#swarmcampaign Blog

Magnetic Cornflakes

Corn flakes are made of maize, sugar, and metals like iron.That makes your breakfast cereal quite attractive, because iron is magnetic and thus your breakfast bowl has something to share with the Earth’s crust. What does you breakfast cereal have in common with Earth’s crust you might ask me? They both have the same material, i.e. iron, in them.

Like many metals, iron is magnetic, so if you have strong enough magnet, you will be able to pick it up, not your down of breakfast cereal, because it doesn’t contain enough iron for the magnetism to overpower gravity pulling the weight of all that cereal down. But you may test how to extract the iron from that cereal and pick it up with a magnet. But first of all, check the label of your breakfast cereal in order to find out how much iron each serving contains – the more the better, for this test, not really for your stomach.
Take a bowl and spoon, a strong magnet, a white paper piece, and here we go, the rest you can see on the video above.
Don’t worry . The iron metal that you detect in your cereal does not come from a faulty piece of machinery. It’s added in dust-like filings to supplement our diets. Human need iron, hemoglobin in the blood uses iron to transport oxygen around the body and our body can’t synthesize iron. For this reason, many food manufactures add iron to their products. It’s a kind of junk food, but it’s for your health, they say.

But if you don’t want to swallow your daily iron with your breakfast cereal, you might take it at lunch. Some spinach salad, some beetroot carpaccio or lens will provide you all the iron you need. It’s perhaps not as crunchy and sweet as cornflakes, but it’s an experience for your taste. Try it.