Consumer diagnostics · Chemical exposure
Million Marker
A mail in urine test that reports a person’s exposure to bisphenols, phthalates, parabens and oxybenzone. Sold direct to consumers since 2019, carried by nine NIH small business awards, and pushed into the mainstream by a Netflix documentary in March 2026.
The test her doctor did not have
Jenna Hua is a registered dietitian with a doctorate in environmental health sciences from UC Berkeley and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford Medicine. She ate well, exercised, bought organic. Then came the fertility struggles, and four late term miscarriages. She asked her obstetrician for a test for the industrial chemicals she had spent a decade studying. The answer was no.
“When I went to my OBGYN to ask for a toxic chemical test, I was told the only test available was a test for heavy metals,” she told Authority Magazine in 2021.
That gap is real. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has measured bisphenols and phthalates in Americans for decades through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. But CDC says those analyses “are not readily available in hospitals or most commercial clinical laboratories,” and that it does not test individual patients. The population gets measured. The person does not.
Million Marker was built to fill that space. Accepted into Y Combinator in the summer of 2019, it ships a cup, a return label and an exposure journal. The customer collects a first morning void, mails it back, and gets a report.
Thirteen metabolites, and what they mean
The panel is narrow and deliberate. Three bisphenols, five phthalate metabolites, four parabens, and oxybenzone, the sunscreen filter. These chemicals have half lives measured in hours, which is the design logic: they clear fast, so a habit change shows up in the next sample.
The report ranks a customer against NHANES levels and against other Million Marker users, in bands the company calls low, medium, high and very high. That framing is the useful part and the hard part at once. It answers whether a person is unusual, a question the data can support. It does not answer whether a person is harmed, which is what most people are actually asking.
CDC is unambiguous on the difference. “The measurement of an environmental chemical in a person’s blood or urine does not mean, by itself, that the chemical causes disease.” For lead, health thresholds are well defined. For most of what Million Marker measures, they are not.
Christos Symeonides, a pediatrician at the Minderoo Foundation, put the measurement problem to TIME in 2024: “If you have a sufficiently sensitive test, you will find these chemicals in everyone.”
The scientists around it
Hua is chief executive. Jo Rochester, an endocrine disruption researcher, is chief scientific officer and first author on most of the peer reviewed output. The advisory bench is unusually credentialed for a consumer brand: Brenda Eskenazi of UC Berkeley, and Roy Gerona, who directs the UCSF Clinical Toxicology and Environmental Biomonitoring Lab.
The Gerona connection is the one thread the record does not close. That laboratory’s own news page describes Million Marker as “the laboratory’s start-up collaborator.” The company’s shop page advertises a CLIA certified lab. But in the peer reviewed papers the analyst is never named. The 2024 Nevada study says samples went to “a third-party analytical laboratory.” The 2024 trial protocol says only that “A third party, internationally well-known state-of-the-art laboratory is in contract with MM to perform the sample analysis.” No CLIA certificate number appears in any source found, and the test is not sold in New York, Rhode Island, Maryland or New Jersey.
From a Nevada pilot to a Netflix release
The commercial story and the research story have run together from the start. In 2021 the company partnered with the Healthy Nevada Project at Renown Health. In May 2022 NIEHS funded a Phase I award at $218,790, which became a Phase II worth more than a million dollars a year. Two peer reviewed papers came out of that cohort.
Then came March 16, 2026. Netflix released The Plastic Detox, directed by Louis Psihoyos and Josh Murphy, following couples with unexplained infertility through a three month plastic reduction program guided by epidemiologist Shanna Swan. The same day, the underlying pilot appeared in the journal Toxics, first authored by Hua. Million Marker now sells the test as the one from the film, at $399, with a $999 program around it.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Registered studies | Six interventional studies name Million Marker Wellness, Inc. as sponsor. Enrollment: 1,074 (NCT06450951), 434 (NCT05780047), 226, 183 for PFAS, and 151. NCT07703046, on sperm, has an estimated start of June 15, 2026. | Public record |
| Federal funding | Nine NIH awards totaling $4,780,117 for fiscal years 2022 to 2026, from NIEHS, NIMHD and NHLBI, with Jenna Hua as principal investigator on all nine. | Public record |
| Nevada result | In the 2024 study, monobutyl phthalate fell among the 48 people with valid urine tests before and after the intervention, p less than 0.001. Readiness to change rose in women and fell in men. | Public record |
| Detection limits | In that same cohort, “for several biomarkers (MEHP, MEHHP, BPA, BPF, BPS, EPB, BUP, and OBZ), fewer than 25% of participants had concentrations above the LOD” and those biomarkers were dropped. Seventeen participants lost specific gravity values to a laboratory error. | Public record |
| The Netflix pilot | Toxics, March 16, 2026. Six couples enrolled, five completed, no control group. The authors write that “Given the study’s small sample size and absence of a control group, the findings should be interpreted with appropriate caution.” Four of eight co-authors are Million Marker employees, disclosed. | Public record |
| Who runs the assay | Never named in any paper or on the site. Method is liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry with isotopically labeled internal standards and duplicate injections. No CLIA certificate number published. | Not found |
| Clinical proof claim | The homepage calls the product “The only clinically-proven program for reducing toxin exposure on the market.” The company’s own pilot paper asks readers to interpret its findings with caution. | Claim exceeds record |
| Independent read | Linda Kahn of NYU told TODAY that no causal conclusion can be drawn from the pilot. Sarah Hougen Poggi, a physician, wrote in Slate that the film is an infomercial and that the paper ran in an MDPI journal. | Independent |
Read plainly: a real research operation with unusually thin commercial disclosure. Nearly $4.8 million of federal money, six registered studies and a peer reviewed trail put Million Marker far ahead of most consumer wellness testing. What is not established is the step the marketing makes, that one number set against a national percentile tells a customer something actionable about their own health. The strongest published result is behavior change plus one reliable drop in one phthalate metabolite among 48 people.
What to watch
- NCT07703046, the sperm study, estimated to start June 15, 2026 with 100 participants. The first built around a hard clinical endpoint.
- Whether the analytical laboratory is ever named and its CLIA certificate published. Every interpretive claim rests on that assay.
- Whether Swan’s larger NIH funded trial is awarded. A controlled version of the pilot is the study that would settle the question.
- Availability in the four states where the test is not sold, which would signal a licensed clinical laboratory behind it.
In their words
“When I went to my OBGYN to ask for a toxic chemical test, I was told the only test available was a test for heavy metals.”
Jenna Hua, founder and CEO, Authority Magazine, 2021 · Interview
“If you test women, they tend to have a very high exposure because they use so many products,”
Jenna Hua, in TIME, 2024 · Independent
“BPA particularly, as well as phthalates, are found in over 90% of individuals tested,”
Jenna Hua, in TIME, 2024 · Independent
“If you have a sufficiently sensitive test, you will find these chemicals in everyone,”
Christos Symeonides, Minderoo Foundation, in TIME, 2024 · Independent
“The measurement of an environmental chemical in a person’s blood or urine does not mean, by itself, that the chemical causes disease.”
CDC, National Exposure Report, interpretation guidance · Public record
“This is a really intriguing pilot study,”
Linda Kahn, PhD, epidemiologist, NYU, to TODAY, 2026 · Independent
“But presence does not equal harm, and association does not equal causation”
Sarah Hougen Poggi, MD, in Slate, 2026 · Independent
“I feel it’s a basic human right of every person to have a child if they choose to,”
Shanna Swan, pilot co-author, to The Guardian, 2026 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov, six registrations
- Public recordNIH RePORTER, nine awards
- Public recordInterpretation of the Data
- Public recordNational Exposure Report FAQ, Biomonitoring Program, NHANES
- Public recordEnvironmental Chemical Exposure Report-Back in Northern Nevada
- Public recordREED study protocol
- Public recordDaily-Use Products and Urinary Biomarkers of EDCs
- Public recordTargeting Plastic Exposure in Infertile Couples
- IndependentA Test Told Me I’m Basically Made of Plastic
- IndependentA Netflix Documentary Has a Bizarre Idea About How to Get Pregnant
- IndependentCouples Ditched Plastic to Boost Fertility
- IndependentThe couples trying to get pregnant by removing plastics
- IndependentThe Plastic Detox documentary examines plastic products and fertility
- IndependentLifestyle changes may reduce exposure to toxic plastic chemicals
- IndependentThe science behind The Plastic Detox
- InterviewDr Jenna Hua’s Big Idea That Might Change The World
- IndependentLaboratory news page
- CompanyHomepage, shop, team page and FAQ
- CompanyCompany listing, Summer 2019 batch
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
