What's really in a chicken nugget?

Found this article in several major newspapers. Makes you think before eating out or what you eat anytime.

A few days ago, Gannett News Service published a story asking, ‘What’s in a chicken nugget?’.

If chicken nuggets are your default dinner every time you hit the drive-through with your kids, you've probably wondered how healthy they are.

It all starts on a chicken farm.

Usually, only retired egg layers are destined for nugget fame since their meat is dirt cheap. Tendons, tissue, cartilage, organs, and other chicken extras are ground up into a fine poultry paste. Because that paste is typically crawling with bacteria, it's washed with ammonia, and treated with an artificial flavoring. To get rid of the pink color, the paste is dyed.

Doesn't sound too appetizing, but plenty of kids are making it part of their regular diet and not collapsing, so it can't all be bad, can it?

"We basically looked at the nuggets like these and determined that they're 53 percent meat," said Dr. Bruce Hemming, a microbiologist with Microbe Inotech Laboratories. The St. Louis-based company conducts food-safety audits for the food-services industry.

What about the rest of the nugget? "Breading and other components make up the coating of the nugget," Hemming said. "The big issue is the nutritional content here, but you have to talk to a nutritionist."

Nutritionist Sally Hemming at Microbe Inotech describes a chicken nugget as "half chicken, half nugget, more than half fat." And that fat is hydrogenated fat, the "bad" fat.

So only half of the nugget is chicken or chicken parts. The other half is not chicken. And remember, half of those calories are coming from fat. The rule of thumb is that for every 100 calories, look for three grams of fat or less.

Most chicken nuggets don't pass the test, according to information on company websites:

» A four-piece serving of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets are 190 calories, 100 from fat with 10 grams of protein in a 64-gram serving.

» At Chick-fil-A, a four-count Nuggets in the kid's meal has 130 calories, 54 from the 6 grams of fat it contains with 14 grams of protein in a 57-gram serving.

» From the grocery store, a five-piece serving of Tysons Chicken Nuggets has 270 calories, 160 from fat with 14 grams of protein in a 90-gram serving.

A top-of-the-line nugget we tested had only 85 percent of the expected value of meat. They're made up of the worst parts of retired egg layers, ground up, turned into a pink paste, and loaded with fat.

Sally Hemming said a less expensive nugget may contain even less meat. And while she said eating nuggets once a week is acceptable, she suggests looking for nuggets labeled "white meat chicken" since they're better for you.

By law, the ingredients on a package should be listed by weight and chicken should always be the first ingredient.