That was a misleading marketing push. Here is their exact wording:
> Our tender, juicy Chicken McNuggets are made with 100% white meat chicken and no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives.
Made WITH not made OF. Meaning all the meat within a McDonalds nugget is 100% white chicken meat, not that ALL of a McDonald's nugget is 100% chicken. It is designed to be misread/misunderstood.
McNuggets still don't contain 100% chicken or even close, and the fact that 100% of the meat they do contain is "white meat chicken" isn't a significant change.
Go taste a whole-chicken nugget (like Chick-Fil-A's) next to a McDonalds nugget. Heck go look inside them, at the filler. It is night and day.
The only real space in that list for fillers to be found is the food starch, but it's less abundant than water, so if there were a bunch of fillers, it'd be pretty soupy. (Its typical use is as a binder, and it'd make sense for it to serve that purpose in a nugget - you're not going to manage to make a white-meat nugget without some.)
There is certainly a texture difference between a whole-chunk nugget and one made from pureed meat, but you'd see the same sort of texture difference if you ground up a filet steak, too.
Also - that "white meat" is actually a form of bleached dark meat.
McD's used to sell chicken nuggets that were a mix of dark meat and white meat. Some were a piece of dark, other's were made of breast meat chunks. But consumers being the a-holes that they are (rant mode on)...
(this whole thing really bothers me - the "American Consumer" has pretty much single handedly ruined meat products in the United States by insisting that such products not remind them of live animals - so first "breast meat" then "white meat" and might as well be "bland meat" - then they went after pork "the other white meat" - making it so damn lean it's flavorless - you can't get any good fat anymore on your pork chops - with ground beef you have to look for the 70/30 mixture to have any real flavor in your patties. Steaks and ribs they trim off a ton of the fat, and for most supermarket briskets the Point is "gone" - so no burnt ends for you. All its done is make meat - at least from the supermarket - almost flavorless. You have to either buy commercial meat which hasn't been trimmed, or you have to go to a real butcher - either way, you end up spending a ton more money just to get the flavor back...
(ok rant off) ...where was I? Oh, as I was saying, consumers decided that all they wanted was "white breast meat", but McDs knew that dark meat is cheaper. So this food scientist at some USC university (IIRC) came up with a method to bleach the dark meat, then blend it with the white, and you get this "ground chicken" like product that can be molded into perfect nugget shapes - all shaped consistently, all fry consistently. Win for the restaurant.
But I remember real nuggets - there were two different shapes that were the dark meat; flavorful, tender, wonderful. Then one shape (that was "round") that was a disk of white meat (tasted good, but dryer, and less tender). Today, they are all a uniform shape, flavor, and texture profile, all "white meat" - and the texture is somewhere between that of dark meat, and breast meat.
I just don't get people. I love dark meat, I love flavor. Give me the fat, give me well marbled beef and pork. Nothing like a well-smoked brisket, or pulled pork shoulder, or a wonder slab of pork belly. People who say otherwise - I don't know what to think about them.
> Our tender, juicy Chicken McNuggets are made with 100% white meat chicken and no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives.
Made WITH not made OF. Meaning all the meat within a McDonalds nugget is 100% white chicken meat, not that ALL of a McDonald's nugget is 100% chicken. It is designed to be misread/misunderstood.
McNuggets still don't contain 100% chicken or even close, and the fact that 100% of the meat they do contain is "white meat chicken" isn't a significant change.
Go taste a whole-chicken nugget (like Chick-Fil-A's) next to a McDonalds nugget. Heck go look inside them, at the filler. It is night and day.