Poop-maxxing: How a 30-year-old chart became a gut health trend

A clinical tool born in a Bristol gastroenterology ward thirty years ago — a simple seven-category chart meant to give doctors and patients a shared vocabulary for digestive health — has migrated from medical textbooks into the feeds and fixations of a generation hungry for measurable wellness. The movement, called poop-maxxing, reflects something older than social media: the human desire to find order, progress, and control in the most intimate corners of bodily life. What Ken Lewis designed as a diagnostic aid has become, improbably, a mirror for contemporary health culture's deepest appetit