The teenage girl who can only eat Tic Tacs

They are normally the thing people eat at that point in a restaurant when you’ve ploughed through a pile of garlic bread, spaghetti and cheesecake and are too full-up to face anything else.

But for 17-year-old Natalie Cooper, the mints alone are the meal.

For as long as she can remember Natalie, from Oxford Road, Shepway, Maidstone, has been afflicted with a mystery illness that makes her sick every time she eats anything.



Anything that is, except that smallest of mints: the Tic tac.

For reasons that doctors are unable to explain, Tic tacs are the only thing she can stomach, meaning she has to get the rest of her sustenance from a specially formulated feed through a tube.

But as she explained, she certainly doesn’t have an aversion to food. “I like eating everything you’d expect” says Natalie, “I enjoy eating, it just comes back up. It happens pretty much immediately and it’s no effort. I went from Trebor Extra Strong Mints to Polos and ended up with Tic Tacs. They give me a bit of energy but I eat them mostly to get rid of hunger; it’s a psychological effect.”