Magically suspicious: Consumers claim Lucky Charms making them sick

As a kid, I’m sure I was as sugar-addled as many, but gateway breakfast cereals like Honey Comb and Apple Jacks were as far as I’d ever go.

I never used the hard stuff, like Froot Loops, Cap’n Crunch and Lucky Charms. As a little kid I had one bowl of Cap’n Crunch, and I remember it to this day: I went, “Whoa,” and gave my head a little shake, as if I’d just been socked in the jaw with a 2-by-4. Any time your cereal has so much sugar that you can look into your bowl and see it quivering, that’s a bridge too far.

So I never even went near Lucky Charms. Hearts, moons, stars, clovers — I assumed that’s what you saw after you took a bite.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised by the news that Lucky Charms is suspected of making people sick. According to The Washington Post, “The website iwaspoisoned.com, a real-time consumer reporting platform for food safety issues, shows that Lucky Charms complaints have been trending since late 2021. But they’ve surged in recent weeks, with reports surpassing 3,000.”

The complaints are “remarkably consistent, with consumers from coast to coast complaining of severe stomach issues. Many reports came from worried parents and grandparents.” An Ohio resident reported “Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and horrible belching with an awful taste, almost chemical.”

So that’s out of the ordinary, I take it. If they say so. But take one look at a bowl of this food-like product and tell me you would expect to come away with anything less. As Burt Reynolds said in “The End,” “Look at all that color; it looks like Walt Disney threw up.”

But hold da phone: Did someone say “iwaspoisoned.com?” What’s that, the website of Russian dissidents?

I took the liberty of checking out iwaspoisoned.com, and I don’t know. If I were Lucky Charms, my first line of defense is that this site ain’t exactly the Mayo Clinic, if you know what I’m saying.

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One woman wrote that she ate a cereal that had the same ingredient as paint thinner and came down with “abdominal pains, diarrhea, nausea, green poop, blood in stool n felt like I was going to throw up.” She then blamed Obama.

Look, lady, I’m not a doctor, but I’ll go out on a limb here and advise that if you believe your food contains paint thinner, feel free not to eat it.

Not that I want to defend General Mills, either. Any company that puts marshmallows in breakfast food deserves anything it gets. Out of curiosity I read the company history, and it should surprise no one that it was created in the 1960s, because the whole progression sounds exactly like some sort of far-out acid trip.

Wikipedia says the evolving marshmallows began “with the introduction of blue diamonds, followed by purple horseshoes, red balloons, green trees, rainbows, blue moons, leprechaun hats, orange shooting stars, a crystal ball, an hourglass, 6 new rainbow swirl moons and 2 new rainbow charms and a unicorn.”

Wow. Where can I get some of that, man?

And we’re not done. It speaks of an “orange five-pointed star being complimented by a white ‘trail,’” and “a solid yellow marshmallow that resembles an arched door … when liquid is added to the cereal, the sugar in the marshmallow dissolves and the shape of a skeleton key appears ‘as if by magic.’”

I’m not clear; are we supposed to eat this cereal or smoke it? If a little bit of nausea is all you come away with, you should be counting your blessings.

And we haven’t even discussed the mascot, a dancing leprechaun that, come to think of it, is a poster boy for a hallucinogen. But go on, keep eating this stuff. What doesn’t kill us can only make us weirder.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: It shouldn't be surprising some get sick after eating Lucky Charms