I'm ashamed to admit raised my children just like alot of American families do, ON CHICKEN NUGGETS.  The kids love them and they are CHEAP.  There's always the joke about not knowing exactly what they are, but I never took time to really check into it.  As I've said before many times, I never paid food much attention.  I never really took notice of how important what we eat IS for our bodies to function correctly.  I assumed the American government wouldn't allow a very well known restaurant to sell AND MARKET "food" to my children that wouldn't be good for them, let alone hurt them.   Yes, I was that naive about food.

For the past couple of years, I've been researching and reading all I can get my hands on regarding the foods that our bodies REQUIRE in order to function properly.  It truly has been UNBELIEVABLE to me to discover most of the "food" I gave my children to eat was not food at all.  I'm not just talking about fast food, but all of the processed food in the freezer as well.  We need to educate and alert our American mommies so this can stop.  There's NOTHING more powerful on this earth than a woman with her mind made up, so can you imagine what will happen if a whole bunch of mamas start demanding change in our food supplies starting with OUR CHILDREN!

We all eat this crap, but the kids get the worst of the mess.  Let's focus just on the chicken mcnugget.  Here are the ingredients:

White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning [yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (botanical source), safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid], sodium phosphate, natural flavor (botanical source). Battered and breaded with: water, enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, bleached wheat flour, food starch-modified, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, dextrose, corn starch. Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent.

First off, shouldn’t chicken nuggets be made from chicken, bread crumbs, eggs, and oil?  That's what it would be if you made them at home, but not from the place on every corner that has a playland.  It's so over-processed I don't even see how it can be called food.

So what the heck are some of those ingredients?!  I've never even heard of dimethylpolysiloxane and I'm guessing it's not in your pantry either.

Lisa McComb, who handles global media relations for McDonald's says, "Dimethylpolysiloxane is used as a matter of safety to keep the oil from foaming.  The chemical is a form of silicone also used in cosmetics and Silly Putty. A review of animal studies by The World Health Organization found no adverse health effects associated with dimethylpolysiloxane."

Oh thanks, Lisa.  I feel better about feeding it to my children now.

Dimethylpolysiloxane is an "anti-foaming agent" that is added to the frying oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, which would cause the oil to foam. This foaming oil problem is apprently so bad that McDonalds decided a toxic chemical to it in order to make the foam go away.

According to the ‘Handbook of Food Additives’, dimethylpolysiloxane is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable.

That ALONE should make us stop feeding this crap to our kids, but if that's not enough, we have more!
Chicken McNuggets also contain an ingredient called "tertiary butylhydroquinone", or TBHQ, an antioxidant that comes from petroleum and it's either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness."

According to ‘A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives’, TBHQ is a form of butane.  Yes, you read that...butane.  The FDA (you know...the ones that protect us) allows food processors to use "sparingly" in our food.  So what that means is TBHQ can be no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. We better hope the people who are responsible for that number is drinking more coffee than our air traffic controllers because a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse and ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.”

We at least need to get this information out there so parents can make themselves aware of what they are handing their children to eat.  It's time we all begin to really pay food some attention.