Nobody grabbing a pack of McDonald’s McNuggets is expecting healthy food, or even something fully natural, but it can still be shocking to see just how long the ingredient list is. While horror stories about McNuggets and pink slime aren’t actually based in reality, there is a lot that goes into those processed hunks of chicken. McDonald’s altered its McNugget recipe back in 2016 to remove a lot of the preservatives and ingredients that people were concerned about, but there are still around 30 left to sort through. And while most of them are perfectly benign, or at least understandable, some of the names on that list are bound to confuse the average eater.
What really pumps up the length of McNuggets’ ingredient list is that McDonald’s uses combinations of many basic ingredients for each step of the process. For example, there is vegetable oil in the nuggets, which is a combo of four oils: canola, corn, soybean, and hydrogenated soybean oil. While you probably know that the first three, hydrogenated soybean oil is made by adding hydrogen to the cooking fat, which makes it solid at room temperature and helps preserve it. Vegetable starches help improve how crispy breading is, and McNuggets include a combo of five different ones: wheat, rice, pea, corn, and modified corn. None of these are really unusual, but you wouldn’t normally be using such a wide-ranging combo when frying something at home. With a McNugget, you are biting into something that has been precisely engineered.
McDonald’s McNuggets contain a wide range of fats, starches, and flavorings
Beyond all those added starches, the batter for McDonald’s McNuggets contains a lot of different flours. Number one is enriched flour, which contains a bunch of added nutrients like thiamine mononitrate, a B vitamin supplement. There’s also bleached flour, corn flour, and leavening agents, which are presumably there to get the perfect texture on the fry. Intimidating names like sodium acid phosphate and monocalcium phosphate are chemical leaveners used in conjunction with baking soda, while some, like calcium lactate, also act as a preservative.
The last string of ingredients is there for flavor. There is salt, of course, but also dextrose, which is a sugar additive made from corn. There is yeast extract, which is commonly added to food to give it a more savory flavor (the same way nutritional yeast acts as a parmesan substitute for many vegan dishes), and lemon juice solids provide an acidic element. The most ambiguous ingredient is just “spices,” which makes it hard to say exactly how many ingredients are used in McNuggets. And finally, you have the nutrition facts classic “natural flavors.”
While McNuggets’ reputation as industrial food is not undeserved, the long ingredient list isn’t as big of a red flag as you might think. After the 2016 clean-up, it’s mostly variations on ingredients you would use at home, with a few preservatives. Yes, McNuggets are science, no, they aren’t healthy, but they aren’t going to poison you either.
