I was bad because I couldn’t run, bad because I wasn’t sick enough to have a diagnosis but also bad because I was symptomatic enough to be in a wheelchair, bad because I couldn’t will my body into submission the way that I thought I should be able to.

The internalized ableism on display in this sentence from Jacqueline Alnes’s The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour can be painful to read. But her admission offers a vital window into how a culture that devalues disabled and ill bodies feeds a wellness industry that often traffics in harmful deception and outright scams. Part investigative journalism and part personal illness narrative, The Fruit Cure recounts how a lack of medical explanations for the neurological episodes that impaired Alnes’s speech and mobility during her first year of college led her to the wellness website 30 Bananas a Day. There, a pair of toned, white, Australian influencers who called themselves “Durianrider” and “Freelee The Banana Girl” insisted that a diet consisting almost entirely of raw fruit would perfect her body by alleviating diverse ailments and helping her lose weight. The diet, as she saw it then, would make her “good.”

Desperate for answers and compelled by Durianrider and Freelee’s claims to have healed themselves through their radical diet, Alnes found herself mired in this online world of fruitarianism. As she began to “vilify” certain foods and severely restrict her eating, Alnes developed her own “far-fetched” and self-blaming explanations for her illness. She acknowledges that such anxieties “were easier to grapple with than the state of my health as a whole.”

Through an extended investigation of fruitarianism’s past and present champions, Alnes shows how the wellness industry can exploit chronically ill people while providing a poor substitute for more sustainable and affirming forms of self- and community care. While chronic illness memoirs often apply a critical lens to biomedicine, The Fruit Cure interrogates how the wellness industry fails and exploits those whom biomedicine, too, has been unable to relieve. As Alnes shows, the wellness industry positions itself as a health resource and an alternative to an insufficient health care system, making chronically ill and disabled people among its primary targets.

This examination of the intersection of chronic illness, ableism, and wellness makes a generative intervention into the genre of illness narratives. It’s not merely the wellness industry’s propensity to scam and exploit that makes it dangerous, though certainly that dynamic is central. Rather, Alnes’s story demonstrates that the wellness industry’s promotion and legitimization of ableist self-perceptions makes it an especially dangerous force in the lives of the chronically ill. Alnes articulates how wellness messaging distorted her relationship to her own body by perpetuating rather than disrupting an ableism that alienated her from her disability. She details how, once she adopted her restrictive, supposedly healing diet, giving it up would mean letting go of a relentless pursuit of able-bodiedness and accepting her disability: “how would I know I was worthy of care?” she writes. Alnes demonstrates the tight interconnection between, on the one hand, an ableist culture that views wellness as an outcome of individual morality and discipline, and on the other, a wellness industry that profits from selling the scam that we can self-improve ourselves toward a cure.

Critiques of what is increasingly referred to as the “wellness industrial complex” are nothing new. In fact, both wellness claims and critiques of them have proliferated over the past decade. Even as wellness culture flourishes online and in the marketplace, many have become increasingly attuned to the ways in which the wellness industry repackages thin, white, able-bodied beauty standards as “health”; exploits consumer’s very real mental and physical suffering in the interest of making a profit; and replaces collective social change with individual solutions to a host of problems. While the concept of “self-care” is grounded in the history of community-oriented initiatives led by activist groups such as the Black Panther Party, the wellness industry distorts that tradition, replacing mutual aid with consumerism. As Alnes puts it, “There are profits to be made from making people believe in an illusion of the thing they want most,” and those potential gains only motivate influencers to continue promising unlikely solutions and doling out diagnoses for various chronic illnesses.

Indeed, the book is at its strongest when Alnes interrogates the link between wellness and chronic illness, examining how the former advocates ableist “cures” that valorize a rigid notion of fitness and individualize health as a moral imperative. A Division I collegiate runner at the time her symptoms begin to appear, Alnes reveals how important able-bodiedness was to her self-image before she became ill. “My entire self-worth hinged upon my ability to run well,” she admits early in the book when describing the “dangerous” play-through-the-pain mentality common to elite athletics. Her tenacious commitment to performing her able-bodiedness by running even when injured eerily resonates with the self-punishing wellness protocols she later adopts.

Alnes, whose condition remains undiagnosed, understands why so many people distrust biomedicine and turn to wellness. She describes how both the frustrations of medical misunderstanding and the discrimination that marginalized communities face in clinical settings leads many to seek alternative answers. At the same time, she shows how wellness influencers perpetuate their own harms by exploiting the needs and desires of those seeking care. “When you are in the throes of illness,” Alnes explains, “… there is something comforting about distilling the world into dichotomies: sick or well, bad or good, off-limits or completely nutritious. When so much seems unknowable about the very body you live in, it feels nice to land on a firm platform … even if the very platform itself is a false reality.” The fantasy of clarity that such binary thinking offers comes at a steep cost. By promising that complying with strict dietary or other self-care protocols will cure what ails you, Alnes argues, wellness influencers insist that still-suffering followers have no one to blame but themselves—a narrative that fuels ableist ideology.

Buying into wellness culture can also deepen physical and mental suffering by encouraging a fatphobic politics that harmfully elevates thinness as the pinnacle of health. As registered dietician Christy Harrison, who also lives with chronic illnesses, explains in her book, The Wellness Trap, supposedly beneficial wellness practices such as restrictive dieting can, in some cases, actually cause chronic illness symptoms such as gastrointestinal distress and amenorrhea. They can (though don’t always) also encourage orthorexia, a form of disordered eating characterized by fixating on consuming “healthy” foods. Though the influencers who published their claims on 30 Bananas a Day promised that their fruit-based diet could be a form of treatment for eating disorders, Alnes reveals that a slim physique was always part of the able-bodied ideal they sold viewers. Indeed, she notes that the combination of anti-fat messaging and demonizing of a host of foods promoted on the site “toe[d] the thin line between ‘health’ and disordered eating.”

“The Fruit Cure” signals the urgency of disabled communities, digital and otherwise, that can nourish rather than punish chronically ill bodies.

Despite the clear and manifold injuries she illustrates, Alnes is wary of coming down too hard on alternatives to biomedicine. Her primary critiques are of “extremism” and the unregulated naturopathic marketplace—not alternative remedies themselves. She points out that before they posed a danger to others’ health, Durianrider and Freelee were drawn to restrictive dieting by their own experiences with illness. The problem, in her eyes, is not fruitarianism and similar diets, but the ways that they have been weaponized for power and monetary gains. She traces fruitarianism’s colonial origins and the role that racism has played in its anti-fat foundations, but she also critiques media coverage of 30 Bananas a Day that employs ableist language to dismiss the diet as “insane.” Though some may find her unwillingness to condemn the diet frustrating, Alnes repeatedly acknowledges that what we eat is shaped not only by health but also by culture, access, religion, and ethics. “To reduce a diet to ‘good’ or ‘bad,’” she explains, “would be perpetuating the same harms caused by certain extreme fad diets themselves.”

At times, Alnes’s critique is sometimes blunted by her emphasis on the personalities and sagas of Durianrider and Freelee themselves. Of course, the book is in part about Alnes’s fascination with these influencers, but it can be difficult to share in that fascination as a reader, especially given the strong case that The Fruit Cure makes against paying attention to them. Though Alnes writes that she is “less interested in the drama of YouTube and more invested in what these situations can teach us about intersections between profit, personal responsibility, and wellness culture,” she devotes a few too many pages to detailing the scandalous hypocrisy of the influencers who, as it turns out, also found their own advice unsustainable, as well as the allegations of sexual harassment against one of them. Fans of scam documentaries of all kinds and especially of the popular podcast Maintenance Phase will enjoy her extensive and careful reporting, but zeroing in on the specific faults of the 30 Bananas a Day stars somewhat distracts from Alnes’s critique of wellness culture as a whole and the compulsory able-bodiedness that undergirds it.

Nevertheless, The Fruit Cure is a thoughtfully researched book that weaves together journalism and historical research to contextualizes the illness narrative at its core. Indeed, Alnes never lets the reader forget that we are reading an illness narrative, and she pushes us to consider our expectations of the genre. Perhaps it is unsurprising that in a text centered on consequential fruit consumption, Alnes frequently invokes the garden of Eden. Her interest in the Book of Genesis leads her to offer what she refers to as multiple “origin stories” in the first half of the book, signaling the difficulty of pinpointing a defined starting point when narrating illness. Her identity as a runner also clearly informs her thinking about starting and finish lines. About a year after her symptoms pushed her to leave the college track team, Alnes ran a marathon, an occasion that she notes would have offered a satisfying conclusion for many readers. “Part of me wishes I could end my story here, at this marathon,” she writes, “I could say: I overcame my symptoms, I returned to my sport, I was whole …. But it wasn’t the end.”

The Fruit Cure’s actual ending is far less conclusive than what Arthur Frank calls the “restitution narrative” of illness. Alnes reveals that she still experiences unexplained neurological symptoms, but that she has learned both how to manage them and to accept her imperfect body. She takes care to differentiate the quick-fix promise of “cure” from the slower process of “healing,” which she explains requires “acknowledg[ing] and work[ing] to remedy the real issue.” For Alnes, healing has largely involved coming to terms with her disabled identity. For example, she describes registering for disability services during graduate school and seeking support for disordered eating recovery from a nutritionist. When she writes that “healing is still ongoing” and “probably always will be,” she doesn’t mean that she is still pursuing a cure for her illness; rather she underscores how difficult it remains to disentangle her self-worth from “the forces that once held [her] in their grip.”

In addition to differentiating between “cure” and “healing,” Alnes introduces a third term to characterize what she sought from wellness culture: relief. “I found relief,” she writes, “in people like me sharing their symptoms openly online.” Indeed, when she found 30 Bananas a Day, she hoped that it would alleviate not only her “sickness” but also the “loneliness” that she acknowledges so often accompanies being disabled in an ableist world. Throughout The Fruit Cure, she describes how the onset of symptoms left her isolated among her collegiate peers. In some of the most troubling passages in the book, she recalls teammates mocking her neurological symptoms, especially her impaired speech. She also describes feeling stigmatized as a wheelchair user on campus, which contributed to her spending most of her time alone in her room. The message boards on 30 Bananas a Day relieved that pain by offering her “a salve for solitude.”

Offline, though, it’s clear that the advice wellness culture had to offer actually hindered her ability to form and appreciate community. She recalls feeling “perpetually in a state of anxiety about how I would participate in group events while not saying out loud what I had begun to believe” about food and health. Though, after quitting the track team, Alnes eventually found an affirming home among her two roommates, her restrictive eating habits left her, as she puts it, on the “sidelines” of the dinner table where those bonds might otherwise have been nurtured or relished. What starts out sounding like a forum for validation and belonging among disabled community quickly converted into an echo chamber of affirmation for wellness practices that are not only dangerous but isolating.

The relief that Alnes found upon reading accounts like her own online is exactly what makes the illness memoir itself such an appealing genre. Online communities have the added benefit of polyvocality, reassuring readers that they are in good company despite their feelings of isolation. For Alnes, who “for so many years … longed to be the girl on the team, someone who belonged, racing around a bend,” the 30 Bananas a Day site offered her the opportunity to join a new team, but one that carried the same pressures of bodily performance and conformity. “The messaging is elementary but clear,” she writes of the site, “stay with the group,” meaning don’t slip up on the diet, “and your life will be better.” Reading these lines, I wished that Alnes had found a different kind of chronically ill community, one she could “keep up with” by reading and engaging with their stories rather than by restricting herself alongside them. In another version of this narrative, she might have found a community premised not on wellness or cure, but on the “relief” that can come from solidarity and mutual support. Though The Fruit Cure reads largely as a cautionary tale against being consumed by wellness, it also signals the urgency of disabled communities, digital and otherwise, that can nourish rather than punish chronically ill bodies.