Moms in Uproar Over 'Banana Girl,' 'TannyRaw,' Online Diet Gurus


Following a steady pelting of complaints by anti-eating-disorder activists, YouTube temporarily suspended the channel of a popular raw-food adherent known as TannyRaw on Friday. And while the channel was only down for a few hours, the move touched off a social-media dustup about responsibility and blame regarding young, susceptible women, eating disorders, and those spouting diet advice, including TannyRaw and a YouTube star who calls herself Freelee the Banana Girl.

The small but vocal group of about 15 critics — Mothers (and Others) Against Eating Disorders, or MAED — took issue with what they call TannyRaw's “dangerous” approach to dispensing weight-loss and nutrition advice, and say that in one video the South Carolina woman, whose real name is Tanya, even counseled a young girl to refuse treatment for her eating disorder. “That's unethical and dangerous,” noted one woman on Twitter, where an impassioned back-and-forth between people on both sides of the argument raged all day Friday. “We will NOT stand for her preying on sick kids!” tweeted another.



The TannyRaw channel was down for several hours on Friday, displaying the following message to its more than 2,000 followers: “This account has been suspended due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service violations.”

Before complaining to YouTube — as well as to the FCC and the FDA — MAED says it attempted more than 50 times to start a dialogue with Tanya directly, but got no reply.

Tanya (whose last name is unknown) did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo Shine — nor did YouTube. But the LFRV (low-fat raw vegan) guru, who has a tendency to sing along with Stevie Nicks and to film herself while driving, and who also posts frequently about her diet on Instagram to her more than 3,100 followers, introduced several new YouTube videos on Friday in response to the controversy. “I’ve been robbed, and you’ve been robbed, of our 186 precious videos — genuine, true light, of me coming to you with what really healed and helped me,” Tanya told fans, before her videos were reinstated. “No gimmicks, no me trying to make a dollar, just me giving to you.”

In an earlier video, she explains that she was starting her channel to help others by talking about how the LFRV diet helped her lose more than 100 pounds, dropping to 229 pounds from 127. It also helped her beat lupus, arthritis, nodular acne, and “all kinds of autoimmune disorders, where I almost was bedridden before,” she says in the video.

Her fans seem to be devoted with a cult-like allegiance. “I use to be blind and let me tell you now I see so much clearer,” wrote one devotee on YouTube Friday. Others created their own YouTube videos in which they defend her honor, and fans also came out in full force on Twitter and on Instagram, where one woman noted, “I tweeted back to [the angry moms] asking them if they knew about the many [eating disorder] cases that have been cured through this lifestyle, including mine, but they haven't answered yet. I don’t know how they got hung up on Tanya because she is nothing but a positive beam of light.”


But TannyRaw is not the biggest problem on YouTube, according to the moms of MAED. That honor would most likely go to Freelee the Banana Girl, a raw-food adherent living in Australia (not to be confused with Loni Jane Anthony, who was fiercely criticized for sticking to her raw fruit diet throughout her pregnancy, and who gave birth to a healthy boy recently). Freelee, who eats 30 bananas daily and sometimes speaks with only her toned midsection in front of the camera, has more than 167,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel. She claims to have recovered from an eating disorder and has addressed controversial topics including “Thigh gaps? Can ALL women get them? Yes!” and “Why do people get fat on a raw fruit diet?”

“What kills me is that these people seem to be totally unregulated,” MAED member Amy Cunningham, whose 12-year-old daughter is recovering from anorexia, tells Yahoo Shine. “If they were doctors, nurses, nutritionists or had any qualification whatsoever they would not be allowed to dispense this information.”

Claire Mysko, a body-image expert who oversees the Proud2Bme program with the National Eating Disorders Association agrees that the information these online gurus are sharing can indeed be dangerous. "At the very least," she tells Yahoo Shine, "this content should come with a warning and a link to an eating disorder resource like the National Eating Disorders Association."

Freelee has already been called out in the press for her approach, including by the Daily Mail and the Daily Beast, the latter of which raises the question of whether her strict diet is actually an eating disorder (to which Freelee responded, according to the Daily Beast piece, “Absofruitly not”).

It’s interesting to note, though, that the National Eating Disorders Association website contains information about the unofficial “Orthorexia Nervosa,” which means “fixation on righteous eating.” Coined by doctor Steven Bratman, it explains, “Orthorexia starts out as an innocent attempt to eat more healthfully, but orthorexics become fixated on food quality and purity. Self-esteem becomes wrapped up in the purity of orthorexics’ diet and they sometimes feel superior to others, especially in regard to food intake.”

“Treatment facilities are on the lookout for this, because a lot of people are masking eating disorders with this idea of ‘clean eating,’ such as raw food or veganism,” Lara Pence, director of alumni affairs at the Renfrew Center, an eating disorder clinic in New York, tells Yahoo Shine. Though she is not familiar with the videos of either Tanya or Freelee, she says she supports the idea of calling attention to potentially harmful messages. “Eating disorders have the highest death rate of any mental illness,” Pence says. “It’s appropriate to fight these websites, to bring to the light the inappropriateness of them, because they can be incredibly dangerous.”

She adds that, while most people spewing diet messages may not mean to be harmful, they are not going to go away — just like the practice of retouching photos in fashion magazines, which can also be harmful to women’s body images. “But there are videos out there showing how things are retouched, which are helpful,” she says. “So it’s good to say, ‘Let me fight this information with more information.’”