Instead, as Alnes continued to push herself to log day by day miles and compete at monitor meets, her episodes grew extra critical — she started dropping management over her speech and blacking out. Now the neurologist thought she may be having complicated partial seizures, however an electroencephalogram didn’t present seizure exercise. Still symptomatic and missing a prognosis when she returned to high school as a sophomore, Alnes was pressured to give up the cross-country crew.

This may sound just like the begin to a well-recognized form of sickness narrative, one through which a affected person hunts down an elusive prognosis in a disbelieving medical system. But whereas Alnes’s “The Fruit Cure” does delve into these elements of the affected person expertise, that’s in service of a wider exploration of the attract that alternative-wellness practices can maintain when Western drugs can’t simply tackle a physique’s failures. In 2012, when Alnes was a university junior, the enticement got here within the type of an internet site known as 30 Bananas a Day, which touted a uncooked vegan eating regimen primarily based virtually totally on fruit, proclaiming that it might remedy nearly each ailment.

She stumbled onto the positioning throughout a time when she was so symptomatic that she needed to depend on a roommate to push her round in a wheelchair. Bewildered by her physique, Alnes turned to the web. After exhausting WebMD, she discovered Harley Johnstone (a.ok.a. Durianrider) and Leanne Ratcliffe (a.ok.a. Freelee the Banana Girl) — Australian fruitarians whose web site and accompanying YouTube channels racked up a whole lot of 1000’s of followers. Like Alnes, many who had been 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 remedy: a uncooked eating regimen also called 80/10/10, through which folks get 80 p.c of their day by day energy from carbs (principally fruit) and fewer than 10 p.c from protein and from fats. But as “The Fruit Cure” attests, through a hybrid of memoir, analysis and reporting, what the fruitarian eating regimen actually presents is an phantasm of management sure up in a moralistic obsession with purity and particular person duty.

Now an assistant professor of artistic writing at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, Alnes well frames “The Fruit Cure” round Adam and Eve — the oldest story in regards to the temptations of fruit. She opens the ebook with an prolonged metaphor recasting Durianrider and Freelee as the primary man and lady: “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 comparability 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 because the Order of the Golden Age, promoted what they known as “the great scientific fact that purity of food tends to promote purity of Character,” by means of their publications and sermonic “lectures to natives” in British colonies. While Durianrider and Freelee dropped the spiritual evangelizing and the racism, they up to date the emphasis on purity and private duty for the social media period, blaming followers who didn’t get outcomes — well being, weight reduction, happiness — for tripping over arcane guidelines.

When Alnes displays on why she was so inclined to Durianrider and Freelee’s solutions — although she by no means went absolutely fruitarian — she is on her surest footing. As a aggressive athlete, her life had been dominated 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, although, her “inability to overcome was laid bare.”

Compared along with her lucid and stylish dealing with of the non-public, Alnes stumbles into tutorial stiltedness in a few of the extra research- and reporting-heavy passages. She tends to quote sources within the physique of her textual content to make apparent statements or to craft arguments that might be stronger in her personal voice. The worst instance is when she cites the grasp’s thesis of a Swedish college scholar to make the purpose that, traditionally, folks have trusted specialists greater than friends. The same insecurity comes by means of in lengthy paragraphs that pose rhetorical questions with out actually 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 really feel like remnants of an early draft that wanted extra polish.

In the previous couple of chapters, Alnes shifts many of the narrative focus away from herself to hint the autumn of 30 Bananas a Day, a story full of hypocrisy and flame wars. She quotes at size from Durianrider and Freelee’s YouTube movies, giving an unlucky microphone to his virulent misogyny, her fat-phobia and their scammy, evidence-free claims. And whereas Alnes consists of compelling interviews with two dietitians and a handful of former followers who suffered well being issues, a extra thorough debunking of the eating regimen would have been welcome.

I wanted, too, for Alnes to linger longer on how she ultimately got here to just accept her lack of clear prognosis and remedy — she nonetheless has neurological episodes, and docs haven’t but pinpointed why — and stopped reaching for black-and-white solutions. Despite this unevenness, “The Fruit Cure” serves as a reminder that life usually calls for that we sit with uncertainty, and that individuals peddling complete management are simply as misleading as Eden’s serpent.

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

The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour

Melville House. 307 pp. $32