So What Really Is In A
McDonald's Chicken McNugget?
Chicken McPoison
Author unknown
5-14-7
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a fascinating book that details the changing eating habits of Americans. I can't recommend it highly enough. It explains how, over the last 30 years, we have become a nation that eats vast quantities of corn much more so than Mexicans, the original "corn people."
Most folks assume that a chicken nugget is just a piece of fried chicken, right? Wrong! Did you know, for example, that a McDonald's Chicken McNugget is 56% corn?
What else is in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget? Besides corn, and to a lesser extent, chicken, The Omnivore's Dilemma describes all of the thirty-eight ingredients that make up a McNugget one of which I'll bet you'll never guess. During this part of the book, the author has just ordered a meal from McDonald's with his family and taken one of the flyers available at McDonald's called "A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts: Choose the Best Meal for You."
These two paragraphs are taken directly from The Omnivore's Dilemma:
"The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There's some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.
According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the "leavening agents": sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are "anti-foaming agents" like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of food additives , dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable.
But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill."
Bet you never thought that was in your chicken McNuggets!
the mcnugget(i feel dirty just typing out the name) is the main food of little kids at mcdonalds. i just dropped my son off there to work. he wont touch the food. and heres another little interesting tidbit. they tell the kids working there that they cant have a big mac on their break. you would think its the cost, right? no. they tell them its bad for them. they are restricted to a reg hamburger or cheeseburger.
Used to sneak one in here and there when nothing else was available and I was new to the Low Carb diet. After about the second time of being noxious I started to wonder about the carb content...Well the injection of corn syrup was the end of that for me.
That was the last thing I thought I could eat there since the buns are so carb rich due to the sugar (worse corn syrup) content...
I always pictured McDaonalds as having a huge vat of Mac Mix goop that they used to make every item on the menu, as well as the containers, differing only in which molds they poured it in and how they colored and cooked it (or froze it and sweetened it for the shakes). Haven't figured out yet how they do the salads . . . .
"Haven't figured out yet how they do the salads . . . ."
LOL!
How about very thinly sliced colored plastic pieces that dissolve (when wet) and after a few chews. ;) Do you remember the fruit roll-ups when you were a kid? -- coulda been plastic! -- now imagine lettuce colored articles. Ta Da! Solent Green?
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Chicken McNugget -- The Awful Truth? 
