Francesca Biagioli A Russian raw food blogger, Maxim Lyuty, has been sentenced to eight years in prison for the death of his newborn son. This ugly story, however, has nothing to do with the choice to follow a vegan or raw food diet but is linked much more simply to the madness of this "father"
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You might remember the story of the raw vegan influencer, Zhanna Samsonova, who passed away in 2023, likely due to an infection that thrived in a body weakened by overly restrictive eating habits.
Today’s news from Russia brings an even graver incident. In Sochi, Maxim Lyuty, a blogger known for advocating a raw vegan lifestyle, has been sentenced to eight years in prison for the death of his newborn son in the spring of 2023. Alongside him, the baby’s mother, Oksana Mironova, received a two-year sentence of corrective labor (reduced as she was also a victim of her partner’s delusions).
According to the court’s findings, the baby died of starvation under bizarre circumstances. Born without medical supervision and unregistered, the infant was subjected to an extreme diet known as the prana diet from the first days of his life, which involved purported nourishment from sunlight alone, without food or water. This “dietary regime” led the blogger to repeatedly force his newborn to fast (thus denying the mother the possibility to breastfeed him) and even immersed him in cold water to “harden” him.
The dire consequences of this cruelty were quick to appear: on March 8, 2023, the infant, less than a month old, died. Shortly before, the parents had taken the child to a hospital, where doctors faced the severe effects of malnutrition and pneumonia he had developed. Despite their efforts, the child did not survive.
Maxim Lyuty, once an icon in the world of raw diet and wellness, is now a name synonymous with the worst outcomes, the death of a helpless child neglected and used as a guinea pig for insane experiments.
Initially, Lyuty claimed that his wife’s iron deficiency was the cause of their baby’s death, a newborn weighing just over a kilogram. During the trial, however, he stated to the court:
“I recognize my guilt. Had I known about the prematurity of my son’s birth and the mother’s contraindications during pregnancy, I would have immediately sought medical help at the first signs of the child’s discomfort, regardless of the mother’s preferences and beliefs.”
This statement, however, reveals his madness, as the issue was clearly not the premature birth or any pregnancy complications faced by the mother.
Lyuty was accused of preventing the mother from breastfeeding the child and seemed to want to conduct a sort of experiment on his son, feeding him exclusively with solar energy, then to promote this as the dietary path to follow.
However, it’s crucial to emphasize one essential point: this tragic event cannot be linked to the vegan or raw diet for which this Russian influencer was known, but rather to the irresponsible and dangerous actions of an individual with apparent psychiatric problems.
The case of Maxim Lyuty is a painful testament to the risks that can arise from extreme ideologies, rather than a critique of vegetarianism or veganism which, when followed in a healthy and balanced manner under the supervision of health professionals, are absolutely safe dietary choices (even for children).
Source: Kkommersant
