You would think that the death of Steve Jobs from cancer after shunning conventional medical care and following a "fruitarian" regimen of treatment (until it was too late) would have been a warning about trying to subsist on fruit alone.

But bad ideas can have a long shelf life, to use a turn of phrase economist Steve Hanke has used, and there are people who persist with that bad idea.

Unfortunately, one of them, a 39-year-old social media "influencer," has apparently died of starvation because of it.

According to the New York Post:

Vegan influencer Zhanna Samsonova has reportedly "died of starvation" after subsisting exclusively off a diet of exotic fruit in Malaysia, according to her friends and family.

She was 39.

The Russian national — who frequently promoted raw foods on social media where she was known to her millions of viewers on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram as Zhanna D'Art — reportedly died July 21 after finally seeking medical treatment during a tour in Southeast Asia, according to local media outlet reports.

What a sad story.  She was a pretty young woman who went by the internet influencer name Zhanna D'Art.  She left Russia for the Southeast Asian expat life around Thailand and Malaysia, where the party-hearty, eat-pray-love sybarite lifestyle goes on in that crowd, and based on her Instagram pictures, she seems to have embraced that.  Now her only influence to be had is as an example of what not to do.

But it's dubious all of her fans and followers are going to be swayed by this.  Already, they are claiming it was an infection, or some toxic present in the fruit she ate, which seems far-fetched compared to the claimed vegan diet she followed and the emaciated pictures she ran of herself to influence her followers:

A proponent of uncooked herbivorous fare, the Ka(z)an 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, Samsonova had only eaten the giant, sweet jackfruit and durian, a spiky, mace-like fruit known for its custardy meat and noxious odor.

"I see my body and mind transform every day," Samsonova had gushed while describing her restrictive eating regimen. "I love my new me, and never move on to the habits that I used to use."

The foodfluencer said her raw foods regimen was reportedly inspired by seeing "peers" who looked a lot older than their ages, which she attributed to their "junk food" diets.

How sad.  Did she ever listen to her body?  A diet like that would be impossible not to feel pangs of hunger on.  How much delectable food did she turn down in a region loaded with delectable food, all for this bad idea of dining on the kind of fare a castaway would be forced to subsist on before trying to catch a raw fish or bird?  

But that's the thing with some vegan fanatics.  It's not that they are content starving themselves and serving as an example to others — it's that they want to scold you into adopting this diet, too.  Some say it's to save the Earth.  Some say it's to prevent global warming.  Some say it's out of love for animals.  Or in her case, it seems to have been to remain young and thin instead of old and ugly and fat.  In every case, it's some kind of virtue-signal.  Politicians such as Cory Booker and Eric Adams, and the characters at the World Economic Forum, as well as various nuisance protest groups are all in this category.  They are out there. 

This is not to say that all vegetarian cuisine is bad.  There are nations where it is widespread (South Asia, the Mediterranean), and people live fine on it, but anyone who has studied this knows that it is a carefully acquired art — both to avoid hunger and to avoid critical vitamin and mineral deficiencies normally obtained through meat, such as Vitamin B-12 and taurine.  Those vital nutritional needs need to be obtained other ways on such a diet, or there will be health consequences.  I have a relative who pursued a vegetarian diet as a college athlete — and ended up in the hospital based on nutritional deficiency, so I know it happens.

I am actually a fan of vegetarian cuisine, however, and I enjoy making its wide and varied dishes of the Mediterranean kind, but I know a couple things about it: to feel full, you need to put some time into the creation of truly tasty and filling vegetarian meals.  Just vegetables by themselves are not interesting.  Vegetarian cuisine is more work than conventional cuisine.  And you have to eat some kind of meat or fish or eggs or cheese or other protein at times to address nutritional requirements.  It's the way we are designed, and to go against that is to go against nature. 

This person, apparently eating just raw fruit from two kinds of trees, didn't put that kind of work in.  It was all so simple and absolute — eat jackfruit and durian and find the fountain of youth.

And she obviously didn't know what she was talking about, but that didn't stop her from being an "influencer" and drawing a wide crowd of adoring followers.

That raises questions about the NGOs and other virtue-signaling organizations that favor imposing their versions of vegan and vegetarian diets onto the broad public, including schoolchildren, all to save the planet, and how little they understand about what they are imposing.  It's like the COVID vaccine and the COVID lockdowns this same crowd has imposed, taking away freedoms to choose in the name of public health and in the end doing more harm than good.

Those globalist "influencers" also didn't know what they were talking about any more than the Russian woman did, but it hasn't stopped them from trying to influence others, often through force of state, which they are succeeding at.

Only allowing freedom of choice in all such matters and staying open-minded to new information as it comes in is truly effective in correcting course whenever a harmful idea or bad course of action, such as veganism or fruitarianism, is shilled.  That includes a free flow of information.  Apparently, no one could stop this influencer, who, as some have noted on Instagram, may have had an eating disorder that she billed to the public as a desire for a clean-eating vegan regime.  In that regard, she would be similar to the transgender people who market their mental illness to the public as a biological need for health but remain mentally ill no matter how many accommodations the medical community provides and the public gives in to.  They are all of the same piece, and they all want to impose their views on you — and they create harm, including harm to themselves. 

No one should be fooled anymore.  Any absolutist idea promoted for health or virtue is bound to lead to tragedy.  Zhanna's death is example one.

Image: Instagram.