Lucky Charms: 4 reasons to keep your kids away from this devilish cereal
Written by Ajay Chohan, Founder @ Small Batch Goodness
Lucky Charms - General Mills
Why the Lucky Charms product labeling is misleading: All the health claims on the top right of the Lucky Charms box are a disguise to cover the true nature of this highly processed cereal full of harmful additives tied to inflammation and behavioral problems in children
Potentially Harmful Ingredients in Lucky Charms: Modified Corn Starch, Trisodium Phosphate, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Added Sugars
Potentially Harmful Process used by Lucky Charms: Extrusion
YOU PICK UP A BOX of Lucky Charms, look at the adorable picture and the bold health stats at the top, and gullibly throw the cereal in your shopping cart. Not realizing that Lucky Charms uses a high heat manufacturing process and is full of unwanted additives as well as artificial colors and flavors.
Let’s dive right into the 4 reasons why the Lucky Charms cereal does not belong on your breakfast table. The article now includes information on the food poisoning concerns around Lucky Charms that began in late 2021.
Reason 1: Lucky Charms is made via extrusion – an unnatural process that denatures our cereal grains and makes them toxic.
Lucky Charms is made via a process called extrusion. In this, an extruder takes in the mixture of grain, sugar and fats through extremely high pressure and temperatures, and emits the mixture out of tiny holes on the other end. The extrusion process is how cereals like Lucky Charms achieve the various fancy shapes. The issue is, this high heat process changes the very nature of grains and their protein structures. These puffed denatured proteins become foreign and potentially toxic to our human nervous system.
Paul Stitt, author of Fighting the Food Giants, had covered the ill effects of extrusion extensively, including research on rat studies where rats who were fed extruded cereal died faster than those starved and only given water. Toxic puffed grains are not the only thing this cereal hides behind its devilish charm though.
Please Note: Here is my article on the 3 Wholesome and Alive Breakfast Alternatives to the Processed Cereal.
Reason 2: Lucky Charms is full of the ultra processed ingredients corn starch + modified corn starch with links to inflammation, and contains the processing agent Trisodium Phosphate
Jumping into the additives, after oats & sugar, corn starch and modified corn starch are the main ingredients in Lucky Charms. Modified corn starch is made by altering corn's physical & chemical properties to make it resistant to high temperatures and to have it used as a stabilizer or gelling agent - ew (1)! Wholesome, unprocessed foods do not need modified corn starch - cereals made via extrusion do! To make things worse, modified corn starch has been linked to inflammation and an increase in waist lines. Anything modified, puffed or extruded means processed - and not something that humans evolved naturally eating. It is best to avoid cereal and other foods containing modified corn starch.
Same goes for the Trisodium Phosphate in Lucky Charms, only a highly processed cereal would need this ingredient, as this processing agent is added to cereals to help the slurry mixture go through the high pressure extruder. Trisodium Phosphate is the infamous “paint thinner” with industrial uses…and also added to our cereals.
Reason 3: Lucky Charms has a rainbow of artificial colors with links to hyperactivity, behavioral problems in children, allergic skin reactions, as well as cancerous tumors during animal testing.
Let’s now get into the bevy of synthetic food dyes present in Lucky Charms. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest the Red 40 dye, which is made from petroleum, contains carcinogens that sped the development of cancerous tumors in mice. To add to that, 15% of people experienced allergic skin reactions to this dye (2). Red 40 has also been linked to hyperactivity in children (2). The Center for Science in the Public Interest thus recommends Red 40 be excluded from foods. Yellow 5 is associated with hyperactivity in children and is similarly recommended to not be in foods (3). Yellow 6 caused possible adrenal and testicular tumors in rats (2). Blue 1 is associated with allergic reactions and possible kidney tumors in mice (3).
It is certainly not worth having cancer causing carcinogens in our daily cereal just for the sake of bright coloring. Why would General Mills add these synthetic food dyes to cereal and then market them aggressively to our children?
Reason 4: Food poisoning concerns surrounding Lucky Charms.
Beginning in late 2021, consumers began complaining of getting food poisoning with symptoms including diarrhea & vomiting after eating Lucky Charms. Now, the food safety site iwaspoisoned.com has received over 3,000 complaints from people getting sick after eating the cereal. The FDA has also received over a 100 complaints so far this year in 2022 and is now “investigating.” While the FDA investigates, we can look over the thousands of sickness complaints on iwaspoisoned.com to get our cues.
One customer from Ohio states “Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and horrible belching with an awful taste, almost chemical. Household of 4 all experienced the same thing. 2 people had the illness at least three times each. The other 2 had it twice. The symptoms hit very fast and violently and passed in about 24 hours. I have never felt so miserable in my life.” Another common symptom being reported is green poop.
Yikes. Given all the additives Lucky Charms has, it’s difficult to track down the poisoning source. Having said that, as we covered in Reason 3, Lucky Charms literally has 4 petroleum based food dyes. These food dyes are often a source of impurities and contaminants, and very well could be the culprit here.
You should not be eating Lucky Charms.
Even outside of the food poisoning concerns, Lucky Charms is one of the unhealthiest cereals given it’s full of harmful synthetic colors and food additives. Why in the world would General Mills try to feed this to our kids? The next time you find yourself researching if a cereal is gluten free or vegan (important questions), ensuring that it is actually nourishing for our bodies is equally important. Because if not, why is the cereal part of our daily breakfast anyways? We need to stop falling for misleading advertising claims of cereal manufacturers with their clever areas of emphasis. Please save your kids from starting their days off with these “Lucky” “Charms.”
What makes a better breakfast?
Anything we eat should be wholesome and alive. It should come from nutrient dense and biodiverse soil. The harvest should then only be minimally processed. And it needs to be absolutely free of synthetic garbage and additives. You can read my article here for ideas on quick yet healthy substitutes to eating overly processed cereal.
Lastly, here are the other varieties and flavors of Lucky Charms that are equally bad for you:
Lucky Charms, Gluten Free Marshmallow Breakfast Cereal with Unicorns
Chocolate Lucky Charms, Marshmallow Cereal with Unicorns, Whole Grain
Fruity Lucky Charms, Whole Grain Marshmallow Breakfast Cereal
Lucky Charms Honey Clovers Breakfast Cereal
Is (or was) Lucky Charms part of your breakfast routine? Share your thoughts below!
Sources - Research for Yourself!:
1. https://foodadditives.net/starch/modified-food-starch/
2: https://cspinet.org/sites/default/files/attachment/food-dyes-rainbow-of-risks.pdf
3. https://cspinet.org/sites/default/files/attachment/dyes-problem-table.pdf