Our guts have never been more optimized—but have the scat chats gone too far?

In the winter of 2021, I had a minor surgery that required me to spend a week off my feet. To this day I don’t know if it was the lack of mobility or the prescription narcotic that ground my digestive system to a halt, but by the time I realized I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in seven days, why mattered less than how—that is, how to get it out. Which is how I found myself on my toilet, drenched in flop sweat, learning the phrase “impacted stool” from Google.

I don’t have children, but when my friends tell their birth stories I now nod along in tacit understanding—I know the horror of “There’s no way that will fit through there,” of “Oh god, what if this has to be surgically removed?,” of writhing around for a better angle. I chugged the water my husband, god bless him, handed me through the cracked door. I felt cold and also hot. When it was finally over, I broke out in full body shakes—I was pale, giddy, in shock. I looked back in proud relief. My marriage grew stronger for what we’d achieved together. When I meet others who’ve endured it, we find immediate brotherhood.

This experience, though humbling, wasn’t totally out of the ordinary for me. I’m a slow-motility girlie—I pack prunes and Smooth Move tea on trips; for years, I bought a fiber cereal hilariously called Kashi GO; I once had an Uber Eats guy deliver me a Fleet enema. My best friend likes to remind me of a night we spent at the emergency room trying to diagnose mysterious stomach cramps I thought were appendicitis but turned out to be garden- variety constipation. I’ve had to get comfortable discussing the scatological with clinicians, pharmacists, roommates I’ve shared bathrooms with. But barring the occasional nod from my fellow comrades in what one doctor called “sluggish digestion,” I’ve mostly suffered these slings and arrows solo—that is, until recently.

One day, it seems, the internet woke up and chose BMs, and suddenly the hottest girl you know is posting about scat. Now you have to go out of your way to not eat fiber—prebiotic supplements are in our soda, our candy bars, our cold foam. The beverage case is dominated by the likes of Olipop and Poppi and Culture Pop, all offering varying degrees of digestive assistance. The other day, I saw a smoothie blend in the freezer aisle called “Fiber Supremacy,” and earlier this year, Frito-Lay launched a fiber-packed version of both SunChips and Smartfood popcorn. Kraft is making a purgative macaroni and cheese that boasts six grams of fiber per serving (or 15 grams if you eat the whole box—which is, let’s be honest, how most people consume Easy Mac). Outside the retail space, home cooks are finding ways to fit chia and flax into not just their breakfasts but their meat loaf. They’re pureeing beans into sauces and veggies into puddings and cakes. Literal doctors are posting their #fibermaxxing menus to TikTok. And while this may sound like just another wave on the ocean of content we surf daily, it gets…weirder.

I’ve covered the ingestion of sustenance extensively in my 20 years of food writing; the passing of it, less so. We are biologically inclined to separate food talk from waste talk—unless you’re a new parent, the human body recoils from the plate at the mere mention of excreta. As such, there’s a glaring lacuna in our field when it comes to the business end of our alimentary canal. But as #fibermaxxing has given way to #poopmaxxing, culinary talk is shifting from what goes in to how easily it comes out. I recently watched a girl on TikTok showing off her “PoopMaxxer purse” in which she carries Dude Wipes, after-poo spray, toilet seat covers, extra TP, instant oatmeal packets, and fiber gummies because, she says, “in addition to a poopy butt I also have a sweet tooth.” She signs off the video with “Goodbye poopies,” because, I guess, why not.

What is going on here? Some have theorized this is just the latest way to get skinny—Ozempic is expensive, but Poppi is cheap. It’s hardly a coincidence that this trend comes on the heels of GLP-1 mania and #proteinmaxxing, two dietary fads known to cause constipation. “They’re all getting colonics!” a friend recently exclaimed to me in a breathless tone of conspiracy-crazed revelation, of the ultrathin celebrities in our newsfeeds.

Others attribute the fixation to the sudden rise in colorectal cancer rates among young people—and given how hard it can be to access and afford health care in the United States, who could blame us for taking our well-being into our own hands? This may also be why we’re more obsessed with lifestyle optimization than ever before—I know some couples who rarely eat together, because of how personalized each of their diets have become. We have more access to dietary research and more ways to track health data than at any time in human history, prompting many to turn their bodies into full-blown science experiments.

Whatever the reason, it’s now de rigueur to be regular. What was once my personal bête noire is the obsession of wellness queens everywhere, who are FODMAPing, fibermaxxing, and colon cleansing their way toward slenderness, Bethlehem, nirvana. But what becomes of life’s simple pleasures (sharing a meal, eating someone else’s cooking) when we value function over all else? Sure, we have a whole supermarket’s worth of ways to grease the gears now—but is our fiber fixation maybe missing the point?

I grew up in the early aughts, an era governed by the food rules of women’s magazines. They told us to suck in our stomachs, buy skim milk, avoid egg yolks, skip meals—or else eat lots of small ones to boost metabolism—and mangle a sandwich roll by digging out the middle. In my efforts to move on from this hellscape, I learned to seek out whole foods, swapping out this noxious morality for what seemed like a more righteous one. I thought Michael Pollan had single-handedly saved me from a lifetime of disordered eating when he published In Defense of Food, dispensing his now legendary dietary advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

One day, it seems, the internet woke up and chose BMs, and suddenly the hottest girl you know is posting about scat.

And for a while, this worked. I went to the farmers’ market, bought local dairy, had my first good tomato. I made kombucha and sourdough bread and buckwheat brownies. Heck, I became a food writer. By embracing Pollan’s edict, I saw how food could be a paradise of unlimited possibility instead of a restrictive environment of guilt. I learned to approach food with curiosity instead of fear. I still sucked in my stomach out of vanity and believed in the virtue of frequent light snacking, but I was eating pretty much whatever I wanted (with the exception of my fiber cereal), and feeling healthier for it.

The body changes, though—it always does—and one day I woke up in my late 30s on various meds for migraine and anxiety and allergies that all listed constipation as a symptom, bloat bulging out the zipper of my high-waisted jeans. My BMs were fickler than ever and, for the first time in over a decade, I was feeling the urge to diet. Instead, I went to my GP, who recommended fruits, veggies, and grains—foods I was already consuming en masse, thanks to Mikey P. So I took psyllium. I got acupuncture. I went to a GI doctor who prescribed a weapons-grade laxative. I Googled “CBT for IBS” and tried meditation, in case this was all simply a matter of unclenching. I started taking 800 milligrams of magnesium per day and carrying Senna pills in my purse. The bloat only seemed to be getting worse. One friend suggested I just buy bigger jeans.

All of this is to say, the robots weren’t my first choice.

A large language model may seem no better than a teen magazine when it comes to dispensing medical advice—both are prone to errors and hallucinations, both seem just as likely to propagate myths and mislead the uninformed. But when I finally caved and told ChatGPT everything I put in my body on a daily basis (and more details about what comes out than I thought I’d ever commit to digital memory), I was forced to accept the ways a robot may—at times—be better equipped to see the whole picture than an American doctor frenzying to get you out of their office in 15 minutes.

I went to the robot expecting gold stars for my diet. I told it about all my green smoothies, my kale and cabbage and kimchi, my dried fruits and legumes. I told it that I try to eat healthy but I live in the restaurant capital of America and am likely to scarf an emergency pizza slice or coffee shop pastry every now and then. I told it that this dietary freedom was an important part of not just my job but my recovery from growing up millennial in Britney Spears’s America. I told it that I was allergic to restrictive dietary fads. Please, I begged it, by way of conclusion, just don’t tell me it’s FODMAPs.

The robot didn’t tell me to eat more vegetables and whole grains, because it knew I was already eating them. It didn’t tell me to buy bigger pants, because it knew I tended toward body dysmorphia. What it did say was this: You (and potentially your entire peer group) are seriously overdoing it. Too many vegetables and whole grains can put you in a world of pain. Too many colonics can cause constipation. Too much sucking in can cause bloating. Too many small meals can actually slow digestion, because of something called the migrating motor complex—a series of escalating waves of intestinal contractions that move food through your body, and don’t start up until at least an hour after eating. “And,” the robot added, with a note of what felt like genuine regret, “I hate to say this, but it’s at least a little bit FODMAPs.”

“FODMAP” is an annoying acronym for a pretty basic (but still annoying) concept—essentially highly fermentable short-chain carbohydrates that cause gas, bloating, cramping, diarrhea, and constipation in those with sensitive systems. Apples contain FODMAPs. So do beans, alliums, dried fruits, and anything in the Brassica family. A little bit is okay, but stacking them at every meal, all day long, can backfire royally. Which is exactly what I, in my gold-star-seeking diet, had been doing for years.

This news hit me like an epiphany, like a midlife crisis, like a new Michael Pollan book. It felt very big-if-true, so I sought out some humans to corroborate.

“People can definitely consume too much fiber,” says Kate Sweeney, a registered dietitian and nutritional scientist who focuses on gastrointestinal distress and disordered eating. With a long career at institutions like Tufts University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Sweeney has seen it all—and she did not hesitate to tell me that “there is no such thing as perfectly optimized digestion.”

The microbial life that exists in our guts is, at its core, grounded in rot, and in this ecosystem, purity and perfection are fantasies. We talk a lot about keeping our guts “clean,” but our guts are the primary site of spoilage in our bodies—they have no business being clean. “Your colon contains stool, mucus, and trillions of beneficial microorganisms that play important roles in digestion and overall health,” says Liz Sauter, a registered dietitian and nutritionist at Boston University’s Sargent Choice Nutrition Center. “It is not necessarily supposed to be sterile.” Sweeney corroborated this, also adding that, “Bloating does not always mean something is wrong or needs to be fixed.”

Yet fix it is what we seem determined to do, even if it means putting beans in our brownies or carrying a freaky purse. Why? Because ours is an optimizing species. We evolve through a persistent bent toward perfection—one that becomes spectacularly self-destructive if left unchecked. Sweeney says as many as 90 percent of cases that come to her show some overlap between a desire for gut optimization and disordered patterns of control. At its worst, this can manifest as orthorexia, defined by the National Institutes of Health as “an obsessive focus on healthy eating.” There’s a fine line between management and pathology—one we often don’t recognize until we’ve passed it. “Concern becomes concerning when food rules start to create anxiety or rigidity,” says Sauter, “or interfere with relationships, social experiences, and quality of life.”

While you can’t fault us for trying to control something amid the fog of genuine instability that plagues our modern world, our bodies are not machines, and they can’t be automated. We have to stay adaptive, responsive, flexible. And if that sounds like the opposite of a biohacked diet, that’s because it is.

The microbial life that exists in our guts is, at its core, grounded in rot, and in this ecosystem, purity and perfection are fantasies.

Sweeney teaches clients to accept a certain level of risk—for example, knowing that apples make you bloat, that sometimes you may need to eat them anyway if you’re hungry and that’s what you have, and that you can accept the discomfort if you remember nothing is actually wrong with you. (Likewise, emergency croissants.) “We can certainly change things that improve our gut,” she says, “but we also need to work on accepting what we cannot change.”

Since talking to the robot, I’ve been pretty regular. I’m no longer Kashi’s number-one customer and I haven’t had prunes in ages, but I drink a lot of water and I have three square meals a day. I try not to snack too much. For the most part, I eat what I have, what’s put in front of me. I know what FODMAPs are, but I don’t think about them very much. Most days, my pants fit. When they don’t, I try to remember that bloating is a part of digestion, and digestion is part of being alive. And in an age of AI, maybe that’s not a bad thing to be reminded of—that we are, at the end of the day, animals, with fallible, variable, reactive bodies.

What sets our species apart is not only our knack for perfectionism and optimization, but for sensory pleasure and communion. When I pushed Sweeney to paint a picture of what “optimized” eating would look like, she said staying present and eating with others. “Connection through food is simple and yet really does help,” she said. Sauter quoted esteemed eating disorder specialist Jessica Setnick: “When nutrition is positive, it expands your horizons and accentuates the joy in life. When [it’s] pathological, it isolates you.”

To eat is to be curious—to explore, transform, ferment, decay. So eat what you have. Bloat a little sometimes. Your gut isn’t clean, and it’s not supposed to be, so let it be dirty. Don’t overcomplicate one of life’s purest pleasures out of anxiety over the things you can’t control. Wellness culture can help us change our less salubrious habits, but it cannot give us immortality. There’s no cure for our predicament—we all have to shuffle off this mortal coil someday. And the harder we clench onto the good life, the sooner it will slip away.