‘The anger’:Woman claims Cheerios are the cause of her daughter testing positive for lead exposure
Is there lead in Cheerios? That’s what one woman in a now viral video is claiming.
TikTok user @kaytipie says her daughter recently had a blood test. The results came back and her blood was infected with lead.
So, she took to the entire house to see what could have been the cause of the potential poisoning.
Daughter tests positive for lead exposure
“The anger. I just swabbed everything in my house. We’re talking 90 swabs, I swabbed everything. You know what popped positive?,” she said.
She then pans her camera to show a demonstration she conducted with multiple cheerios. One with a normal Q tip with water on it and then another with a lead detector.
“I tested 20 of these [expletive], every single one of them turned pink,” she said. She claims in the video when lead is mixed with sodium rhodizonate, it turns pink if there is the presence of lead, which according to the National Institute of Health is accurate.
Are Cheerios to blame? Or is there a simple explanation?
In the comments, some users shared their own anxieties about the state of food production.
One user said, “The amount of comments saying it must be something else is alarming. Our food is poison people! Wake up!”
However, other commenters bring up good points. Like one user, who wrote, “Guess what else reacts with sodium rhodizonate? Iron... Guess what's in Cheerios? Iron... It's not reacting to lead in the Cheerios; it's reacting to the iron... There is no lead in Cheerios.”
It is true that Cheerios contains iron. A serving of the cereal has 12.6 miligrams of iron, or about 70% of your daily value, which is of course based on a 2,000 calorie diet.
Cheerios have been linked however, to pesticides in them that have been known to cause reproductive issues. According to a study by the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, Chlormequat Chloride was found in 92% of non-organic oat-based foods tested in 2023, which includes Cheerios.
Chlormequat Chloride is a plant growth regulator and is often used on grain crops which would include those that cheerios and other oat based products are produced from. The chemical has been said to have potential harmful effects on reproductive functions.
An update
In an update, @kaytipie says TikTok has been taking her videos down and censoring her. She said spent days researching and labs and lawyers to help her but says it was dead end after dead end. She claims to have found one lab she feels can help verify her findings.
It is unclear if General Mills, the manufacturer for Cheerios, has had an issue with this in the past.
@kaytipie ♬ original sound - buckysaveragesimp
The Daily Dot reached out to General Mills to see if they have any comment regarding this woman’s claims. We also reached out to the original poster of the video to see if she has any updates regarding her case.
Internet culture is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. You’ll get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.
The post ‘The anger’:Woman claims Cheerios are the cause of her daughter testing positive for lead exposure appeared first on The Daily Dot.