The popular sugary oats-and-marshmallows cereal with an Irish theme has been blamed for dozens of cases of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea in recent months, and now the top US public health regulator is looking into the reports.
“The FDA takes seriously any reports of possible adulteration of a food that may also cause illnesses or injury,” the agency said in a Saturday statement.
However, according to reports, the FDA is looking into just 100 reports of Lucky Charms-related illness, but the popular website for self-reporting suspected foodborne illness instances, iwaspoisoned.com, has recorded vastly more, saying on April 14 it had recorded more than 3,000 cases of people getting sick from eating Lucky Charms across all 50 US states.
The iwaspoisoned.com reports take the form of personal testimonials, many of which describe stomach-rending experiences they believe were caused by eating Lucky Charms. Presumably, the FDA’s methodology is a little more scientific.
The other reports are not being totally dismissed, though: an FDA spokesperson told the Washington Post on Monday that “isolated incidents” and “complaints of a less serious nature” are monitored and “may be used during a future inspection of a company to help the FDA identify problem areas in a production plant.”
The cereal is made by General Mills, one of the world’s largest food production corporations, which manufactures Lucky Charms at a factory in Buffalo, New York.
General Mills has rushed to head off further doubt about its product, using the Lucky Charms “official account” on Twitter to say on Monday that “Food safety is our top priority. We take your concerns very seriously. Through our continuing internal investigations, we have not found any evidence of consumer illness linked to the consumption of Lucky Charms.”
Lucky Charms has long been maligned by health advocates as one of the unhealthiest breakfast cereals to appear on supermarket shelves thanks to its high sugar content and use of artificial flavors. Despite attempts to shed the sugar and fake flavors and improve their image, a substantially different product has so far failed to get past product quality managers.