Sadly, Karolina is not the first to suffer this fate as a result from the fruitarian diet. Zhanna Samsonova, a Russian vegan raw food influencer known online as Zhanna D’Art, tragically died in July 2023 at the age of 39 in Malaysia. Reportedly, she died from “starvation and exhaustion” exacerbated by her extremely restrictive diet. For at least the last four years of her life, she had followed an exclusively raw vegan diet, subsisting mainly on fruits, sunflower seed sprouts, fruit smoothies, and juices. At its most extreme, friends reported her diet was almost entirely fruit-based, with some claims suggesting she had not consumed water for six years. Instead, she had opted for fruit and vegetable juices. Samsonova passionately promoted this raw food lifestyle on social media, believing it transformed her body and made her look younger than her peers.
Zhanna’s health declined fast due to her fruitarian diet.
Despite her online assertions of wellness, Samsonova’s health had been visibly deteriorating. Friends noted her “increasingly emaciated” appearance and expressed profound worry. One friend described how they feared “finding her lifeless body in the morning.” Her mother, Vera Samsonova, had desperately fought to save her daughter, disapproving of the extreme eating habits and trying to convince her to adopt a more balanced diet. Just months before her death, friends saw her in Sri Lanka looking exhausted with swollen legs and oozing lymph nodes. She was reportedly sent home to seek treatment, only to run away and resume her travels. Her official cause of death was attributed by her mother to a “cholera-like infection,” which was believed to have been worsened by the extreme exhaustion and malnutrition caused by her strict vegan diet.
Are Raw, Vegan Diets To Blame?
The core issue that led to the deaths of both women was not a standard or balanced raw, vegan diet. Rather, it was the extreme and restrictive nature of the specific “fruitarian” and raw food regimens they followed that induced severe malnutrition and starvation. In the case of Karolina Krzyzak, doctors explicitly linked her death to starvation and the severe medical conditions directly caused by her fruit-only diet. Her death was a result of the catastrophic breakdown of her body due to the total lack of essential proteins, fats, and other critical nutrients. Therefore, the diet itself, by causing starvation, was the direct fatal mechanism.
For Zhanna Samsonova, her mother cited the immediate cause of death as a cholera-like infection, however, this infection was said to have been exacerbated by the exhaustion of the body due to her all-vegan diet. Medical professionals and her friends pointed out that her decade-long, increasingly restrictive diet, which included long periods of dry fasting and a total lack of water for years, left her severely malnourished, exhausted, and incapable of fighting off even a common infection. This suggests that the extreme diet critically compromised her immune system and overall organ function, turning an otherwise survivable illness into a fatal one. Ultimately, experts view these tragic outcomes as stemming from disordered eating patterns, like fruitarianism, that are inherently deficient and dangerous, rather than a health-conscious lifestyle.
Extreme Diets Are Not The Answer
The human body is complex and requires a wide range of macro- and micronutrients in order to function and thrive. The issue with extreme or restrictive diets such as these are that they don’t provide even the minimum amount of calories that a person needs for the basic functioning of their body. Yes, fruits and vegetables are good for you – both in raw and cooked forms. Yes, the general population could eat more of these products. However, eating only fruits and vegetables does not provide you with enough protein, carbohydrates, fat, and calories to live. Eventually your body’s systems will start failing. True health comes from a diet that contains a proper balance of a variety of different foods. Whole grains, root vegetables and tubers, lentils, beans, unsaturated oils, nuts and seeds, and animal sources of proteins if you so choose. It is also okay to occasionally include foods with less nutritional value, like cakes, cookies, french fries – so long as they are not regular occurance. Fruits and vegetables should be staple parts of our diet, but they cannot be the only thing we eat. If you are unsure if you are getting the right nutrition that you need, speak with a registered dietitian. They can help you build the diet that is right for you.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
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