Just this week I saw a sure sign that Halloween is approaching – a huge display at our local grocery store featuring General Mills’ Monster Cereals! But of the three varieties currently available – Franken Berry, Count Chocula, and Boo Berry – only one of them has been written up in a medical journal.
That’s right – Franken Berry, the pink monster with Boris Karloff’s voice, has a real medical condition named for him.
Stephen King’s Cujo is known for its titular villain, a rabid killer St. Bernard. But tucked into a side plot is something even scarier— a children’s breakfast cereal that spurs a nationwide panic. The cereal contains a dye that, although harmless, doesn’t break down in the digestive tract and results in stools that are, in the words of one character, “as red as a stop sign.” In other words, it appears as if the children are pooping large amounts of blood.
This may sound like one of King’s macabre inventions, but it was almost certainly based on real cereal-related occurrences since 1972.
This is the tale of Franken Berry Stool – an officially recognized ailment that, although it seems crazy now, sent more than a few kids to the hospital complaining of bright pink poop, described by an attending physician as “resembling strawberry ice cream.”
How did a delicious Halloween-themed pink cereal land so many kids in the ER that it earned coverage in medical journals and created a new medical condition?
Wouldn’t a glow-in-the-dark cereal additive be fun?