Have you ever had the experience of finding a Chicken Nugget on the floor board of your car that had been sitting there for weeks (or maybe months)? If you have kids, this has probably happened to you at some point. The striking thing about finding an old Nugget is that it looks just the same as it did when it was dropped onto the floor. The other striking thing is that it never emitted an odor like a real piece of chicken would after it begins to rot. I have had this experience, and it doesn’t take a scientific study to conclude that something is amiss with fast-food Chicken Nuggets.
Nevertheless, a new study in The American Journal of Medicine shows precisely what’s been missing—namely, chicken! In a nutshell, researchers found that the main ingredients of chicken nuggets are fat, epithelium, bone, nerve, and connective tissue, not chicken meat. From the study:
We bought an order of chicken nuggets over the counter at each of 2 national fast food chain restaurants near our academic health center in Jackson, Mississippi. One nugget was selected at random from each box…
The nugget from the first restaurant… was composed of approximately 50% skeletal muscle, with the remainder composed primarily of fat, with some blood vessels and nerve present… Higher-power views showed generous quantities of epithelium and associated supportive tissue…including squamous epithelium from skin or viscera…
The nugget from the second restaurant… was composed of approximately 40% skeletal muscle… Here too, there were generous quantities of fat and other tissue, including connective tissue… and bone spicules.
The study arrives at four main conclusions:
(1) Fast food chicken nuggets have become a staple of the American diet.
(2) The composition of the present day chicken nugget is not well understood.
(3) Our histopathological analysis of representative chicken nuggets shows that chicken is not necessarily a major component.
(4) The term “chicken nugget” is a misnomer.
You can read the rest here.
P.S. If you continue to eat chicken nuggets, I won’t judge you.
(HT: John Dyer)