- More than 1,000 people have reported stomach upset after eating Lucky Charms.
- Reports of vomiting and diarrhea related to the cereal began showing up on iwaspoisoned.com in late 2021.
- The FDA is investigating the claims, but there's been no official recall of the cereal.
The US Food and Drug Administration is looking into reports of food poisoning from people who ate Lucky Charms cereal, according to the website IWasPoisoned.com.
More than 1,300 people have described instances of stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and colorful stools after they or their children consumed the sugary cereal, via the site's report form.
Most of those reports have come in April 2022, but stories of stomach troubles from Lucky Charms eaters have been trending on the site since late 2021, founder and CEO Patrick Quade told NBC.
On Friday, Quade told the outlet that it was "the biggest surge of reports related to any single product" in the history of the consumer-led food safety site, which got off the ground in 2009.
More reports poured in shortly after, since Michael Che and Colin Jost mentioned the claims of Lucky Charms-related illness in their latest Weekend Update segment of Saturday Night Live. Many users described a history of stomach upset, and said they connected it to the cereal after hearing of other reports.
There's been no official recall of the cereal from General Mills or the FDA, although both parties have launched their own investigations.
"Food safety is our top priority. We take the consumer concerns reported via a third-party website very seriously," wrote Andrea Williamson, General Mills spokesperson, in an email to Insider. "After a thorough internal investigation, we have not found any evidence that these complaints are attributed to our products. We encourage consumers to please share any concerns directly with General Mills to ensure they can be appropriately addressed."
Consumers are reporting liquid diarrhea for days
The most common symptoms reported by Lucky Charms consumers via IWasPoisoned.com include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach pain.
"Got extremely, violently ill after eating," one consumer from Pennsylvania wrote. "Been four days of vomiting, nausea, diarrhea. I've lost 8lbs because I can't even keep water down for very long, let alone food."
In some cases, people described odd-colored stools. One parent in California wrote of their 8-year-old's "green, watery diarrhea" that they suspected was linked to eating Lucky Charms.
Many of the reports came from concerned parents of kids with upset stomachs. One Georgia mother, Racquel Ashman, spoke with Aria Bendix for NBC. She said her 7-year-old daughter had diarrhea, cramps, and "was vomiting everywhere" after eating the cereal.
It was only a couple of days after Ashman had a bowl of Lucky Charms herself that she made the connection.
"On Monday when I woke up, I started feeling absolutely terrible," she told NBC. "I had abdominal cramps. It literally felt worse than my labor pains. I was very confused. I was just vomiting. I couldn't keep anything down at all. I had diarrhea, too. I kept getting chills."
What to do if you get sick
A note on IWasPoisoned.com recommends that anyone who fell ill after eating Lucky Charms report it. If you report via the crowdsourcing site, there's a checkbox on the form to alert relevant authorities.
The FDA has its own reporting system for food safety issues, which hasn't counted nearly as many instances of Lucky Charms-related illness. The agency told NBC there had only been three reports related to the cereal in 2021, and 41 reports since 2004.
It's possible that the reports of stomach troubles could have nothing to do with Lucky Charms. Outbreaks of norovirus, which causes the stomach bug, have been on the rise as well, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The only way to know for sure is to test the cereal for contaminants. The team behind IWasPoisoned.com recommends that people who got sick keep leftover Lucky Charms for testing, and said it will communicate procedures for testing to everyone who reports their case.