Nobody walks into (or drives through) a fast food restaurant expecting to order a health food. But you might, at the very least, expect that what you order is, well, what you order. Chicken is chicken and beef is beef, right? Think again: What many fast food meals feature is real-life mystery meat.
Take, for instance, the chicken nugget. A paper published online last month by The American Journal of Medicine looked at two nuggets from two different, unidentified national fast food chains: Each was comprised of just 50 percent or less muscle tissue, which is what we typically define as chicken, Reuters reported. The rest of the pair of nuggets was made up of a hodgepodge of pure fat, blood vessels, pieces of bone, nerves and cartilage.
“What has happened is that some companies have chosen to use an artificial mixture of chicken parts rather than low-fat chicken white meat, batter it up and fry it and still call it chicken,” lead author Dr. Richard D. deShazo, of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, told Reuters Health. “It is really a chicken by-product high in calories, salt, sugar and fat that is a very unhealthy choice.”
Beyond the obvious gross-out factor, these chicken bits probably aren’t particularly harmful, explains David Katz, M.D., founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center and author of the new book Disease Proof. But they’re definitely not doing the body any good, and typically have a poorer overall nutrition profile compared to plain white-meat chicken.
“It stands to reason that the enormous, high volume mass production of model-shaped chicken bits — that are then concealed inside breading — would not be made from the best parts of chicken because the best parts of chicken are more expensive,” he tells HuffPost. “All of this is, of course, substantially less nutritious than what we typically think of as chicken.”