What Are McDonald's McNuggets Made Of (And Is It Pink Slime)?

For years, McDonald's has fervently denied claims that its chicken-based menu items are made with a soft-serve-looking concoction known colloquially as pink slime. You may have seen the accusations yourself in a chain email or viral Facebook post — likely attached to an infamous and untraceable image of so-called pink slime being deposited into a cardboard box which has floated around the internet since 2010 or so.

Most descriptions of the picture claimed this was how McDonald's restaurants produced Chicken McNuggets, in a process that involved crushing the entire bird to create a pink substance — comprised of "bones, eyes, guts, and all," according to one email obtained by Snopes — which is then washed in ammonia and artificially flavored.

According to McDonald's, it's just not true. The megacorporation has denied the accusation for more than a decade, making a firm statement on its website as recently as 2021 insisting that its chicken nuggets are made exclusively with "USDA-inspected boneless white-meat chicken — cut from the chicken breast, tenderloins, and rib meat." So, no eyeballs, it seems.

Despite the sensationalist rumors, pink slime is a real thing. But it's not in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, nor is it even poultry. In food production, it's known as lean, finely-textured beef or boneless lean beef trimmings, and the company hasn't used it in its hamburger products since 2011. That process employs a centrifuge to extract the last bits of meat from fatty trimmings that can be used in ground beef products.

Pink slime sometimes gets conflated with mechanically separated poultry, but, even in that case, the bits and bobs used aren't as shocking as you'd expect. Instead of eyes and guts, the paste-like mixture is made by putting unstripped chicken bones into a machine that exerts intense pressure, pushing every last bit of edible meat through a sieve to be collected. Yeah, not too appetizing, but also not pink slime.

Still, McDonald's says its all-white-meat chicken products have no trace of any pink stuff — a Chicken McNugget is chiefly breast meat, seasonings, and some chicken skin. In a YouTube video released by McDonald's Canada in 2014, the company filmed a tour of the production facility where it makes Chicken McNuggets, and while it won't have you singing "I'm Lovin' It," there was no pink goop to be found. Independent food experts confirmed to CNN that what McDonald's showed was the real deal.

Just because there don't seem to be any eyeballs in your McNuggets doesn't mean it's part of a balanced diet, though. These nuggets are packed with salt, oil, and starch — a six-piece order will get you nearly a quarter of your daily value of both sodium and fat. And that's before you dip them in sugary sauces like Tangy Barbecue or Sweet 'N Sour.

Other ingredients in McNuggets include sodium aluminum phosphate, a leavening agent, and dextrose, a natural sugar that's also one of the many, many ingredients in McDonald's french fries. These chemicals may sound scary, with their eyebrow-raising names, but both are, of course, safe to eat. You'd have to consume quite a bit of sodium aluminum phosphate to get sick — much more than you'd encounter as part of a normal diet. Your real concern should be whether any of those ingredients will taste any good the next day as you reheat your Chicken McNuggets.