Dragon’s Breath cereal balls, are 2018’s latest snack craze. The treat is essentially a “dessert cereal snack that tastes like Fruit Loops dipped in liquid nitrogen,” according to Today.com.
The appeal of the trendy new dessert is that it leaves customers breathing “smoke like a dragon.”
While it may sound like all fun and games, Florida mother Racheal Richard McKenny is all too aware that these snacks can be downright deadly.
In an attempt to make other parents aware, she shared her frightening mall experience with her son Johnny in a viral Facebook post that has since been shared nearly 100,000 times.
Read Racheal’s urgent warning below:
“Dragon’s Breath WARNING
I want to share Johnny’s story with everyone to serve as a cautionary tale in hopes that it could prevent this from happening again.
There is a snack served at mall kiosks called ‘Dragon’s Breath.’ It’s a liquid nitrogen infused cereal that, when eaten, allows you to blow smoke like a dragon. Sounds pretty neat, right? There’s also a video that highlights people eating it. The video plays on a TV next to the kiosk and captures the attention of everyone that passes by. Johnny saw it and wanted to try it yesterday. Unfortunately, I let him.
As a bit of a history, Johnny has asthma. He has had a prescription inhaler for five years now, but we have rarely had to use it. It stays in my outing bag anytime we are doing something that involves a lot of physical exercise (like walking the theme parks, riding our bikes around the neighborhood, or going to the park) so that we have it on hand just in case of an emergency. We also have a nebulizer machine at home. That machine does get a little use to help clear his lungs whenever he has a bad cold or upper respiratory infection. Even then, the nebulizer only gets used two or three times a year. That being said, I did not have either one of those with us when we went to the mall. It never even crossed my mind that we might need them. I was wrong.
We took the kids up to The Avenues mall in Jacksonville yesterday. On our way out, we let the kids split one order of the Dragon’s Breath cereal treats. They had fun and it seemed harmless enough. We left the mall right after that and started the 40-minute car ride home. About 10-minutes into the ride home, Johnny started an occasional cough. Around 20 minutes in, the cough became really consistent. By the time we passed the Palencia sub division, he was coughing so bad that he was having trouble catching his breath. We knew he couldn’t breathe, and we knew that we couldn’t get him to the hospital in time.