I’m sure many of you have come across news reports about the passing of a raw vegan influencer—for reasons that we still don’t fully understand.

Firstly, although I never met Russian personality Zhanna D’Art (real name Zhanna Samsonova), I would like to acknowledge her passing and send my sincere condolences to her family, friends, and everyone who knew her.

What shocked me about this incident is how wild news outlets from all over the world got with the story. It was featured in some of the biggest newspapers in the world, like The New York Post, Daily Mail, The Independent, etc. For a few days, it seemed like the whole world was talking about this person.

But, I couldn’t help thinking: tens of thousands of people are dying every day as a direct result of eating the standard western diet, hospitals are full of sick people where it’s even difficult to find an open bed, the health systems of pretty much every country in the world are collapsing because people are getting fatter and sicker than ever before; and nobody’s talking about it, are they?

Instead, they discuss the death of a single woman who was following a raw food diet. By the way, there are different types of raw food diets, including vegan ones, and we still don’t really know the true reason for this person’s demise.

In fact, what we do know is that Samsonova’s mother told Russian news outlets that her daughter had died of a ‘cholera-like infection,‘ which may not have anything to do with nutrition at all. But you see, a death from an infection of this type would not have made the news.

I’ll explain why this news story went viral so quickly. In essence, journalists write to please their readership, which, in most cases, is made up of the lazy, average public that likes nothing more than to continue eating their beloved bacon, get fat, and die without ever wanting to make an effort to improve their diet.

That is why any news story that you hear about someone apparently dying from eating an extreme diet, as they call it (which, if we are talking about my raw food diet – it’s not extreme at all – I wrote an article about this), reaffirms the previous point. Why bother with fruit and veg? It’s OK to keep eating junk food. That’s the easy option, and that’s what most people want to hear.

By the way, you never see journalists writing about the tens of thousands of people who have overcome serious illnesses by changing their diet to raw foods over the decades. No, they don’t go there. No journalist would ever write about that, because it would put a lot of pressure on their readers to change their diet too, and that’s not good news; it doesn’t sell newspapers, you see!

But in our world, there are more intelligent people; we are not stupid. As I always said: In order to understand nutrition, you need to understand politics.

If you really care about your health, you shouldn’t pay much attention to what the majority of the public thinks. As the lyrics from the song “The Boxer” by Simon & Garfunkel say: “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” It rings very true.

Food is the worst addiction – worse than heroin, cocaine, and tobacco combined. I know many people who understand that their food is poisoning them, and yet they still choose to consume it anyway. It’s okay; I respect their choices. But the world should also respect the choice of people who want to heal themselves through food and feel well.

Fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts are our natural diet according to our biology, and this is what real science (not business) says. Whether the majority of people are willing to accept this fact or not is beside the point.