Chicken Nuggets, Twinkies and Candy...Do You Really Know What You're Eating?

Do McDonald's Chicken Nuggets make an appearance on your menu monthly? Have you ever ate a Twinkie and loved the creamy center? What about candy like M&M's, Good n Plenty, or any of that yummy candy with the hard outer candy shell? You would be surprised to know that some of your favorite food contains ingredients that you would never in your wildest imagination actually consume.

Let's start with Chicken McNuggets from McDonalds. We've all wondered at one time or another if they were really made of chicken, or could it be a soy product? Somewhere I even heard it was a mix of chicken and fish. It turns out that part of that assumption is right. Chicken McNuggets are actually part chicken and many other ingredients. There are 38 ingredients that go in to a nugget, 13 of which come from corn. This includes; cornstarch, mono-tri and diglycerides, dextrose, lecithin, chicken broth, yellow corn flour, the corn feed chicken itself, and even more cornstarch for the batter, cornstarch for a filler, vegetable shortening and partially hydrogenated corn oil. Some of the other ingredients are quite frankly very frightening to think that we are eating. These ingredients are synthetic and usually come from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. First there are the "leavening agents"; sodium aluminum phosphate, monog-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These all keep the fats from going bad. The most frightening of all is the tertiary butylhydroquinone, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to help preserve freshness! TBHQ (tertiary butylhydroquinone) is a form of butane (lighter fluid). The FDA allows processors to use it sparingly on food. I don't know about you, but homemade chicken is sounding much better right about now!

Now, we'll go straight to that favorite childhood treat, Twinkies. Like the Chicken McNuggets, Twinkies contain alot of ingredients, 39 to be exact. I will give you a few, and I think you'll start to get the idea. Corn dextrin, a common thickener, is also the glue on postage stamps and envelopes. Ferrous sulfate, an iron supplement in enriched flour, is also used as a disinfectant and weedkiller. While these ingredients may concern you, they will not harm you, although I would not live on a diet of Twinkies.

Yogurt, candy, fruit drinks, and other food contain a color additive that is extracted from dried bugs. While most of you are cringing thinking about all the food that you eat that you now know had dried bug guts in it, let me also tell you that the colorant is called cochineal extract or carmine dye. This dye has been used for centuries. It is used to dye food, cosmetics, drinks and fibers. This dye can also cause serious allergic reaction in some people, even death. To find out more about this dye, log on to this website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1997-11/UoM--CFDC-041197-php . Confectioner's glaze, food glaze, resinous glaze, and pharmaceutical glaze are all basically names to confuse us on packages for shellac, the excretion of a certain type of beetle. This shellac is used to make the outside candy shell of very many popular candies shiny. Yummy!

I have always wondered when I looked at ingredients on the outside packages of food, why the producers had to list everything in words and terms that the average consumer could not understand. Well....now I know.