In The Fruit Cure, an athlete desperate for health falls into a fad

In 2010, when Jacqueline Alnes was in her second semester as a Division I collegiate cross-country runner, she began to experience inexplicable neurological episodes. Her symptoms began after what her university’s team physician called a bout of bronchitis; he prescribed antibiotics. Shortly after taking her first dose, she collapsed. At first, the doctor chalked up her fainting spell to an allergic reaction. But weeks later, Alnes was still experiencing periods of blurred vision, vertigo and fainting; her head “felt full of some atmospheric pressure” and “would start rocking back and forth on its own, like an unwilling marionette.” The team doctor referred her to a neurologist, who suggested that she had vestibular neuronitis, inflammation of an inner ear nerve, and assured her that her symptoms would resolve within weeks.

Instead, as Alnes continued to push herself to log daily miles and compete at track meets, her episodes grew more serious — she began losing control over her speech and blacking out. Now the neurologist thought she might be having complex partial seizures, but an electroencephalogram didn’t show seizure activity. Still symptomatic and lacking a diagnosis when she returned to school as a sophomore, Alnes was forced to quit the cross-country team.

This might sound like the start to a familiar kind of illness narrative, one in which a patient hunts down an elusive diagnosis in a disbelieving medical system. But while Alnes’s “The Fruit Cure” does delve into these aspects of the patient experience, that is in service of a wider exploration of the allure that alternative-wellness practices can hold when Western medicine cannot easily address a body’s failures. In 2012, when Alnes was a college junior, the enticement came in the form of a website called 30 Bananas a Day, which touted a raw vegan diet based almost entirely on fruit, proclaiming that it could cure just about every ailment.

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She stumbled onto the site during a time when she was so symptomatic that she had to rely on a roommate to push her around in a wheelchair. Bewildered by her body, Alnes turned to the internet. After exhausting WebMD, she found Harley Johnstone (a.k.a. Durianrider) and Leanne Ratcliffe (a.k.a. Freelee the Banana Girl) — Australian fruitarians whose website and accompanying YouTube channels racked up hundreds of thousands of followers. Like Alnes, many who were drawn to 30 Bananas a Day “were trying to rid themselves of illnesses that had gone undiagnosed for years,” she writes. Durianrider and Freelee promised a concrete cure: a raw diet also known as 80/10/10, in which people get 80 percent of their daily calories from carbs (mostly fruit) and less than 10 percent from protein and from fat. But as “The Fruit Cure” attests, via a hybrid of memoir, research and reporting, what the fruitarian diet really offers is an illusion of control bound up in a moralistic obsession with purity and individual responsibility.

Now an assistant professor of creative writing at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, Alnes smartly frames “The Fruit Cure” around Adam and Eve — the oldest story about the temptations of fruit. She opens the book with an extended metaphor recasting Durianrider and Freelee as the first man and woman: “The man and the woman held the knowledge of good and evil,” she writes. “They knew that water and carbohydrates in the blood equaled beauty; fat in the blood, ugly.”

The biblical comparison takes on depth as Alnes traces the roots of fruitarianism, which intertwine with Christian asceticism and colonialism. Early proponents of fruitarianism in late-1800s England, such as the Order of the Golden Age, promoted what they called “the great scientific fact that purity of food tends to promote purity of Character,” through their publications and sermonic “lectures to natives” in British colonies. While Durianrider and Freelee dropped the religious evangelizing and the racism, they updated the emphasis on purity and personal responsibility for the social media era, blaming followers who didn’t get results — health, weight loss, happiness — for tripping over arcane rules.

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When Alnes reflects on why she was so susceptible to Durianrider and Freelee’s suggestions — though she never went fully fruitarian — she is on her surest footing. As a competitive athlete, her life had been ruled by self-discipline. “My whole life, through sport, I had learned to equate control with power, with praise,” Alnes writes. “The more I could suppress my own bodily instincts, the more I could quiet those murmurs of soreness or discomfort, the better I was.” At her sickest, though, her “inability to overcome was laid bare.”

Compared with her lucid and elegant handling of the personal, Alnes stumbles into academic stiltedness in some of the more research- and reporting-heavy passages. She has a tendency to cite sources in the body of her text to make obvious statements or to craft arguments that would be stronger in her own voice. The worst example is when she cites the master’s thesis of a Swedish university student to make the point that, historically, people have trusted experts more than peers. A similar lack of confidence comes through in long paragraphs that pose rhetorical questions without really parsing them, like: “In light of a healthcare system that has failed so many, are alternative cures, untested or untrue, a form of predation?” These moments feel like remnants of an early draft that needed more polish.

In the last few chapters, Alnes shifts most of the narrative focus away from herself to trace the fall of 30 Bananas a Day, a tale filled with hypocrisy and flame wars. She quotes at length from Durianrider and Freelee’s YouTube videos, giving an unfortunate microphone to his virulent misogyny, her fat-phobia and their scammy, evidence-free claims. And while Alnes includes compelling interviews with two dietitians and a handful of former followers who suffered health problems, a more thorough debunking of the diet would have been welcome.

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I wished, too, for Alnes to linger longer on how she eventually came to accept her lack of clear diagnosis and cure — she still has neurological episodes, and doctors have not yet pinpointed why — and stopped reaching for black-and-white answers. Despite this unevenness, “The Fruit Cure” serves as a reminder that life often demands that we sit with uncertainty, and that people peddling total control are just as deceptive as Eden’s serpent.

Kristen Martin is a cultural critic based in Philadelphia. Her debut narrative nonfiction book, “The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow,” is forthcoming from Bold Type Books.

The Fruit Cure

The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour

By Jacqueline Alnes

Melville House. 307 pp. $32

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