WHEN I read about the tragic death of Zhanna Samsonova, the vegan raw food influencer who is thought to have starved to death on a strict diet of various fruits and juices, it sent a chill down my spine.
This sad tale brought back the awful memories of my own extreme raw diet, that made me feel so ill I ended up in the emergency room.
My journey began in late 2018.
After years of throbbing pain from chronic migraines, I started to look at alternative remedies.
One thing I kept hearing was how certain foods, such as meat, chocolate, and cheese, could trigger migraines.
Those of us who live in a twilight world of low-grade wellness are suckers for anything that offers us respite from chronic pain.
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When a nutritionist friend told me to try a vegan raw diet, “It will cure your migraines overnight,” she sang, I immediately turned to Google.
Hundreds of sites promising “instant cures” popped up.
Yet, following a vegan raw diet, I was not only thin and gaunt, with limp hair and dark circles under my eyes, I found out I was lacking crucial vitamins and minerals.
As a result, I suffered a series of severe health complaints.
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It all started so promisingly, a week after deciding to go raw vegan, I emerged from my local Whole Foods groaning under armfuls of vegetables and birch juice.
I threw out my tins of tuna, walked hastily past the aisles of lamb and sirloin, and stocked up on all kinds of exotic fruits and chia seeds.
At first, I don’t deny that I felt fantastic, and my skin glowed, problems, however, started to creep in slowly.
After less than two months, I began to experience waves of extreme tiredness.
My limbs felt heavy and just going to the shops felt like wading through treacle.
As time went by, I felt increasingly worse and continued to lose weight at an alarming speed.
My face looked drawn and friends commented on my appearance.
“What's happened to you?” one woman asked.
“You look anorexic,” others joined in.
I was also being affected mentally, there is hard evidence that the joyful response to food gives rise to better health.
Sitting down to a plate of grass when you are a confirmed meat-eater is more like a prison sentence than a pleasurable experience.
Over the next few months, my mood imploded like an egg-free souffle.
I became that smug vegan guest at dinner parties, rolling my eyes when the meat course was brought out.
Tut tutting under my breath, as I nibbled on my emergency stash of hemp seeds, I was so ravenous.
After seven months, I felt so weak I practically fainted on the bus one day.
Eventually, I went to see my primary care physician.
“It’s probably just the menopause,” she said, as I sat slumped in the chair rattling off all my symptoms.
Finally, after my condition worsened, she took one look at my thin frame and sent me for blood tests.
Could this be cancer I wondered, my blood running cold?
I had read that one symptom is sudden weight loss and by now I looked like a suntanned stick.
Thankfully it wasn’t, but the results were shocking nevertheless.
I was so low in iron I had become dangerously anemic and my lymphocytes, killer immune cells, were also on the lowish side, not to mention a seriously low reading of Vitamin B12.
And science backs this up.
Research in The Journal of Nutrition found that 100 percent of participants following a raw vegan diet consumed less than the recommended 2.4 micrograms of vitamin B12 per day.
Moreover, more than a third of the participants were vitamin B12 deficient at the time of the study.
And it is not just the B vitamins that are lacking in vegan diets.
A study in the National Library of Medicine on the effects of calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and vegan diets on bone health shows they are associated with significantly lower BMD values.
The study was carried out with respect to omnivorous diets and found extreme veganism could, potentially, increase the risk of fractures.
Despite the warnings about deficiency in important minerals, vitamins, and general ill health, extreme veganism continues to soar in popularity.
Glamorized by slim health bloggers and sold as an aspirational aesthetic by hip celebrities, we are still rushing to fill our stomachs with kimchi and smashed avocado.
According to Statista data from 2023, 6 percent of Americans are currently vegan, a staggering increase from 0.6 percent in 2016, and a figure which is rising every year.
In my case, it wasn’t until I ended up in the emergency room that the penny dropped.
One Saturday lunch on a rare date, I was slurping on a berry smoothie, when suddenly I felt incredibly sick and the sounds in the restaurant seemed ear-splittingly loud.
People’s voices and the music drilled into my brain.
I was shaking and gripping my head, “It’s the pain,” I sobbed.
My date took one look at me and took me to the nearest hospital.
After an hour in the ER, I was discharged with a bag of powerful painkillers and stern warnings about my diet.
I knew then that the madness had to stop.
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Nowadays, I am glad to say I am back to eating delicious lamb chops and mozzarella salad, and cooked food has never tasted better.
Hopefully one day the tide will turn, and we will stop to think before we throw that tasty beef burger into the trash.
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