Unmasking the mystery: These are the 30+ ingredients hiding inside your Chicken McNuggets

Oftentimes, looking behind what goes into the fast food we eat is an easy way to put you off from some of your favorites… even if it’s for a short time.

For lovers of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, be aware that this may be unsettling.

A four-piece nugget contains around 170 calories, 9 grams of protein, and 10 grams of fat. Though considered a ‘healthier’ option on the menu, that may only be useful in comparison to other items.

The classic bites have seventeen ingredients, according to the McDonald’s website. None are super surprising. White boneless chicken leads the list, followed by water, vegetable oil, and flour.

How much of a chicken nugget is actually chicken?

But we still can’t get past the first ingredient without questions coming to mind. White boneless doesn’t tell us very much about what parts of the bird are making it into the nuggets. While the company has advertised that it mainly uses breast meat, one study published in 2013 analyzed nuggets from various fast-food restaurants and found otherwise. Though one cannot be sure that they were purchased at McDonald’s, it’s undeniable that the nuggets on menus across the national chains vary widely in shape, taste, or nutritional information. The researchers found that between 40 to 50 percent of the nugget was made up of “skeletal muscle, with the remainder composed primarily of fat, with some blood vessels and nerve present.”

Additionally, as noted by Michael Moody, in their piece on the beloved treat, we are not given any information on what percent of the product chicken makes up. Moody spoke with Dr. Christopher Ochner, a research associate at the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center, who explained that if you compare the calorie and fat content of white boneless chicken and chicken nuggets, you will find that the latter has a much higher fat concentration.

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