In her new book, The Fruit Cure, Jacqueline Alnes, an assistant professor of creative writing at West Chester University, takes on and dismantles the fruitarian diet the author turned to in a moment of desperation, writes Kristen Martin for The Washington Post. 

Alnes, who was a Division I collegiate cross-country runner, started experiencing inexplicable neurological episodes in 2010, during her second semester. For the next two years, the doctors tried but failed to find the cause of her symptoms. 

“My whole life, through sport, I had learned to equate control with power, with praise,” wrote Alnes. “The more I could suppress my own bodily instincts, the more I could quiet those murmurs of soreness or discomfort, the better I was.”

Her condition worsened to the point that she had to rely on her roommate to push her around in a wheelchair. That is when she discovered a website called 30 Bananas a Day, which indicated a raw vegan diet based mostly on fruit could cure just about every illness. 

It did not take her long to realize how little merit there was in that claim.

Her book attests, through her own experiences, interviews, and research, that the fruitarian diet offers nothing but an illusion of control wrapped up in emphasis on purity and personal responsibility. 

Read more about The Fruit Cure by WCU professor Jacqueline Alnes in The Washington Post. 

_______