Top 10 Junk Food-Related Deaths

Talk to any nutritionist, dietitian, trainer, or anyone with their head screwed on when it comes to health and nutrition, and you’ll get a pretty comprehensive view that junk food is not good. Period.

But if it only makes up a small portion of your overall diet, because you only enjoy the odd few fast food meals, it’s unlikely you’re really going to see any adverse effects from your occasional indulgences.

Direct Junk Food Deaths

Natasha Harris – Coke

After drinking two gallons of coke every day for two years straight, Natasha Harris sadly met her end from a heart attack in 2010. This coke consumption totaled a whopping two pounds of coke and one gram of pure caffeine every day. Such a huge sugary beverage consumption like this can easily lead to arrhythmia, an enlarged liver, and fat deposits in the arteries, eventually leading to a blood flow blockage to the heart. Natasha died from drinking coke. Don't be like Natasha.

Adam Deeley – Cup Cakes

Don't worry; most people won't die from eating cup cakes. This case is an extreme scenario. This was an eating contest that went horribly wrong. In 2008, Welsh student Adam Deeley joined a cup cake eating contest in a bar. In his efforts to claim the prize, he stuffed his mouth with so many of the little treats that he choked and suffered a fatal heart attack.

Scott Martins – Carbs

Maybe Dr. Atkins was right – carbs are the dietary devil.

Since childhood, Martins ate a diet obscenely high in carbohydrates – beans on toast, candy bars, chips and fries were his staples. Vegetables, lean meats and healthy fats certainly weren't. 20 years of this led Martins to develop hepatitis, a liver dangerous inflammation that isn't, as you see here, always viral in nature. His blood couldn't clot properly, and he died as a result of excessive blood loss through his gums during a dental procedure.

Unnamed Teen – Pancakes

A 19 year old couldn't get enough of pancakes, even when he thought they tasted slightly funny. It turned out the pancakes in question were over two years past their expiration date, had gone moldy, and the teen suffered an allergic reaction, meaning his lungs and larynx filled with mucus. Expired pancakes definitely take "junk" food to a whole other level. Don't forge tto check the expiration date!

Noah Akers – Hot Dog

Noah suffered from diabetes and childhood obesity, but these didn’t kill him directly. He died as a result of choking on a hot dog in an eating competition, which had the prize of a candy bar.

Whether or not these deaths were in fact directly caused by junk food is up for debate, as there could also have been numerous underlying causes playing a part. What is certain however, is that junk food played a role in all these tragedies, and that a culture that embraces fast food as a dietary choice contributed to t.

Slightly less bizarre is the complete truth that a high consumption of junk food does play a significant part in many cases of obesity, diabetes, stroke and heart disease. These deaths may not have the strangeness factor attached, but they’re still just as traumatizing.

Indirect Junk Food Deaths

The Twinkie Defense

You heard it here first, Twinkies are a murder weapon.

At least that’s what Dan White’s lawyers tried to argue at his trial for the killings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. White was supposedly clinically depressed leading up to the murders, and ate nothing but junk food – mainly Twinkies, before the killings.

Jeff Munro – Chips

In 2012, Jeff Munro, a young meth-addicted male was admitted to Toronto Don Jail, and quickly transferred to the psychiatric unit after developing mental health issues. According to reports, Munro ate a bag of chips belonging to his cell mate and was subsequently beaten to death over the issue.

Ricky Guest-Binns – Cheesy Fries

Cheese and fries – two combinations that epitomize everything that the faithful junk food addict stands for. Beware though, these can be deadly in more ways than one.

Guest-Binns was killed in 2012 after he failed to make his cheesy fries up to the high standards expected by one of his fast food joint’s customers.

He was killed with a single punch by Allan Glenny, of Blackpool, Uk, after Glenny deemed that the cheese on his chips wasn’t melted correctly.

Vincent Smith – Hot Chocolate

Smith was an employee at a chocolate factory in Camden, and fell from an eight foot platform into a vat of boiling hot chocolate. He died from head wounds.

Savannah Hardin - Dehydration

Not a specific junk food here, rather punishment for consuming too much candy. Savannah’s mother and grandmother decided one day that the girl was eating too much junk food, so made her run to work it off. Then they made her run some more. And a little more for good measure. The run totaled three hours and Savannah passed away due to dehydration and chronically low sodium levels..

These deaths certainly place less of a blame on junk food, and in some cases the rationale behind them being linked to junk food borders somewhere between sketchy and absurd.

On the whole, this article is taking a slightly lighter take on all the scare mongering tactics used by the media and public health campaigns to dissuade the general public from indulging in high-sugar, high-trans fat, processed junk food on a regular basis.

The truth of the matter is that you’re highly unlikely to suffer a tragic accident, or death as a direct result of eating junk, but you might be able to scare your kids, or other impressionable young junk food junkies away from their favorite burger bar or fried chicken shop with the creepy bedtime tale of the kid who died by bleeding through his gums after eating too many sweets, or the girl who had a heart attack from coke.

You should be completely safe to let your hair down once in a while and grab a pizza, some ice cream or stop off for a 12 piece bucket. You might not have these horror stories swimming around in your head, but remember that junk food can cause very real deaths, if you go overboard and let your dieting discipline wander a little too far.