartore et al., 2025 (Nutrients). PMID 40871679 ↗
These are the studies our verdict leans on, chosen from the 189 we read for Chlorophyllin. The full linked list is below.
The studies, linked.
8 sources behind our Chlorophyllin verdict: peer-reviewed studies and registered clinical trials. Every one links straight to PubMed, the journal, or ClinicalTrials.gov. Read them yourself.
- Clinical trialEvaluation of Iron Bioavailability From Iron Chlorophyllin in Young Women Using the Iron Stable Isotopic MethodClinicalTrials.gov ↗55 participants, Completed
- Clinical trialIron Absorption From Plant-Derived Heme Iron: An Experimental Study in Iron-Deficient Women (PHIA)ClinicalTrials.gov ↗45 participants, Completed
- Clinical trialEvaluating the Effect of Polyphenols on the Iron Bioavailability From Iron Chlorophyllin in Young Women Using the Iron Stable Isotopic MethodClinicalTrials.gov ↗40 participants, Completed
- Clinical trialA Phase III Trial to Assess the Effectiveness of NRF2 Activator (Oral Sodium-copper- Chlophyllin ) in Locally Advanced Cervical Cancer to Reduce Late Radiotherapy Toxicity. (CHOC-LATE Trial)ClinicalTrials.gov ↗Phase 3, 316 participants, Not yet recruiting
- Clinical trialA Prospective Phase 2 Study of Chlorophyllin for the Management of Brain Radionecrosis in Patients With Diffuse GliomaClinicalTrials.gov ↗Phase 2, 118 participants, Recruiting
- Clinical trialPhase II Randomized Study of Short Course Radiotherapy Based Total Neoadjuvant Therapy & Brachytherapy Boost With Or Without Chlorophyllin In Watch And Wait Suitable Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer (SCOTCH Study)ClinicalTrials.gov ↗Phase 2, 76 participants, Active not recruiting
- Clinical trialA Phase II Study to Evaluate Oral Chlorophyllin in Hemorrhagic Cystitis Secondary to Radiation Therapy for Pelvic MalignanciesClinicalTrials.gov ↗Phase 2, 24 participants, Unknown
- Clinical trialChlorophyllin as an Adjunct for Reducing Oral Mucositis in Myeloablative Total Body IrradiationClinicalTrials.gov ↗Phase 2, 17 participants, Recruiting
Evidence surfaced via Semantic Scholar (Allen Institute for AI) and ClinicalTrials.gov. Ranked by study type and citation weight, not cherry-picked.
Problems people have reported.
Read this carefully. These are 198 voluntary, unverified reactions reported to the FDA (openFDA). The number mostly reflects how popular Chlorophyllin is, not how risky it is. A report is not proof Chlorophyllin caused anything. It is a signal of what to watch for, nothing more.
Source: openFDA adverse-event reports. Voluntary reporting, not an incidence rate.
FDA Disclaimer: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This information is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult your healthcare provider before starting any supplement regimen.
