Half a cup of sugar a day? Scientists take on the latest controversial health trend

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.

Raised on a farm in Queensland, Ratcliffe ate a traditional omnivorous diet. Growing up, she struggled with anorexia, bulimia, and drug addiction. Her epiphany came during a yoga session with a fruitarian teacher, and she began to blog about the virtues of fruit in 2009, leading to the creation of her internet-famous Raw Till 4 Diet, which dictates the eating of only fruit until 4pm, followed by a high-carb dinner. Migrating from YouTube to a then-nascent Instagram, she gained a cult following, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers.

Unsurprisingly, Ratcliffe’s claims attracted backlash from the outset. Her fruit-based diet has been met with derision by mainstream dieticians, who state that it lacks the protein and healthy fats necessary for a balanced diet (Ratcliffe says she does take B12 supplements, but nothing else). “I built my community over the past nearly 20 years by being real, raw, and consistent. I shared my journey, the ups and the hard truths, and people related. I offered an alternative to diet culture and fear of food. Of course, not everyone liked what I had to say,” she tells me now over Instagram, signing off “lettuce know” from an undisclosed location in the rainforests of Queensland, where she lives a nomadic and nudist lifestyle.

It’s not only her fruitarian diet that courts controversy. Ratcliffe has previously criticised chemotherapy as ineffective (the video has since been removed) and suggested that menstruation is a process of flushing out toxins – claims that have been strongly debunked by medical professionals. On whether she still believes these things, Ratcliffe did not respond.

Over the past few years, Ratcliffe has gone quiet, posting only sporadically on social media, but now she’s back with full force on YouTube shorts, where glucose is very much the focus of her videos. Her latest clips see her draw graphs on a whiteboard propped up in front of lush jungle vegetation to illustrate a myriad of bold, wild claims. She believes white sugar has been unfairly demonised. “I call refined sugar ‘sun crystals’, they’re pure energy, crystallised sunlight from plants. There’s no need to fear refined sugar. The key is to keep fat intake low,” she says.

While Ratcliffe says she has been “adding refined sugar to my fruit-based diet for over 12 years”, it’s recently become a staple of her online output. “I began sharing the deep science behind it and making powerful connections I have not seen before, and soon others started sharing and repeating what I was saying. The high sugar diet began to gain credibility,” she says.

So why sugar? It’s anyone’s guess. But in many ways, it’s a natural transition from her fruitarian content; fruit, after all, is packed full of it. Creating sugar content is also lucratively sensationalist, going against ingrained health education; with sugar consumption monitored more scrupulously than ever, promoting it is basically counterculture at this point. And, perhaps most importantly, the science is complex enough to warp it at your will.

Ratcliffe’s continued popularity speaks to a broader epidemic of huckstering health influencers. Many of us, by now, have woken up and smelled the coffee enema; a recent study of young women in the US found that almost the entire sample (98 per cent) thought health misinformation was prevalent on TikTok and, more generally, our trust in influencers has waned. That said, many of those who were surveyed felt they were less susceptible to the misinformation than others – known as a “third-person effect” – suggesting that we often think we are immune to believing we’re the sucker.

It’s why professional health experts aren’t best pleased with Ratcliffe. “It’s hilarious, if it wasn’t potentially damaging,” says Sandra Sunram-Lea, professor of biological psychology at Lancaster University and an expert in glucose. “Social media platforms are rife with nutrition misinformation, spread by influencers and other content creators who lack knowledge and qualifications.” On the subject of Ratcliffe’s qualifications, she explains that she went to college to study dietetics when she was 20, but “couldn’t trust an obese teacher who didn’t understand basic human physiology” and later studied advanced nutrition for weight loss at the Fitness Institute of Australia. Her best education, she maintains, has been on-the-ground learning.

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So how is Freelee misinforming us? The first thing to know about sugar is that it turns into glucose, the body’s vital energy source. “Carbohydrates that pass through the intestines are converted into glucose, then immediately absorbed into the bloodstream,” Sunram-Lea explains. All forms of sugar, whether you’re drinking a Forbidden Apple BuzzBall or eating an actual apple, turns into glucose (the idea that fruit sugar is better than refined sugar is now generally disputed). “At this state, blood glucose levels are at their highest; these are the blood sugar spikes.” This rise stimulates the pancreas to release insulin, which is integral as it prevents the release of additional glucose and allows cells to use it for energy supply. All this means is that sugar is not Satan manifest; it’s necessary. “Sugar is not ‘evil’ – it’s a rapidly available source of energy, used to get energy to cells during long distance activity and to treat hypoglycaemia in someone with diabetes. It’s also delicious,” says Aisling Pigott, registered dietitian and British Dietetic Association spokesperson.

But a glut of glucose can be detrimental. “If we consume too much sugar, excess glucose is stored as glycogen and converted into fat,” Sunram-Lea says. Repeated excess sugar consumption can lead to a “vicious cycle of high blood sugar and excessive insulin production”, which can, in some cases, result in type 2 diabetes. (Ratcliffe, naturally, rejects this idea: “Glucose spikes are not dangerous, they’re natural. Sugar is our friend. What’s unnatural is fearing fruit and sugar while selling pills to replace food and ignoring the role of fat and protein overload in metabolic disease.”)

Then, there’s the issue of the glucose comedown. “Sugar consumption has been shown to lead to a crash in mood and alertness about one hour after consumption. So, if your diet leads to a pattern of highs and lows in blood sugar levels across the day, you will feel tired and less able to concentrate,” Professor Sunram-Lea says. Again, Ratcliffe disagrees. “Glucose is the brain’s exclusive fuel. Restricting sugar leads to terrible mood swings, fatigue, cravings, and emotional instability. The real danger is undereating carbohydrates or sugar, not eating too many.”

Something that’s trickier to deny is that sugar is nightmarish for your teeth; it produces acids that erode enamel and can increase the spectre of cavities. Ratcliffe, though, still isn’t convinced, saying it’s a “complex topic” and that excess fat and protein can also cause issues. It’s why she liberally pours sugar in every glass of water or smoothie she drinks. “I drink sugar water because it mimics fruit, sugar naturally comes with water in nature. It’s a fast, clean source of glucose and fructose that supports brain, muscle, and liver function,” she explains. It’s enough to make any dentist throw in the bib.

The experts aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid. “It’s ridiculous. There is no health benefit to drinking sugar water. Sugar is an energy rich, but nutrient poor, food that lacks broader health benefits,” Pigott says. Sunram-Lea is most shocked by Ratcliffe’s claims that sugar can be a lifesaver for the liver. “I was particularly amused by her claim that sugar water recharges the liver. It’s hilarious, as excess sugar consumption, particularly fructose (that’s the sugar in fruits; and those 12 bananas or whatever she eats as breakfast on top of 1 litre freshly pressed orange juice) has a negative impact on the liver, which can lead to fatty liver disease.” It’s why she concludes that “there is not an ounce of truth in her claim that a high sugar or fructose diet is good for you”.

In a sense, Ratcliffe’s journey reflects that of Belle Gibson’s – a fellow Australian health influencer recently dramatised in Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar. Gibson, while undoubtedly far more malicious in terms of her deception, once suggested that the vinegar had cured her of cancer. Ratcliffe, of course, is not perpetuating such bold claims – and it’s sugar, not vinegar, that she’s turned to. Yet, in a paradoxical way, she’s selling something that also leaves a sour taste.

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Ratcliffe, though, believes there is an agenda at play. She thinks low-glucose advocates like her online nemesis, fellow influencer The Glucose Goddess, are trying to spin sugar. “[She creates] fear around an imaginary problem (glucose spikes) and sell the solution: expensive anti-spike supplements, useless hacks, and fear-based content. Snake oil has been around forever. Her agenda is the same as most in wellness marketing: fame, product sales, and control. Meanwhile, I’m here to bring people back to what’s real.” Ratcliffe, who sells a range of ebooks priced at $39.95 (£29.75) and private coaching sessions at $450 for 7 days, seems to be experiencing the third-person effect.

But is there a grain of truth in anything she says? For one, eating more fruit is obviously usually a positive move. “What is correct is that consuming the whole fruit (as opposed to a fruit juice) is better as the fibres contained in the fruit lower blood sugar spikes,” Pigott explains. Plus, it’s true that entirely flattening the glucose curve isn’t viable. “In theory this claim does make sense, and flat lines are not desirable. However, glucose variation outside of a healthy range is often a sign of diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance which is much less desirable, especially if it stays high for an extended period of time.” And to be fair to Freelee, high sugar consumption doesn’t always lead to type 2 diabetes, says Pigott. “It’s not as simple as x = y.”

But, even if there is some wisdom in the misinformation, consuming this kind of sugar content has serious risks. While Ratcliffe herself is always adamant that she doesn’t currently suffer from any sort of eating disorder (in fact, she credits fruit as helping her recover from anorexia) there’s a real risk that her diet can lead to orthorexia, meaning an obsession with eating in a healthy way. Although her own social media channels’ comments are packed full of glowing testimonies, many others have posted online about the nefarious effects of following her diet, with suggestions that it has led to vitamin absorption deficiencies and chronic candida (a type of yeast that naturally occurs in the body) overgrowth.

Pigott thinks there’s an incredibly diabolical example of the halo effect at play: Ratcliffe appears to be incredibly athletic and in excellent health, making her lifestyle potently aspirational. “This channel is a really good example of how someone who looks good is perceived as healthy. Promoting a large volume of sugar as ‘health boosting’ is ridiculous.” she says. For Ratcliffe, though, she is adamant that she is taking on the establishment and boosting public health. “I’ve helped thousands transform their bodies and minds through this lifestyle,” she says. Whether you think that’s for the better, or the worse, depends on one thing: have you been sugar-pilled, yet?