Chicken Nuggets Are Only Half Meat. So…What’s The Other Half?

We're going to warn you: The following info is NOT for the faint at heart.

Chicken nuggets are a little bit like hotdogs, as in, most of us have our I'd-rather-not-know blinders on when we're munching on them. But, you can no longer enjoy your blissful ignorance. A couple of researchers in Mississippi looked into it for you, and the results are, well, not exactly appetizing.

The scientists purchased nuggets from two fast food chains — they won't say which — and then painstakingly dissected a nugget from each restaurant, looking to see what kinds of cells the nuggets contained. The results?

The two nuggets contained only 50% and 40% meat, respectively. So, what else was in there? This is where things get a little bit ick. The remaining half of the nugget was, thankfully, made up of chicken. But, it wasn't parts of the chicken that we commonly eat. It was a mixture of fat (to be expected), nerves, tendons, glands, skin, and a lil bone.

Now, before you swear off nuggets forever, remember that this is far from a large-scale study of all nuggets. But, it's probably indicative of the fact that nuggets, generally, contain a lot less meat than we might expect. If you ever eat chicken drumsticks, then you're ingesting a lot of these chicken parts anyway, without even thinking about it. Not that that's especially comforting. (NBC News)