"The iron in the cereal is pure iron! Really! It is the same iron found in nails and automobiles. It is mixed in the cereal batter along with many other additives. The very tiny particles of iron quickly react with hydrochloric acid and other chemicals in the digestive tract, changing to a form easily absorbed by the body."
That's a secondary school lesson guide for a science class in which the students extract the raw iron shavings from the cereal. It's a trivial process (you need a magnet, some water, and some crushed cereal - high iron content cereal obviously yields more dramatic results).
And now I've done a quick bit of Googling, I think I'd loosely speculate that iron with strong magnetic fields, consumed, might affect the performance of some medical equipment that use magnetic fields to perform their detection.
Specifically MRIs can detect oxygen carrying red blood cells because of the iron in hemoglobins and the change in magnetic strength when oxygen is attached to the red blood cell. Hemoglobins are apparently renewed, in part, by digesting iron (in things like cereals).
A wikipedia entry on MRI suggests that the sensitivity of FMRI (functional MRI) is fine enough to determine brain activity based on the magnetic response of hemoglobins.
So if the consumed iron had a stronger magnetic memory, this could have an effect on measurements of existing medical equipment which is tuned to the current norm.
"The iron in the cereal is pure iron! Really! It is the same iron found in nails and automobiles. It is mixed in the cereal batter along with many other additives. The very tiny particles of iron quickly react with hydrochloric acid and other chemicals in the digestive tract, changing to a form easily absorbed by the body."
That's a secondary school lesson guide for a science class in which the students extract the raw iron shavings from the cereal. It's a trivial process (you need a magnet, some water, and some crushed cereal - high iron content cereal obviously yields more dramatic results).
The Times also has an educational piece on extracting iron from cereal: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...
You can see in this video the extracted iron: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V265pGgsBnM
View from 2:30.