Chicken nuggets: Call ’em tasty, call ’em crunchy, call ’em quick and convenient. But maybe you shouldn’t call them ‘chicken.’

So says , a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. In a published in The American Journal of Medicine, deShazo and his colleagues report on a small test they conducted to find out just what’s inside that finger food particularly beloved by children. Their conclusion?

‘Our sampling shows that some commercially available chicken nuggets are actually fat nuggets,’ he tells The Salt. ‘Their name is a misnomer,’ he and his colleagues write. The nuggets they looked at were only 50 percent meat – at best. The rest? Fat, blood vessels, nerve, connective tissue and ground bone – the latter, by the way, is stuff that usually .

Now, this was an informal test. To conduct their chicken ‘autopsy,’ the researchers went to two different national fast-food chains near their health center in Jackson, Miss., and ordered chicken nuggets over the counter. The fast-food chains involved went unnamed – ‘we felt that would generate negative publicity off topic,’ deShazo told us via email.

When put under the microscope, one chicken sample consisted of just 40 percent skeletal muscle – […]