In late 2025, a new wellness trend centred on “fibremaxxing” emerged on social media, with creators promoting fibre‑rich plant-based foods such as chia seeds, red kidney beans, and chickpeas as the new super healthy foods of everyday eating. Posts with hashtags celebrating this shift have reached more than 150 million views on TikTok, reflecting a sharp contrast with the previous year’s fixation on protein as the supposedly superior nutrient for fitness.
Dietitian Kate Hilton said to the BBC that fibre has often been sidelined, and has historically been seen as an “unsexy nutrient” connected mainly to digestion and flatulence, rather than to strength and exercise. Nutritionist Kristen Stavridis welcomed the new attention, saying, “When I first saw all the posts on fibre, I was pretty thrilled. It feels like the messages around gut health are finally getting through to people…The carbohydrates that we consume tend to not be things like whole grains and we have a lot more of a reliance on things like meats to get our proteins, rather than beans or vegetarian sources.”
Kevin Whelan, professor of Dietetics at King’s College London, has highlighted the wider health implications of fibre‑rich plant diets, stating, “People who have a higher fibre intake, external will live longer, have less cardiovascular disease, fewer cancers and are at a lower risk of conditions like diabetes.”
Birmingham resident Yeshe Sander, who grew up encouraged to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables but moved towards ultra‑processed, low‑fibre foods in her teens and student years, said, “I wanted nothing to do with healthy food. As a teenager, I would eat huge amounts of chocolate, doughnuts, cookies…It was only when I got a bit older, in my early 20s, that I thought maybe they were onto something.”
A 2025 study, titled “Gut microbiome signatures of vegan, vegetarian and omnivore diets and associated health outcomes across 21,561 individuals,” showed that a vegan diet can transform people’s gut microbiome in a more positive way than a vegetarian or a meat-eating diet, and fibre is probably the reason. At the NUTRITION 2025 conference, scientists from the Illinois Institute of Technology unveiled new research spotlighting the health benefits of daily chickpea and black bean consumption for people with prediabetes. The 12-week study, involving 72 adults, compared the effects of consuming one cup per day of chickpeas, black beans, or rice.
