One of Leanne Ratcliffe’s latest videos on YouTube sees the health influencer flaunting a 25kg bag of white powder to her nearly 800,000 subscribers. It’s a two-month supply of organic sugar, which she begins pouring into a sickly sweet smoothie. “White sugar is healthy. We’ve been lied to!” she exclaims in another. Known as Freelee the BananaGirl, the 44-year-old Australian doesn’t just have a sweet tooth. She absolutely canes sugar. “I average about half a cup of white sugar a day… sugar is our friend,” she tells me. The NHS would have a heart attack at that: the public health body suggests we should limit our sugar to 30g a day, about a seventh of a cup.
If you were chronically online on Tumblr around the mid-2010s, you might remember Ratcliffe. During this era, the likes of FullyRawKristina and Trisha Paytas made names for themselves by promoting miracle plant-based solutions that shunned cooking altogether and focused instead on consuming mountains of organic matter. For years, Ratcliffe was part of this raw vegan collective, earning her kooky moniker by eating up to 51 bananas a day, totalling 5,000 calories and an unimaginable amount of potassium.
