McDonald’s had another main character moment in the 2024 election cycle, appearing as the airplane feast of choice Nov. 17 for President-elect Donald Trump and advisers Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump Jr. and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
But is there something going on with the golden arches’ famous McNuggets?
A Facebook post showing a box of Chicken McNuggets reads: “McDonalds chicken nuggets contain silicone oil, which is a synthetic material used to make contact lenses, caulking, and lubricants.”
The caption of the Nov. 15 post says: “This sounds unhealthy and disgusting!! They need to fix this!!”
Another Nov. 17 Facebook post shared the same image. A user in the comments wrote: “I always wondered why they went down my throat so easily.”
(Screenshot/Facebook)
The posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)
The U.S. McDonald’s website does not name “silicone oil” as an ingredient in the chicken nuggets. The website lists the following ingredients, and silicone oil (or a related chemical name, “dimethylpolysiloxane”) isn’t among them:
White boneless chicken, water, vegetable oil (canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil), enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), bleached wheat flour, yellow corn flour, vegetable starch (modified corn, wheat, rice, pea, corn), salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, calcium lactate, monocalcium phosphate), spices, yeast extract, lemon juice solids, dextrose, natural flavors.
PolitiFact contacted McDonald’s about this claim and received no reply by the time of publication.
In our research, we learned that U.S. McDonald’s chicken nuggets once contained dimethylpolysiloxane, an antifoaming agent derived from silicone. It is found in a variety of foods, such as cooking oil, vinegar and chocolate. It’s also added to oil to prevent it from bubbling up when frozen ingredients are added.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves dimethylpolysiloxane as a food additive. The Code of Federal Regulations Title 21, as of November 2024, says that dimethylpolysiloxane can be added to food not to exceed 1 part per million.
But in 2016, McDonald’s USA announced the removal of artificial preservatives from several menu items, including Chicken McNuggets. Since then, dimethylpolysiloxane has not been in the nuggets’ ingredients.
The U.S. has more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants, by the far the most of any country as of 2023, according to Statista, a German data gathering site. Japan and China are the other countries with the most restaurants, but we could not find complete ingredient lists for their McNuggets.
We also didn’t find silicone oil or dimethylpolysiloxane in the United Kingdom’s and India’s Chicken McNuggets. However, dimethylpolysiloxane is on the ingredient list in Canada’s McNuggets.
This is not the first time we have fact-checked claims about McDonald’s food. In September, we rated a video that claimed the FBI found human remains at a McDonald’s meat supplier Pants on Fire!
McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets in the U.S. — the country with the most McDonald’s locations — no longer contain silicone oil, though it is still listed on the ingredients list in at least Canada. We rate the claim Mostly False.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
