These days, it’s hard to step foot in a grocery store without being confronted with a slew of protein-enhanced products. But in the wake of the carnivore diet and endless cottage-cheese recipes, a new macro is starting to get more airtime. “Respectfully, you should be trying harder to hit your fiber target, not your protein target,” warned one viral TikTok earlier this year. Soon, people on the app were talking about “fibermaxxing,” and influencers started gushing about the benefits of chia-seed pudding and sharing tips to get 50 grams of fiber a day. Unlike protein, fiber is the macronutrient the vast majority of Americans actually don’t eat enough of. Women generally need about 25 grams a day, but most of us eat around half that much. TikTok says prioritizing fiber will keep you full longer, snatch your waist, and reduce your risk of colon cancer.

For Jeni Britton, fiber helped her “get to a place in my life where I could ask for a divorce.” Five years ago, the company she founded, Jeni’s Ice Cream, was her whole life. She’d been running the business for more than 15 years, but increasingly, she was feeling lost and exhausted. She started going for long walks, hiking near the Appalachian Mountains outside of her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and eating tons of blueberries. “Like, a quart a day,” she says. She quickly noticed that she felt better than usual — radically better. She suddenly had more energy; for the first time in her life, she started running in the woods. She dropped 20 pounds without much effort. Her skin looked better, her face less puffy. “Friends told me I was reverse aging,” says Britton, who is 52. “I just started to feel alive again,” she says. Her husband — with whom she shares two teenage children — is a “wonderful human being,” but they’d grown apart over the years. Eating more fiber helped her feel like herself again, and she realized it was time to make some big changes.

The way Britton tells it, she accidentally stumbled on the secret to health and well-being. Nourishing her gut microbiome with plants helped her think more clearly. Eating more fiber would help America, “as a country,” restore its sense of hope, she says. “I know it almost starts to sound woo-woo or like a miracle drug, but …” she pauses, “it kind of is.” She decided it was time to step away from her career in ice cream and leave Ohio for New York. In January, she launched Floura, a line of fruit bars in flavors like “blueberry matcha” and “mango cardamom” that promise half your daily fiber. The first batch sold out in two days.

The bars are made from “upcycled fruit” — leftover trimmings from a produce-processing plant in New Jersey that supplies fresh-cut fruit for stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Each bar contains 12 different plants, including fermented watermelon rinds, apple paste (made from the cores left over from bags of Mott’s sliced apples, “like the ones they use in Happy Meals,” Britton says), almonds, puffed quinoa, and chicory root. As far as bars go, they actually taste pretty good — somewhere between a fruit leather and the inside of a Fig Newton.

When I visit Britton’s apartment, which she’s subletting from a friend on the Lower East Side, she starts cutting up an Asian pear and loading the pieces into a small blue plastic chopper. “I dated a guy in Berlin who turned me on to this little chopper, and now I use it all the time,” she says. Most days, her first meal of the day is a bowl of bircher muesli, which she makes with sheep’s-milk yogurt mixed with oats, flax, chia seeds, grated apples and pears, walnuts, pepitas, coconut, cardamom, and a few slices of underripe banana (“When it’s still a little green, it has more fiber,” she says). It’s a recipe she created with her gut microbiome in mind. “I went on ChatGPT and I asked it to tell me every single fiber that I’m using, and which specific microbes it’s feeding, because there are so many different ones, and they can affect your brain activity, or energy, hormones, skin … even things like optimism and hope.” For optimal gut health, she tries to eat 30 different plants a week.

“I’m not a health nut by any means,” Britton says. “I don’t work out. I don’t go to the gym.” She’s skeptical of supplements, though she recently started taking vitamin D after “reading some studies.” She doesn’t track macros, and she still eats a lot of ice cream — her favorite Jeni’s flavor is Buttercream Birthday Cake. But she’s convinced that fiber deficiency is the root of many of our problems. “Our mission is really to reverse chronic illnesses,” she says. Though she thinks MAHA’s focus on food dyes is misguided, she agrees that a reckoning with the “industrial food system” is long overdue. Floura’s ads play up the fact that they’re seed-oil free. “There’s so much science that’s already out there,” she says, before explaining that she thinks that her microbiome being out of balance could have caused her children’s autism. Really? I ask. “I was working too much, eating too much sugar,” she says. “I do think there was something …” she trails off. “I don’t know. It could also be genetic.” (While some studies have found that eating a diet high in fruits, vegetables, fish, nuts, and whole grains in pregnancy is associated with a lower risk of autism spectrum disorders, there is no definitive evidence that a mother’s diet causes autism, which experts believe is typically the result of a complex mix of genetic and environmental factors.)

When many people think of fiber, they think of Metamucil, which, as a gloopy powder mixed with water to help keep you regular, is probably the most unsexy supplement on the market. Britton says that Gen Z doesn’t have the same baggage. While she initially assumed Floura’s customer base would be the menopause crowd, so far, its fans have skewed younger. From talking with her 18-year-old daughter, Britton has gleaned that today’s young people are “obsessed with bloating and pooping.” She predicts that grocery stores will soon be full of fiber-enhanced products, like Olipop and a “daily fiber veggie pouch” known as Liquid Salad. “All the VCs are very interested,” she says. “It’s definitely taking off.”

The hype around fiber sometimes seems too good to be true — but the dietitians I spoke with generally agreed that, if you haven’t been eating enough, adding more plants to your diet will help you feel better. “I kind of love that fiber hired protein’s PR team,” says Clara Nosek, a registered dietitian-nutritionist who runs the Instagram account @yourdietianbff. In addition to making it easier to poop, fiber also slows down digestion of carbs, helping to regulate blood sugar, Nosek says. It can help lower cholesterol, and eating enough really can reduce your risk of colorectal cancer. There’s some truth to the idea that eating more fiber can help with cravings and food noise, too. “A really big benefit of fiber is increasing satiety and fullness,” says Abbey Roberts, a registered dietitian. “It can help so we’re not feeling like we’re constantly looking for the next thing to eat, and always feeling the need to snack, which can happen with a low-fiber diet.”

But there’s a reason the majority of us struggle to get enough fiber. Eating a diet that’s high in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains requires time and money, and at $33 for a box of ten, Floura bars aren’t cheap. There’s also no getting around the fact that it’s a processed food. Britton pushes back on this: “There’s no ultraprocessed anything in Floura. We’re sticklers on that,” she says. “Everything in this is made the way your great-great-great-grandmother would have made it.”

When I ask Britton if she eats a Floura bar every day, she shakes her head. “I eat this,” she says, gesturing to her muesli. “I get enough fiber. But I tell everybody, ‘If you can’t get enough fiber, eat a Floura bar.’”

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