The Shocking truth about what is in a McDonalds Chicken Nugget.

McDonalds Chicken Nuggets are a favorite food for many children. Parents who don’t like to cook might even kid themselves that McDonalds Chicken Nuggets may provide their kids with a dose of protein. (Protein is required by the body for growth, maintenance and repair of all cells.)

This morning while cleaning out my family van I came across some McDonalds Chicken Nuggets that must have been there for quite some time. I know this because I haven’t been to McDonalds in several weeks. Normally to find real chicken under a seat that had sat in a hot car for how many weeks, perhaps months would be a gross, stinky and horrid site. These nuggets however looked exactly as they did the day they were purchased. They didn’t even smell although admittedly I did not put one up to my nose to thoroughly check it.

My daughter, age seven, loves nuggets and I’ve always known they aren’t “good” for her but after finding these pristine, aged nuggets in my vehicle I started feeling alarmed that I was allowing her to eat them. So I immediately went online and looked up the ingredients and this is what I found from The Omnivore's Dilemma, A Natural History of Four Meals a nonfiction book by Michael Pollan published in 2006. Granted this information was from back in 2006, however I doubt the ingredients of the McDonalds chicken nugget have changed much since then.

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.”

After reading this I am convinced it is time to no longer allow her to eat McDonalds chicken nuggets. I encourage other mothers and fathers to limit how often you allow your children to eat them as well.!
If you would like more information about the book, copy and paste this: The Omnivore's Dilemma in the Amazon search box on my blog page.