When I was young, my parents told me endlessly to stay away from junk food and eat all my vegetables or I’ll die of cancer, go blind and/or deaf (or some other debilitating illness depending their creativity that day). As it turns out, their attempts to scare me into a healthy diet wasn’t completely unfounded.
According to The Independent, a 14-year-old UK teenager has been left irreversibly blind and deaf after living off a junk food diet that consisted of nothing but *checks notes* French fries, Pringles, sausages, processed ham and white bread.
Apparently the teen started abandoning anything remotely approaching healthy when he was just seven and opened his arms to all things junk food ever since.
You’d think that a diet like this would offer up some outward warning signs but his mother says he remained “thin as a rake” the whole time. However, she began to suspect something was up when he started bringing home his packed lunches completely untouched, not to mention that his brother and sister were eating anything and everything put on their plate.
There’s apparently a medical reason for why the teen went on this gamer’s diet as he was diagnosed with “avoidant-restrictive food intake disorder”, in which sufferers avoid food with a certain texture, smell or taste.
Huh. That just sounds like he was picky AF.
You’d think the kid would learn his lesson after losing his sight due to a damaged optical nerve and losing all hearing but Dr Denize Atan, the doctor who’s been caring for him, says he’s still eating junk food but with vitamin supplements sprinkled on top these days.
Dr Atan also says it wasn’t necessarily the processed food that caused problems for the teen, it was because he was eating only junk and nothing else. Gee, who would’ve thought having a diet of unhealthy food would lead to health problems?
This unique case did make it into a medical journal as a case study to warn other people about the dangers of embracing a gamer’s diet so the teen’s got that going for him at least.
So when next time someone tells you to lay off the junk food and to eat something healthy, maybe listen to them. Otherwise you’ll end up blind, deaf and the subject of a scientific case study that’ll form the basis of an article making fun of why a junk food-only diet is stupid and dangerous.