“I TURNED to Lisa and said people get paid for eating that on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!”

Big Brother duo Mario Marconi and Lisa Appleton were shocked to discover a dead maggot inside their Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut cereal box.

The Latchford couple, who shot to fame on last summer’s series of the hit Channel 4 programme, say they were stunned – and certainly won’t be adding maggots to their new healthy eating range.

Mario, aged 43, said: “It must have been in the corn – luckily it was on Lisa’s spoon!

“We were all eating breakfast at the table and she saw it on her spoon. We looked closely and we could see it was a crunchy corn maggot. It’s enough to put you off food for life!”

Mario made a complaint to Kellogg’s following the find last Saturday morning.

Rachel Fellows, from Kellogg’s, said the maggot was in fact the larva of a small pecan weevil – a tree insect.

She said: “We’d like to thank Mr Marconi for getting in touch with us after finding something unexpected in his cereal.

“An entomologist has confirmed that what he found was a small pecan weevil. They can grow, quite naturally, inside the shells of pecans where they eat the nuts.

“Very occasionally, people find them in whole pecans they buy for eating at home or in packs of pre-shelled nuts they might use for baking.

“We use pecan nuts in Crunchy Nut Nutty and every batch is shelled and checked before being chopped and put into our cereal. It seems this small bug slipped through these rigorous checks and made it into the finished product.

“We would like to apologise to Mr Marconi and reassure him that we only very rarely get complaints like this and the weevils are completely harmless, even if eaten.

“We’d also like to send him a case of Crunchy Nut Clusters to make up for what must have been a very disappointing breakfast.”