British Teen Goes Blind After He Ate Nothing but Chips, Fries and Ham

An English teenager became legally blind after eating a steady diet of French fries, chips, and the occasional piece of ham for more than ten years, a report in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine revealed this week.

The unidentified boy from Bristol, England, first visited the doctor when he was only 14-years-old after complaining of chronic tiredness. At the time, his doctor diagnosed him with anemia and a B12 deficiency and sent him on his way with a B12 shot and instructions to eat a more varied diet.

But by the time the teenager turned 15, his vision and hearing had begun to fade, and despite an MRI scan showing no abnormalities doctors were mystified. It wasn't until doctors asked him about his diet, that they figured out what was going wrong.

"His diet was essentially a portion of chips (fries) from the local fish and chip shop every day," the boy's doctor, Denize Atan, told BBC News. "He also used to snack on crisps (chips) — Pringles — and sometimes slices of white bread and occasional slices of ham, and not really any fruit and vegetables."

However, the boy had an aversion to "certain textures of food" and could only tolerate certain items like "chips and crisps" because that's the only types of food he wanted and could eat. Despite the fact the boy ate every day, he'd become malnourished thanks to the lack of nutrition in the meals he had been taking.

By the time he was 17 years old, the boy's condition had worsened to the point where his optic nerve had been damaged to make him legally blind.

"He had lost minerals from his bone, which was really quite shocking for a boy of his age," Atan said.

The boy was prescribed nutritional supplements and was referred to a mental health service to treat him for a condition known as "Avoidant-Restrictive Food Intake Disorder." Individuals diagnosed with this condition often develop while children and become uninterested in food and are sensitive to various textures.

"Nutrition does not just depend on how much you eat but what you eat and this case illustrates that fact. Here was a boy who consumed enough calories—he had normal height and weight and no visible signs of malnutrition—but he restricted his food to crisps and chips [fries] and a bit of processed pork. In other words, energy-dense foods of little nutritional value. The case illustrates the fact that calorie intake and BMI are not reliable indicators of nutritional status," Atan explained.

"He now takes multivitamin supplements but I cannot say that his eating behavior has changed much—despite seeing gastroenterologists, dieticians, the child mental health team and eating disorder specialists," she said.

The boy has not gone completely blind - his peripheral vision is still good enough to allow him to walk around on his own, but with the blind spots in his vision, the boy will be unlikely to drive, watch TV or tell faces apart. Nutritional optic neuropathy is treatable if caught early enough, but left too long, the damage can become permanent.

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