Food Theory: The Many Lies of McDonalds Chicken Nuggets

did you know that chicken mcnuggets come in four shapes the boot the bell the bow tie and the ball yeah shapes aren't random you'll see these four shapes over and over again in every box the world over mcdonald's has standardized them to quote ensure consistent cooking time for food safety weird fact by the way the boot overwhelmingly tends to be people's favorites in the polls about this sort of thing but despite the four different shapes there's one thing that they all share a history of deep fried lies hope you're hungry friends this one is gonna be spicier than that limited edition szechuan sauce hello internet welcome to food theory the show that brings the num noms straight to your tumtums and today's num num is the delectable yet questionable chicken mcnugget a food item that honestly i thought i'd overgrown as i approached my adult years but now that i have a three-year-old it's a food item that's forcibly reinserted itself back into my life and my diet these things keep pulling me back in i wish i knew how to quit you why don't you why don't you just let me be huh let's face it at this point in my life i eat more of these things than a six-year-old after soccer practice for most of us the chicken mcnugget has been a staple throughout our entire lives i'm sure almost all of us have at least one fond memory of going to mcdonald's and getting that mcnugget happy meal i mean some nugs and a toy can life get any better according to sources yes yes it can but what i want to chew on today isn't the crispy golden crust on the outside of these things it's the conspiracy that lies buried in the middle you see the origin of the chicken nugget is anything but golden a domino of lies that gave rise to the world's favorite poultry based snack if you've watched this channel before you know that what we eat and how we eat it has more to do with advertising pr and legal maneuvers than it has to do with your taste buds and the creation of the chicken mcnugget is a prime example the chicken nugget was first tested in mcdonald's in 1980 but it wasn't because ray kroc wanted to expand his diners palettes it was because he was practically being forced to by the entire industry of american media in the end these little golden rounds are the product of four major lies and no amount of sweet and sour sauce is gonna make this one taste any better so that my friends is our journey today exposing the four mistruths that prove our love of chicken nuggets is a lot more conspiracy than coincidence but in order to understand what's going on we're all going to need to become chicken nugget historians so let's rewind all the way back to the caveman days you know before the existence of the dollar menu back in the 1950s and 60s so this is 30 years before the iconic boot-shaped nuggets started appearing on the mcdonald's menu a man by the name of ansel keys was starting to establish himself as one of the most famous nutrition scientists in the world his reputation had started to take off after working for the u.s military to develop k rations a daily package of food for paratroopers that provided 3 200 calories a day and was rated as better than nothing by test groups shortly after he began gathering data on the health and diets of different populations to try and find the relationship between the foods certain cultures eat and the illnesses that they exhibit with a particular emphasis on heart disease one of his first and most famous discoveries came from corporate executives living in minnesota he saw that they were dying of heart disease at much higher rates despite being some of the best fed people in the world on the other end over in post-world war ii europe despite reduced food supplies cardiovascular disease rates had decreased sharply this led keys to determine that diet was actually a big factor with heart health eventually he concluded that the high in milk high-end red meat diet of the minnesota businessman resulted in heightened cholesterol levels and ultimately heightened risk of death by heart disease from there he turned his attention globally he noticed that of anywhere in the world southern italy had the highest concentration of centenarians people living to be a hundred he hypothesized that their longevity had to do with the low cholesterol foods that they would eat as such he started preaching the good word of a low meat diet that was high in grains and olive oil something that he would eventually brand as the mediterranean diet eventually he would launch the famous seven countries study a longitudinal study which means it was a long one where he followed 12 763 males across seven different countries over the course of 50 years all in an effort to see how diets affect heart health time and time again his work would come back to one thing cholesterol high cholesterol was causing heart disease and killing people ansel's findings especially that initial minnesota study had a massive and i mean a massive impact on the us government's views about cholesterol and heart disease suddenly there were these major pr campaigns all against anything with fat and cholesterol so yay right people are starting to get healthier they're learning about the dangers of cholesterol sign me up for my diet of bread and shots of olive oil right well here in comes lie number one ansel didn't have the full picture and covered up any results that suggested his lack of knowledge he see by 1968 he was already famous and he performed the minnesota coronary study where he tried to replace highly saturated fat diets with diets that would lower people's total cholesterol his hypothesis was that by lowering people's cholesterol he would stop them from getting heart disease unfortunately this study failed it concluded that quote replacement of saturated fat in the diet effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not translate to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease in short the patients in the study had lower cholesterol sure but they were still dying of heart diseases at the same rates this study would go mysteriously unpublished can't imagine why he wouldn't publish research that directly disproved his entire professional platform must have gotten lost on his desk or something honestly we only know about the existence of the study because the results were discovered in 2013 over 50 years later turns out keys had discovered cholesterol but he had no idea about the differences between good and bad cholesterol and he didn't want to telegraph that out into the world he also wasn't taking into account other lifestyle factors like the fact that the minnesota corporate executives were sedentary drank heavily and were almost all smokers all of which have been shown to cause heart disease science is kind of tricky that way it's almost like sharing all of the information both for and against your hypothesis is important for the education of the masses but uh nah screw that i've got a brand to maintain and by that point it was just too late the wheels of advertising against the enemy of cholesterol were already in motion and beef was public enemy number one and was put in that position by liar number two big tobacco you see another major contributor to heart disease smoking was surging in popularity all through the 50s with nearly 10 cigarettes sold per adult per day and it was known at the time that smoking was a major cause of heart disease kind of you see beginning in 1948 the framingham study became the first major piece of science to show that cigarette smoking was a major risk factor for a whole myriad of health problems including of course heart disease but big tobacco fought it off the council for tobacco research funded counter studies for over a decade to cast doubt on the results and shift blame to other causes so by the time ansel keys started attacking beef tobacco companies were already well practiced at shifting blame to other places the less centralized beef industry didn't have the sophistication or the lobbying power that the tobacco companies had to fight their reputation for being unhealthy so cigarette consumption kept going up while beef consumption went down not because of science but because of publicity and as you might imagine this didn't bode too well for mcdonald's in the 1960s at the time it just had over a thousand restaurants in operation and basically two things on the menu burger and fries cholesterol with a side of fat the beef industry was already starting to feel the us's shift away from cow and towards the lower cholesterol alternatives of chicken and turkey but in 1977 the pressure got turned up even more the u.s published what's now considered a controversial nutrition guideline all about cutting fat out of everyone's diet and realigning to this old friend the food pyramid in recent years it's been revealed that the food pyramid was actually highly misleading a theory for another day to be sure but at the time this was the guidance that everyone followed it had a huge impact on the food market which was now being strongly forced to shift to white meat chicken as the alternative protein to fatty beef and looking back at mcdonald's they're over here for the last decade like jordan peele sweat and profusely trying to figure out what to do so how about lie number three steal someone's recipe in 1963 a man named robert baker came up with a recipe for a little some something called the chicken stick yeah it's it's not a very appealing sounding name but that's because the dude was a scientist and not some sort of marketing genius robert baker was a professor of poultry science yup real thing from cornell university and is responsible for more than 40 different poultry products ranging from chicken nuggets to turkey burgers this guy was so prolific when it came to cooking bird meat that he was inducted into the american poultry hall of fame also apparently a real thing god bless you robert baker he didn't patent his chicken sticks right away so mcdonald's was able to sweep in and take credit for his invention including his whole method for making them the method involves taking finely chopped white meat chicken skin and spices as well as maybe some breading to bind it grinding it up into a regular consistency breading it twice then flash freezing it to bind everything together real well at the time of cooking it's deep fried and fat directly out of the freezer and served thus the chicken mcnugget was born and with it mcdonald's finally had on its menu a healthier lower cholesterol alternative to burgers right right wrong on so many levels so wrong that it's actually line number four while mcdonald's absolutely met the letter of what the media was pushing towards serving lean white meat chicken in their restaurants they managed to skirt around the intention of creating a healthier alternative to hamburgers let's just compare the nutrition facts of mcdonald's hamburger to a mcdonald's six-piece chicken mcnugget which both conveniently enough have the same calorie count 250 calories thereby making this a fair comparison total fat in the burger nine grams total fat in the nuggets 15. total saturated fat in the burger three and a half grams versus the nuggets two and a half grams which i guess is one gram win for upending the entire american beef industry but let's look at the thing that drove this whole controversy in the first place cholesterol mcdonald's hamburger 30 milligrams mcdonald's chicken mcnuggets 40. a hamburger actually has 25 less cholesterol than the nuggets even though the entire invention of the nugget was driven by america's obsession with lowering their cholesterol in the 1970s mcdonald's effectively made a less healthy alternative to a hamburger in response to the public's demand for a healthier alternative to the hamburger and they a hundred percent got away with it i mean there's a reason chicken nuggets are a mainstay of mcdonald's menus around the world these things are delicious and the reason they're really delicious is maybe because they're kind of bad for you all that said if you think this episode is me putting on a poor beef moment or that i'm a secret member of big beef which ironically has adopted some of big tobacco's old playbook in recent years i'm not i do love a great steak as much as the next guy but my new year's resolution is to eat healthier just like the next guy in researching for healthy lifestyle choices in 2022 i did find out something in a fun twist ansel keys he might have been onto something he did in fact live to be a hundred so minus the completely unethical cover-up of his research there's evidence that the mediterranean diet is a good one for lots of other reasons just you know not preventing heart attacks and even though we know that the mediterranean diet isn't the end-all be-all of nutrition solutions it doesn't mean that beef is off the chopping block either the world health organization recently declared red meat as a carcinogen you know something that causes cancer and there's been a big emphasis on its potential environmental concerns as well so there's plenty still left here to debate all that said whatever your path to health may be in 2022 remember that the food you're choosing is often dictated by the advertising that you see not the rigorous scientific studies that we're all clearly reading we all probably should be reading to be honest if you want to actually know what's healthy read the nutrition facts to decide if that incredibly deep fried chicken is actually better for you than the filet mignon or you know you could always make your new year's resolution subscribing to this channel i'm here to do all that research for you and digest it down into a nice tasty bite now if you'll excuse me this episode's made me incredibly hungry so i'm gonna go grab a burger but maybe like a turkey burger or something anyway remember it's all just a theory a food theory bon appetite

Channel: The Food Theorists

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Id: jQB6YvlOpwE

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 08 2022