When Extreme Picky Eating Leads To Undesirable Consequences

Eating potato chips and other junk foods may be okay if eaten in moderation. It is entirely a different story, however, if your diet only consisted of those foods. It would lead to undesirable consequences. Such is the case of this UK teenager. His unusual diet has led to chronic nutritional deficiencies, which left him blind and deaf. It is believed that this is the first case in the UK of a person going blind and deaf due to junk food diet.

Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the case report says that the boy visited his family doctor when he was 14 years old, complaining that he was experiencing fatigue. The boy back then was not taking medications, and he seemed healthy. He described himself as a “fussy eater”, however, and “tests showed that he was low in vitamin B12 and had anemia.” He was prescribed with injections of the vitamin and was advised how to eat a proper diet.

His condition worsened a year later, as he developed hearing loss and was sent to another doctor, and he would soon after start having vision problems.

But tests at the time, including brain scans and standard eye exams, didn’t reveal any underlying physical causes. Over the next two years, his vision continued to worsen, and by the time he saw an eye specialist, he was diagnosed with damage to his optic nerves.

Again, tests looking for a possible explanation like a hereditary disease came up short—but a more sensitive test found that he was still low in vitamin B12. And when they asked about his diet, he revealed that since he was a kid in grade school, he had flat out avoided foods with “certain textures” and almost exclusively ate chips, white bread, processed ham and sausage; he had also stopped taking vitamin B12 shots. Further tests showed that he was deficient in copper, selenium, and vitamin D too, and his bones were unusually weak with low mineral density.

The low vitamin D likely caused the weak bones, but the other deficiencies, the authors wrote, “likely contributed to the patient’s vision and hearing loss.”

Find out what happened to him next over at Gizmodo.


Image Credit: Didgeman/ Pixabay

By Franzified