Posted on 07/11/2005 7:08:48 PM PDT by gd124
When Gina Gough was rushed into hospital in agony, with severe abdominal pains and jaundice, doctors initially suspected hepatitis and put her to an isolation ward.
In fact, the 22-year-old's condition was the result of a three-year diet that consisted almost entirely of crisps. She was eating up to 15 bags a day and went into hospital weighing 14st.
Her case demonstrates the potential dangers of a junk-food diet and follows last year's controversial film Super Size Me, in which a documentary-maker ate nothing but McDonald's food for a month and monitored the subsequent deterioration in his health. It is likely to renew fears that Britain's younger generation faces unprecedented ill-health and early death due to poor diet.
Miss Gough, a nursery nurse from Cannock in Staffordshire, said: "My mum used to tell me that all the crisps I ate would make me ill, but I shrugged her off because I didn't think anything this bad could happen to me. I could have died."
She developed gallstones up to an inch-and-a-half in diameter, which formed from the excessive amounts of cholesterol in her body. Most gallstone patients are twice Miss Gough's age. When her gall bladder was removed in a four-and-a-half hour operation last autumn, surgeons were shocked to discover that it had filled with stones and swollen to the size of a tennis ball. They said it could have exploded at any time.
Gina Gough Miss Gough in hospital
Miss Gough has since started to eat low-fat meals and take regular exercise, and she hopes that her story will be a warning to others. She now weighs 12½st.
Her appetite for the snacks developed after she was made redundant in 2000, and began spending her days in front of the television. "I'd start off with a packet of crisps for breakfast, and then I'd have a second packet. I wasn't tempted by any other food. I was depressed after losing my job, but I felt good after eating a packet of crisps," she said.
She put on five stone and she said her personality changed: "My concentration slowed and I felt tired all the time. I was a very happy-go-lucky person before, but I started to get mood swings and I became very snappy."
Miss Gough believes that she was addicted to "highs" generated by the fat and chemical additives in the crisps. In 2003, a study by the Rockefeller University in New York, suggested that biochemical changes caused by large quantities of fat and sugar were comparable to the addictive reactions caused by heroin and cocaine. Researchers found that snack foods could "reconfigure" the body's hormones to crave more fatty food.
Now Miss Gough is calling on crisp makers to put warning labels on their products. "I didn't listen to my parents, but official labels, telling people to eat crisps in moderation and warning about possible adverse effects on health, would certainly have got me thinking. Children are eating foods such as crisps with no idea about what they could be doing to their bodies."
Dr David Haslam, the chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said that Miss Gough had the worst diet he had ever come across. "She was lucky it was her gall bladder that nearly exploded, and not her heart. Poor eating habits cause obesity and illness. Crisps should be eaten once every couple of weeks - not to the exclusion of everything else."
A spokesman for the Food and Drink Federation, which represents several crisp manufacturers, said: "Eating too much of anything - even fruit - is not a good idea. Snacks and treats can always be enjoyed in moderation.
"The idea of putting health warnings on any food simply isn't justified as it would not help consumers understand how that product can fit into their daily diet."
ummmm...
and if i eat 17 bags of sugar or 37 cans of tofu or 100 hot dogs or 3 rocks....i will get sick, lets put labels on EVERYTHING!
How do you say "idiot" in Britspeak.
No. Her case demonstrates her idiocy.
Who takes this stuff seriously? Come on! We shouldn't be taking idiots like this seriously, and then consider changing policy based on someone's idiocy....
Wow .....subsisting on a diet of nothing but crisps (crisps are what we call chips in the US). That's just amazing.
Apparently it's "Gough"!
What's a crisp?
ya gotta love some terms though..."being made redundant led her to eating crisps", ....classic.
I say put the label across her mouth. It will do her much more good there.
Crisps crisps..I say, jolly good show, eating all those crisps. What the freak are crisps?
It's a chick, DD! (he exclaimed in defense of his own usually stoopider gender)
potato chips
bloody nutter.
The culture that allows individuals to duck out of responsibility for one's own actions is what made me doubt liberalism. Shortly thereafter, I discovered that I had always been conservative.
That does not make me better than anyone else. It just means that if I do something...like eat 15 bags of chips a day...I understand that I made a very bad choice and accept the consequences.
Labels, indeed.
Supposedly a study was done (somewhere, sometime) that claimed a man can subsist on potatoes and milk alone.
Can't be.
Chicks would eat chocolate instead.
It's definitely a guy and the reporter screwed up.
IMHO
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