According to the website Iwaspoisoned.com, there have been over 7,300 cases of people having food poisoning symptoms after eating Lucky Charms cereal. These people are reporting the classic gastrointestinal symptoms of food poisoning like nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. There are so many reports that the FDA has begun investigating. General Mills, the makers of Lucky Charms, says they have found no evidence of illnesses from Lucky Charms and no link between the cereal and the illnesses. So far nothing has come of this investigation. It is doubtful that anything will ever come.
It is also likely that the reports of getting sick from Lucky Charms will subside this whole thing will just go away. This is not because authorities are unable to trace such outbreaks or because of some kind of conspiracy at work, however.
While people on the internet are speculating about food additives in the cereal or other ingredients that may have made people sick, the chances are that most or all of these reports are an example of correlation but not causation.
Simply speaking, at any time, thousands of people have food poisoning symptoms and many of them will have eaten Lucky Charms. Informally crowdsourcing such outbreaks on a website is not likely to lead to reliable statistics.
Chances are, the people reporting on the website had food poisoning or some kind of upset stomach, saw reports of the “Lucky Charms outbreak” on the web, and thought to themselves, “I had Lucky Charms last week and I was sick.” It would only take one or two reports on such a website to lead to a deluge of similar reports and, in reality, it could have been any nationally branded cereal.
Whenever we get food poisoning, we tend to think that the last meal we ate made us sick. If you eat a bowl of Lucky Charms and then get sick, you will, of course, assume that the cereal is the culprit. However, whatever you think caused your food poisoning may not be what caused your illness.
If it were true that the last thing you ate is what made you sick, the CDC and local health departments would have a much easier time tracking outbreaks of food-borne illness.
It is certainly possible that your symptoms came from food you ate the night before. But, it is also possible for your symptoms to have come from food you ate days ago or even a week ago!
Symptoms from the most common foodborne pathogens take anywhere from 12 hours to, yes, a week to appear. Usually, they appear within 24 hours after the contaminated food was eaten.
Symptoms from norovirus, the most common type of food poisoning, develop 12 to 48 hours after exposure. So, there is really no way to tell which meal from within this time frame is responsible unless a family member or friend happens to develop similar symptoms and you both have only one meal in common.
It is unlikely, as well, that a food additive would cause such severe and immediate symptoms in so many people. The cereal would have to be contaminated or adulterated, which would have likely already have been discovered.
Even in a real outbreak, of the perhaps hundreds of people who get sick, many thousands may erroneously report that they also got sick from the food or product, most of them having received no medical treatment or diagnosis.
In this case, we probably have mistaken reports of illness from Lucky Charms leading to more mistaken reports. It is highly doubtful that Lucky Charms is the cause of this outbreak. There likely is not outbreak, at all.