Beware the McNuggets - scary
So What Really Is In A McDonald's Chicken McNugget?
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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!
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Molly
Diggin in the Post Bag - Environmental Health Connections
