The Fibre Fad Keeps On Moving
For years, Ariel Pastore-Sebring, a thirty-one-year-old recipe developer and comedian in Portland, Oregon, has been keeping notes for a potential cookbook. One idea was a chapter of recipes inspired, in part, by her time running track at the University of Pittsburgh. “I was very conscious of what I was putting in my body,” she told me recently, especially when it came to finding the right balance of simple carbohydrates and fibre. “Runners are pretty big on clearing out before a race.” On social media, her posts skew aspirational, often showcasing the art of the dinner party: gingham tablecloths set with fresh flowers, kitschy cocktail glasses, and jewel-toned, vegetable-strewn platters. When she decided to experiment with high-fibre recipes on Instagram and TikTok, she opted for candor. In a video featuring roasted sweet potatoes with sautéed greens and dressed lentils, she spoke into a roll of toilet paper as if it were a microphone. “Welcome to Blow Outz,” she announced, in the self-consciously goofy tone of a game-show host, “a new series of recipes to knock a few things loose.”
To Pastore-Sebring’s shock, the video went viral. She added more episodes—a quinoa-apple salad with walnuts, chopped kale, and radicchio; a spin on som tum, the Thai shredded-papaya salad; and the bluntly named Poop Smoothie (nicknamed the Poothie by some fans), made from spinach, chia seeds, oats, and peanut butter—and soon had seventy thousand new followers. She had stumbled into a trend known as “fibremaxxing.” “The craziest part is that people feel like they can share with me what’s going on with their bowel movements,” she said. “I’ve been getting D.M.s from people, like, telling me about their poops, or saying, ‘Hey, this really helped me.’ ”
I first sensed that fibre could be the new protein—a macronutrient that captures the Zeitgeist—last year, when Jeni Britton, the founder of the upscale brand Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, débuted a line of dehydrated-fruit bars called Floura. Made largely from cores and rinds, the bars were marketed as environmentally conscientious, but they were also meant to address a phenomenon that Britton calls the “fibre gap.” Less than ten per cent of Americans consume the daily recommended amount of dietary fibre, also known as roughage—the parts of plants that scrub through the digestive tract instead of being absorbed. (A single Floura bar contains about half the daily suggested intake.) Around the same time, I went out with three friends, all mothers in their early forties, for a monthly dinner that we jokingly call Women’s Group. One of them announced, conspiratorially, that another friend’s holistic physician had a maxim for the premenopausal: six prunes a day.
Compared with protein, which lends itself to narratives of growth—more grams, more gains—fibre is a bit of a hard sell, likelier to be espoused by women in sensible shoes than by fitness junkies on Twitch. But the benefits of eating a high-fibre diet are arguably more significant. Gastroenterologists and influencers alike are eager to explain that fibre affects health beyond “gut motility,” formerly known as shitting: it slows digestion, which can make you feel full for longer and help manage blood sugar and body weight, and has been shown to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. Fibre can also be a prebiotic, feeding the trillions of gastrointestinal bacteria that support our immune and nervous systems. If proteinmaxxing conjures the rapacious spirit of an HGTV makeover show, fibremaxxing is like a PBS special about restoring a Victorian home.
Britton became a zealot for fibre during the pandemic, not long after she’d decided to step away from the day-to-day operations of her ice-cream business. Stuck at home, in Ohio, “I just didn’t know who I was at all, so I went to the forest,” she told me. “I was walking ten miles a day, wandering the earth like Demeter looking for Persephone.” She also began to eat fresh blueberries by the pint. At first, she wondered if she was overdoing it—wasn’t fruit high in sugar?—but after a few months she’d lost weight and felt better than she had in years, a transformation that also helped her realize that she wanted a divorce. After educating herself on nutrition, Britton concluded that it was the fibre, stupid—and that she should try harvesting it from the parts of fruit that an ice-cream company would typically discard.
The bars, which come in flavors like mango cardamom and brambleberry lavender, are packaged in luxe, color-blocked matte wrappers. Each is a chewy, dark-brown puck, slightly tacky to the touch. Most are speckled with bits of roasted almond; all taste predominantly of indeterminate dried fruit. When I asked Britton how she planned to overcome fibre’s less palatable associations, she reached for dreamier imagery: you could think of cultivating your gut microbiome as “feeding your Eden,” she said. “I think people are going to start to think of their insides as, like, this wilderness place that I can go, and it’s where my imagination lives, and my peace and my safety.” Laughing, she added, “Versus the idea of, just, poop.”
In the past quarter century, food culture has become ever more personal and confessional; perhaps the inevitable conclusion was that it would encompass, well, its inevitable conclusion. Like so many trends, this one was pioneered by gay men: one of the early luminaries of FibreTok was a sex educator and amateur chef named Alex Hall, who posts recipes on an account called The Bottom’s Digest. I admit to feeling some relief around the breaking of this taboo—after all, everyone poops, and we might as well do it better. In France, a healthy bowel movement might serve as evidence of aesthetic finesse: according to at least one Reddit thread, to say “j’ai fait un perfect” is to brag about a stool so clean that it requires little to no toilet paper.
As it turns out, the appeal of fibre cuts across marketing idioms, whether it’s Pastore-Sebring’s bawdy millennial relatability, Britton’s candy-colored promise of nirvana, or the biohacking grindset embodied by the thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur Alan Lin. In 2025, Lin, a self-described “fibre daddy,” released a product called Liquid Salad, a thin green purée of apple, cucumber, kale, and celery, enhanced with potent prebiotics such as chicory-root inulin and chia seeds. It comes in the sort of plastic pouch that is often used for baby food, and it tastes, to me, like a pleasantly vegetal applesauce with a powerfully unpleasant aftertaste of stevia. (A version sweetened only with fruit juice is forthcoming.)
Lin got the idea for Liquid Salad on a trip he took to Japan, in 2024. He realized that the traditional Japanese diet, which is heavy in fibre, was optimal for digestion, and he marvelled at the abundance of nutritional-supplement pouches he saw at convenience stores. Back home in Seal Beach, California, he set out to make a high-fibre diet “extremely convenient for lazy Americans.” He earned a following, in part, with an absurd and tangentially related gimmick: a series of videos in which he wolfs down boiled eggs and other sulfuric foods in order to generate maximally offensive farts. “Every influencer is in Lululemon, and so fucking boring,” he told me recently. “I’m, like, Can’t you make it entertaining and fun?”
We’d met, ostensibly for lunch, at the Crema Café, a Seal Beach bakery known for its sandwiches and pastries. But when it came time to order, Lin, who wore a slim pair of Saint Laurent sunglasses and a mesh tank top that showed off his biceps, asked for only an almond-milk latte, unsweetened. He tries to avoid carbs, he explained, focussing mostly on protein and on fibre—the best macro for unblocking, as it were, one’s potential. “I wake up so excited,” he told me. “I take a huge dump every morning, and then I crush the MacBook for thirteen hours every day. This is, like, the most exciting thing in the world to me.” ♦