Would You Recognize a McNugget Addict?

In case you missed it, there was a story out last week about, Stacey Irvine, a seventeen year-old girl in the UK that collapsed at her factory job.  She was anemic, nutrient deficient, and struggling to breathe.  She also had swollen blood vessels on her tongue.  She revealed that she has been living on a diet of McNugget meals for fifteen years, and she never eats fruits or vegetables.  Now, would you think this girl is a McNugget addict?

Probably not.  If you didn't know that these toys were collected from Happy Meals that she ate, you would probably think she is a normal-looking teenager with a gigantic collection of toys.  But no, this girl loved her some nuggets.

What I don't want to do here is get into any moral arguments blaming the mom or McDonald's.  McDonald's provides a product that people can choose to purchase or not.  The mom is kind of on the hook because she didn't act like the parent.  At the same time, a seventeen year old is old enough to change their mind.  If all of the cool kids stopped wearing purple shirts, most other teens would too.  Where there's a will, there's a way.

What I do want to blog about is my admission that I feed my daughter chicken nuggets, although not McDonald's, a little too frequently.  Yup, I said it.  I need to cut back on the nuggets.  It's just that they are a quick, easy meal for a toddler, and I never get an argument from her about eating them.  So, in an effort to show you what factors led me to the conclusion that I need to change my ways, I am going to take you on a McNugget journey of sorts.  

I think everyone has seen the photo that has been circulating recently (again) of the mechanically separated chicken.  I'm not even going to gross you out with that story.  Anyway, it was recently fact checked, and the photo is supposedly not chicken.  Who cares?  It doesn't take a genius to figure out that McNuggets are bad for you.  What we have done as a culture is to tell our kids that "it doesn't matter" and "it's okay to eat them anyway."  

Check out this clip from Jamie Oliver's "Food Revolution" TV show.  He has done this experiment before in the UK, and kids always get grossed out and choose the good food.  But here in America, he was not as successful.

If you want to know if McNuggets are bad for you, here is the answer.  Anything that has a majority of its calories derived from fat cannot be good for you.  The sodium is an entirely different issue.

Another problem that the United States has is that we have created a monoculture.  We eat one type of potato because McDonald's sets the standard, and so farmers spend millions of dollars on chemicals and pesticides in order to grow that particular potato instead of rotating species and finding new varieties like they do in South America.  Anyone else see a problem here?  I don't want to digress from my point, but these two facts work hand in hand.  We embrace monoculture and subsequently brainwash our children into accepting poor nutritional standards because we like what we like.  

As it turns out, I have had an alternative solution to my nugget problem all along.  I have a cook book that my mother-in-law gave me called Deceptively Delicious and it has tons of recipes for sneaking veggies into your kids' food.  I have actually made these nuggets before, and they are great.  Why did I not make them again?  Probably because it's easier to open a bag of Tyson's and heat them up in the microwave.  I'm going to get better.  I am going to make large batches of these nuggets ahead of time and then freeze them so that they are just as convenient as the ones that are currently in my freezer.  I am challenging you to consider doing the same.  Enjoy your delicious new chicken nugget recipe!  I like them with sweet potato, but spinach is great as well.    

Parenting is the toughest job in the world.  A lot of times, you can do things the easy way and get away with it, but occasionally, when the health of your child is at stake, the only option is to make the tough choice and do things the hard way.