They would be bad enough if they were merely chunks of chicken that had been breaded and deep-fried in oil. One 2004 documentary describes McDonald's nuggets as chickens “stripped down to the bone, and then 'ground up’ into a chicken mash, then combined with a variety of stabilizers and preservatives, pressed into familiar shapes, breaded and deep fried, freeze dried, and then shipped to a McDonald’s near you.”
Actually, McDonalds switched to all white meat McNuggets in 2003, after a federal judge called the popular poultry bites “a McFrankenstein creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook,” CNN reports. According to one report, chicken is only about 50 percent of a McNugget; the remainder is a mixture of corn-derived ingredients, sugars and synthetic substances.
According to McDonald’s website, McNuggets’ ingredients include dimethylpolysiloxane, a form of silicone also used in cosmetics. Another additive is tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), a preservative used in vegetable oils and animal fats. Contrary to a scary claim in the book, “A Consumer’s Guide to Food Additives” that’s been widely repeated in other books, including the bestseller, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and on the Web, TBHQ is not a form of butane, a component of lighter fluid. In fact, TBHQ contains, in part, an arrangement of four carbon atoms called a “butyl,” as do many harmless foods, including butter.
If a four-piece serving of Chicken McNuggets carried a nutrition label, at first glance it wouldn’t seem too scary: 190 calories, 12 grams of carbs and 12 grams of fat. But consider that more than half of those calories (56 percent) are from fat—and protein accounts for a mere 19 percent. Add a whopping 360 mg sodium, and its image as “the more nutritious fast-food snack” fades.
