Honey Comb Cereal Makes Me Sick

And may be giving me cancer….

Last night after dinner I was still hungry so I had a small bowl of cereal.  Honey Comb cereal was readily available in the cupboard, so I grabbed it and had a little snack.  I felt just fine until about 1am this morning.  The my stomach woke me up to let me know there was an emergency evacuation going on!

Could it have been something else that made me sick?  Maybe, but I don’t think so, I ate the foods that I usually do every day.  No changes, nothing new except for the honey comb cereal.  Turns out my brother-in-law had some of that same box a week ago and was very ill as well.  Could have been just that box, but I’m not going to buy it anymore.  And not just because it made me sick, but because of what I found in it.

I was not too surprised that something called honey comb is made up of almost all corn flour, as most cereals are all corn.  What did confuse me was the last thing on the ingredients list.  BHT.  What is BHT?  Being the nerd that I am I looked it up on wikipedia.  Besides being a food preservative BHT or Butylated hydroxytoluene is also used in:

 cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, jet fuels, rubber, petroleum products, electrical transformer oil, and embalming fluid.

WHAT?!?! Embalming fluid!?!?  You have got to be kidding me.  I ate that stuff!  Oh and it gets better…

In the 1970s, Benjamin Feingold, a San Francisco MD …claimed that BHT could produce hyperactivity in some children. In addition, some controversy surrounds the link of BHT to cancer risk

Lovely!