You remember when you were a kid your parents would constantly tell you how important it was for you to eat your fruits and vegetables? Well, apparently one teen in the U.K. either didn’t listen or never got that advice because he’s now facing the devastating consequence of blindness.
As reported by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution (@ajc,) a teenage boy from the U.K. has gone blind as a result of only eating a diet consisting of French fries, chips and white bread since he was in elementary school. The blindness was caused by severe vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition damage.
When the young boy was 14, he was taken to the hospital after complaining of feeling tired—it was then he was diagnosed with macrocytic anemia and a vitamin B12 deficiency. He was promptly prescribed supplements, but he didn’t take the vitamins or change his diet, causing his condition to get worse, ultimately leading to his blindness.
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A few years later he had significantly lost most of his vision. Dr. Denize Atan, the doctor who treated him, explained the details of the shocking blindness outcome:
“His diet was essentially a portion of chips from the local fish and chip shop every day. He also used to snack on crisps — Pringles — and sometimes slices of white bread and occasional slices of ham, and not really any fruit and vegetables. He explained this as an aversion to certain textures of food that he really could not tolerate, and so chips and crisps were really the only types of food that he wanted and felt that he could eat.”
Despite the unhealthy diet, the boy was not overweight or underweight, but instead suffered from severe avoidant-restrictive food intake disorder. Dr. Atan also revealed that the boy has “blind spots in the middle of his vision. That means he can’t drive and would find it really difficult to read, watch TV or discern faces.”
The saddest outcome of this case is that it was completely avoidable and could have been treated if it was caught early enough, but the boy’s refusal to take the supplements in the beginning and continuing his unhealthy diet led to the irreversible blindness.
Roommates, what are your thoughts on this?
