the next time you reach for a bag of chips to help you weather the covid blues, spare a thought for the british teenager who went blind after years of consuming nothing but junk food. the “fussy eater,” whose story was documented in the
annals of internal medicine last year, was first taken to a doctor at the age of 14 after experiencing prolonged periods of fatigue. a blood test revealed he was suffering from anemia and doctors sent him home after giving him an injection of b12 and a lecture — one we could all probably use — on proper dietary habits.
a year later, the 15-year-old was back in the doctor’s office reporting vision and hearing problems to baffled physicians who couldn’t find anything amiss after mri and eye tests returned normal results. things only got worse from there.
over the next two years, the patient’s eyesight steadily declined to the point that vision in both eyes was just 20/200, a result considered legally blind in canada. further inspection uncovered damage to the patient’s optic nerve — the bundle of fibres connecting the eye to the back of the brain — and low levels of selenium, copper and vitamin d.
doctors quickly turned their attention to the teen’s diet. “the patient confessed that, since elementary school, he would not eat certain textures of food,” wrote the study’s authors, a group of researchers from the university of bristol in the u.k.