Gross: McDonald's McNuggets Contain Silly Putty Chemical

Whether it is this or something else I do not and will not be doing business with McD's and many other fast food establishments. Cut through all the smoke and the bottom line is, these foods will still kill you.

This is a ridiculous article. Just because a certain chemical is also used in something else that shouldn't be eaten doesn't mean it can't be used in a food product. This article is a prime example of alarmism.

"Why are chicken nuggets foaming in the first place?" You sound like an idiot. Millions of people eat Mcdonalds every day and nothing happens to them. Just because it has an anti-foaming agent, something that sounds weird or gross, isn't a valid complaint.

"A good general rule is not to eat anything with ingredients you can't pronounce". ARE YOU SERIOUS? THIS IS THE STUPIDEST THING IVE EVER HEARD. can you pronounce Eicosatetraenoic acid? That's an omega-3 fatty acid that's part of a healthy diet. I guess that rule doesn't work does it. The point is: You don't know more about what you should and shouldn't eat than FDA scientists who are experts in this field.

Stop being an alarmist.

Unfortunately, Dr. Nestle (whose doctorate is in Biochemistry, though her qualifications for the specific discipline we are examining - Nutrition - seem to be adequate), along with the author here, are spreading needless alarmism. Just because you cannot pronounce an ingredient in your food does not indicate that the food is unsafe, or even that it's something that you should avoid. This article should raise a lot of flags for skeptical readers.

First off, let's look at dimethylpolysiloxane. While the author seems to want us to be alarmed at....I guess the number of syllables, the fact of the matter is that the substance is nutritionally and biologically inert according to all the information that we've got on it. It's contained in many sorts of processed foods, and you - the reader - have probably eaten some of it in your lifetime, in addition to any passive exposure you might have had from the other applications that particular chemical has.

So what about tertiary butylhydroquinone? That can be bad, right? Well, yes - in too high of a concentration, it can be poisonous. That would be why nobody would ever use enough of that preservative to hurt anybody as anything other than a deliberate poison. Similarly, you can kill yourself if you eat too much nutmeg at once, but nobody worries about putting a fine dusting on their cappuccino. Many things can be poisonous if a ridiculous, improbable amount of them are ingested - it is hardly a unique property of this specific preservative.

Ms. Seldman tells us in her writing that ingestion of a full gram of tBHQ can cause a number of adverse effects (the attribution for the book, as an aside, goes to one Ruth Winter, who to my cursory scan seems to be a long-time science reporter), which might very well be true, but she neglects to examine precisely how much oil you would need to ingest to cause even these temporary effects, much less any permanent damage. If they're using a standard 50lb deep fryer, approximately 4.5 grams of this purportedly dangerous preservative would be contained IN THE ENTIRE OIL CONTENTS for the system as a whole, so in order to get up to the danger number that she cites, you'd have to drink somewhere in the neighborhood of ten pounds of oil with your chicken. I carry the dubious honor of having ingested most of the largest order of nuggets that you can get (50) at one point in my misspent youth and I didn't put ten pounds of total food in me, let alone the quantity of oil that would have been left on the food after it was removed from the fryer.

As usual, when confronted with a proposition that seems wildly out of pace with our daily experiences (i.e. that chicken nuggets contain significant quantities of chemicals that would be harmful to your health) the best approach is to be skeptical and examine the claims. In this case, while you can have a chuckle at the polysyllabic contents of your lunch if you want to, I can't find any reason to be alarmed at all. I say eat up.