This is not good news for devout vegans as The Daily Mirror has reported the death of a vegan influencer, Zhanna Samsonova of Russia at the age of 39, due to "starvation and exhaustion."
The report said that 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, according to The Mirror, 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. Speaking with Newsflash, an unnamed friend of Zhanna said they saw her a few months ago in Sri Lanka "looking exhausted."
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." Another friend also claimed that for the past seven years, one of her favourite foods was durian, a spiky fruit known for its pungent smell, Time News reported.