The mother of deceased vegan influencer Zhanna Samsonova — who died of starvation and exhaustion after subsisting exclusively on raw fruits and vegetables — claimed that she battled hard to save her daughter but to no avail.
“I fought for many years [but] she did not listen to her mother,” Zhanna’s mother Vera Samsonova, 63, lamented in an interview with 116RU.com. “She chose this path.”
Her 39-year-old daughter — better known as Zhanna D’Art to her millions of social media followers — had passed away on July 21 in a Malaysian hospital after traveling across Asia for the past 17 years, per the DailyMail.
Several weeks before her death, the vegan ifluencer had shared an Instagram selfie with the chilling message: “Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it’s meaningless.”
The Russian’s mother attributed her death to a “cholera-like infection” that was exacerbated by her extreme diet.
A proponent of uncooked herbivorous fare, the Kasan native claimed she ate a “completely raw vegan diet” for the last four years, consuming just “fruits, sunflower seed sprouts, fruit smoothies, and juices.”
Meanwhile, a friend claimed that for the last seven years, Zhanna had only eaten the giant, sweet jackfruit and durian, a spiky, mace-like fruit known for its custardy meat and noxious odor.
“She ate only durian and jackfruit for seven years,” they lamented. “You don’t need to be a doctor to understand where this will lead.”
If that wasn’t extreme enough, Zhanna hadn’t drunk water in six years and often practiced “dry fasting,” in which she’d abstain from eating or drinking for days on hand.
Needless to say, Vera was devastated over the loss of her daughter, whose cause of death has not yet been determined. “She is already dead, she is no more,” lamented the crestfallen parent, who is currently waiting to get her body back to Russia amid a bureaucratic bottleneck.
This marked a tragic outcome for the mother, who said she tried for years in vain to convince Zhanna to ditch her extreme diet and adopt more balanced eating habits.
And she wasn’t the only one imploring the plant-eater to cease her potentially fatal regimen.
In the final months leading up to her death, Zhanna’s friends pleaded with her to eat more substantive foods, but she refused to change her lifestyle.
“I tried to talk to her, to convince her to seek help from doctors, to take tests,” pal Olga Chernyaeva recalled. “I showed her her body in the mirror and in photographs of past years.”
She added, “I brought her fruits every morning — it was impossible to get her to eat something else. Boolean arguments didn’t work. Zhanna believed that death does not exist.”
As a result, the plant pusher had withered away to a wisp of her former self, to the point at which she was bedbound for a month and took minutes to climb one step of her staircase, according to Chernyaeva.
“I watched her journey to death for seven years,” the devastated pal recalled. “About five months ago, I met Zhanna in Sri Lanka and she had a haggard look. Her legs were swollen… It was amazing that she was still moving — I think she did it through pain.”
Meanwhile, another one of Zhanna’s pals who she met in Thailand, described her as “scary to look at” and compared her hands to their 12-year-old sister’s.
Other friends had harsh words for the deceased with one declaring: “Ms Samsonova’s idle starvation was causing her to melt before our eyes, but she believed everything was fine.
“Only her eyes, merry eyes, and gorgeous hair compensated for the dreadful sight of a body tortured by idiocy,” they added. “Forgive me if it sounds harsh.”
Zhanna faced similar post-mortem critiques on her Instagram page.
“This is just pure starvation, not a healthy raw vegan diet,” criticized one commenter on a video of the influencer describing her lunch of cherry tomatoes and avocado. “I’m sorry to hear it ended badly. I wish I could have helped you out of your eating disorder.”
However, her mother Vera discouraged people from speaking ill of the dead. “People, stop writing bad things, it hurts me a lot. She’s already dead, why else write nasty things?” she pleaded.
While a raw food regimen can have multiple health benefits — including weight loss, improved heart health and a lower risk of diabetes — there are downsides to this diet, especially when it’s not well planned, according to Healthline.
Complications include deficiencies in calcium and Vitamin D, which are needed for strong bones. It can also result in suboptimal B12 levels, which can result in anemia, nervous system damage, infertility, and, somewhat paradoxically, heart disease.
A study published earlier this month in the Journal of Nutrition found that 100% of participants on a raw vegan diet ingested less than the recommended 2.4 mcg of vitamin B12 per day.