I will readily admit that I don’t have a great diet.

While not a junk food junkie, I do down 4-5 Coke Zeros a day and have too many carbs in my diet to be healthy. While I am down about 25-30 lbs from my top weight, I could lose another 40 without being below my ideal weight.

But with that said, even my diet is far healthier than this poor woman who literally starved herself to death trying to eat what she thought was a healthy diet. Even worse, as a social media influencer, she has thousands of followers who have followed her advice. Some still insist that her diet couldn’t have killed her.

Vegan raw food diet influencer Zhanna D’art dies of ‘starvation’: report https://t.co/1yd9FIEOOS pic.twitter.com/pkHLKqqnkh

— New York Post (@nypost) July 31, 2023

I am not going to make fun of her, despite her obviously kooky ideas that make the average vegan look normal. Once you get into a mode where you can truly believe that eating only raw fruits, as apparently Zhanna D’art did, you have moved from the realm of exotic theories of nutrition into the realm of obsession and mental illness.

If anything this is more a story about how social media can magnify mental illness by reinforcing it. There is nothing inherently ridiculous about the idea that a 100% plant-based diet could be healthy, even if it is a lot more difficult to get all the nutrition you need. Everything I have ever read suggests that people who choose a wholly plant-based diet need to be very careful to balance their nutrition.

It is more difficult to believe that both vegan and raw are the only healthy way to go, but without diving deeper into the research I couldn’t do more than surmise whether you could live a healthy life with a diet solely consisting of uncooked veggies and fruits. Rice and beans are definitely off the table, obviously, so it would seem that complete proteins would be tough to get.

But all of those considerations are simply details. The key fact is that a person could make a living not only living an insane life but doing so while literally wasting away before the eyes of her followers. Whether a vegan raw food diet might be made healthy is one issue about which I am completely incompetent to opine (other than whether I would try it, which I never will), but I can confidently say that wasting away is not a good way to stay healthy.

She STARVED TO DEATH. That seems to be one definition of an unhealthy diet, and impossible to miss.

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.

“A few months ago, in Sri Lanka, she already looked exhausted, with swollen legs oozing lymph,” one unidentified friend told Newsflash. “They sent her home to seek treatment. However, she ran away again. When I saw her in Phuket, I was horrified.”

Her friend added, “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.”

There is something cult-like about social media for people seeking affirmation. A small circle of people reinforcing each others’ self-destructive behavior is a very powerful thing. So powerful that a reality that is obvious to people who are sane that it is impossible to miss.

So powerful that a person could literally starve herself to death while getting affirmation.

Sound similar to anything else? I can think of other social media phenomena that are similar. Can you?