Vegan influencer ‘dies of starvation and exhaustion’ after living off raw fruit diet

Vegan influencer ‘dies of starvation and exhaustion’ after living off raw fruit diet

A popular vegan influencer who ate an exotic fruit diet has “died of starvation and exhaustion” at just 39 years old.

Russian Zhanna Samsonova had been living in South-East Asia eating an exclusively raw vegan diet consisting of “fruits, sunflower seed sprouts, fruit smoothies and juices” for the past five years.

She was well known in the vegan community, posting under Zhanna D’Art on social media, for promoting a raw food diet to her millions of viewers.

Her friends said her eating habits had become worryingly restrictive in the last few months of her life and she passed away on July 21 from a “cholera-like infection” exacerbated by “exhaustion of the body by a vegan diet”, her mother Vera Samsonova told Russian newspaper Vechernyaya Kazan.

The friend continued: “They sent her home to seek treatment.

However, she ran away again. When I saw her in Phuket, I was horrified. I lived one floor above her and every day I feared finding her lifeless body in the morning.

I convinced her to seek treatment, but she didn’t make it.”

A raw food diet can have multiple health benefits including weight loss, improved heart health and a lower risk of diabetes – if eaten in a balanced diet, but there are downsides to a solely raw diet according to Healthline. These include deficiencies in calcium and vitamin D, which are needed for strong bones.

This could cause B12 levels to plummet, which can result in anaemia, nervous system damage, infertility and, somewhat paradoxically, heart disease.

Despite the potential downsides to Samsonova’s diet, many of her devoted followers refused to believe her eating choices led to her death, instead claiming that she was killed by chemicals in the fruit she ate.

Zhanna’s official cause of death has not yet been determined as her family try to get her body back to Russia.

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