Vegan influencer Zhanna Samsonova, who died earlier this week, existed exclusively on fruit, vegetables and their juices.
The death of a 39-year-old influencer has shone a light on an out-of-control industry, writes Melissa Twigg.
When Zhanna Samsonova posted weekly updates on Instagram and TikTok about her raw tropical fruit diet, she was hailed by her thousands of followers as an inspiration. Shunning all meat, fish, nuts, dairy, grains and even water, the Russian influencer - who was based in south-east Asia - existed exclusively on fruit, vegetables and their juices.
Earlier this week, she died aged 39; her mother blamed it on a “cholera-like infection”, but friends claim she was emaciated and collapsed from malnutrition. On social media, Samsonova repackaged what we can now agree was hugely disordered eating as “the ultimate diet” that could “make people healthier” and her death has raised yet more questions about the unregulated wellness industry and its tendency to turn orthorexia (the obsession with eating healthily) into something aspirational.
“In cases like this, there are clearly mental health issues going on - and it was the guise of wellness that allowed her to lie to herself and others,” says nutritionist TC Callis. “My issue is mostly that she shared that ludicrously unsubstantiated message with her followers. It’s like watching someone speeding down a motorway - you can take yourself out, but please be careful with everyone else.”
Samsonova’s diet may be extreme, but it is not all that unusual. Leanne Ratcliffe is an Australian YouTube personality whose channel accumulated over 330 million views. Her raw vegan “frugivorous” diet mostly consisted of bananas and she courted controversy when she claimed that not getting her period for nine months was a sign her body had fewer toxins to flush out via menstruation. This doesn’t stack up scientifically: a lack of bleeding in women of child-bearing age is usually a sign of illness or malnutrition.
Equally, those who realise that their eating habits are becoming obsessive will find themselves at odds with the online community they have built up. The model and former vegan-lifestyle enthusiast Essena O’Neill was forced to delete all her social media accounts after announcing that her diet had made her “lost” and “sick”. The backlash from the vegan community was immediate and O’Neill later said she received death threats.
The wellness industry is now worth an almost absurd-sounding £2.8 trillion (NZ$5.8t) globally - and that figure alone illustrates just how persuasive its pseudoscientific claims are, and how many of us believe that a perfect future free from illness, excess weight, anxiety and depression awaits if we just detox correctly and learn how to rebalance our bodies.
“The problem is that ‘detoxing’ is absolute nonsense and there is no such thing as ‘rebalancing’,” says Callis. “We already have these magnificent tools for detoxing - our liver and our kidneys - and there is absolutely no need to drink green juice for five days to clean our gut or whatever other nonsense is being said.
“Yes, putting toxic substances into our bodies is bad, and of course I support looking at what we’re consuming and reducing the toxic load, be that fizzy drinks, sugar, processed food, smoking or too much alcohol,” she says. “What I don’t support is [the wellness industry] packaging up this quite simple concept with the word ‘detox’ in order to make money.”
And while eating healthily in this era of widespread obesity is essential, the diet advice wellness influencers peddle can - at times - be outright dangerous. Many advise a reduction in dairy intake, which is worrying as one in two women in the UK develops osteoporosis by the time they are over 50; a problem that has been linked to not having enough calcium in their teens and twenties.
Equally, women like Samsonova and Ratcliffe both pushed their followers in the direction of a raw vegan diet, which is so restrictive that it can quickly lead to malnutrition and is especially problematic for women trying to conceive as the lack of fats can cause the reproductive system to shut down.
“I’m in support of meat,” says Callis. “We spent millions of years evolving whilst eating meat and our bodies want that high-energy fat. We learnt how to control fire to make food more nutritionally available and we are meant to be omnivores. What we did not evolve to eat are the thousands of chemicals that have entered our diet, but the solution is not to be a raw-food vegan; if it were, we would have different teeth and a much longer gut.”
And yet in so many influencer posts, meat and dairy are spoken about as if they are dirty and pollute the gut, and that the only way to achieve the higher plane of “clean eating” is by heavily restricting the diet until little more than vegetables, fruit, seeds, nuts and water remain.
Unsurprisingly, nearly all major wellness influencers are also thin and attractive. As a result, “wellness” can feel as if it is still mostly about weight loss, and the underlying message on many of these profiles is clear: thin is healthy and healthy is thin. Viewed in this light, the industry becomes far less about well-being and more about a return to the extreme diet culture of the past - a culture we have to pretend no longer exists in our new era of body positivity.
“I do think wellness helps a lot of people hide an eating disorder from themselves,” says retired psychologist Sheri Jacobson, the founder of Harley Therapy. “And when they are crafting a reality online and living by it, it becomes habitual and entrenched and they genuinely believe they are doing the right thing - particularly if they are getting approbation from others.”
Although diet forms the largest part of wellness culture, extreme exercise can be equally worrying. Doctors have noticed a rise in a condition called rhabdomyolysis - a serious illness where damaged muscle releases proteins into the blood. ‘Rhabdo’ can be caused by extreme physical workouts that are done on not enough food. It is extremely dangerous and can cause kidney failure and even death.
American stylist and influencer Melanie Pace has spoken about developing the condition after doing a 5km Warrior Dash (similar to a Tough Mudder) followed by a CrossFit class two days later; she collapsed from rhabdomyolysis, spent a week in hospital and later suffered from hair loss and migraines.
Other fitness influencers like Jo Lindner have died from what is believed to be excessive exercise. And earlier this summer, a 21-year-old influencer named Cuihua died after attempting to shed 200 pounds (90kg) as fast as possible while at a weight loss camp in China.
This feels like a particularly modern phenomenon, born from both the aspiration of following high-profile wellness brands, and the conflicting messages we receive constantly from all around us about how we should look and what we should eat.
“Wellness culture sits in juxtaposition to all the unhealthy foods we are bombarded with every time we leave the house,” says Jacobson. “There is just so much talk around the kinds of foods you should be eating or cooking or buying - it’s everywhere and very difficult to escape, so wellness can feel like a refuge for people who are anxious about it. Particularly when it is being propagated by appealing, attractive people who are seemingly living well.”
Callis also increasingly sees wellness culture as a dangerous American import that is infecting British culture.
“A lot of people with disordered attitudes to eating believe fully in what they are saying and are desperate to spread their beliefs,” she says, “but when nutrition becomes about belief rather than science, we get into dangerous territory. What we eat should never feel like a religion - but sadly these days it often does.”
Detoxing
Arguably the most popular term in the wellness industry and the reason for juice diets, fasting and much more, it doesn’t actually mean much as we detox when we go to the loo and breathe – we even detox through our skin.
Alkaline diet
Another hugely popular fad that is designed to change the pH of our bodies and make them less acidic, it doesn’t make much sense as, if we were successful in this quest, it would deactivate our enzymes and put us in a coma.
Clean eating
While this should mean making simple, healthy changes to an existing diet, it has transmuted into a very strict eating regime focused almost exclusively on fruit and vegetables.
Gut health
While problems with the gut remain very real for much of the population, the modern phenomenon of cutting out certain foods to ‘improve’ gut health often confuses the bowel, which doesn’t like rapid changes in diet and can often react badly.