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An overweight mum who secretly had a gastric band fitted ate herself to death when food backed up in her throat and suffocated her.

An inquest heard retired midwife Dianne Bernadette Cooper-Clarke, 64, was found dead in her home in Camborne, Cornwall, in December last year.

She had undergone a gastric bypass two years earlier after reaching 20 stone.

The surgery reduces the stomach to a small pouch the size of a thumb.

A postmortem examination revealed that a backlog of food – which couldn’t fit into Mrs Cooper-Clarke’s restricted stomach – clogged her throat and stopped her breathing.

Pathologist Hugh Jones, who carried out the examination, explained how her oesophagus had swelled to the size of a normal stomach, adding: “Your oesophagus is the size of a little finger, but hers was as big as her stomach. There was too much food in there.

“A gastric pouch reduces the stomach. People get around this by making their oesophagus bigger.

"They eat a bit and think it goes somewhere, so they have more.”

Mrs Cooper-Clarke, originally from Trinidad, West Indies, told her family she had undergone surgery for cancer in 2010.

Instead, she secretly had a gastropothy.

The inquest in Truro heard that the surgery, which had been carried out properly had a “massive impact” on her weight and high blood pressure.

Giving his verdict, coroner Andrew Cox said: “This is not a natural cause of death. It is not an ­accident because she chose to eat.

"She died of an ­elective surgical procedure of a gastric bypass.”