What Are The 43 Ingredients In McDonald's McRib?

If there is a poster child for processed fast food, it might very well be the McDonald's McRib and its long laundry list of ingredients. While some of the fast food giant's controversies have been overblown, like the famous McDonald's "pink slime" McNugget rumor, any headline you've seen about the McRib having a bunch of ingredients is 100% true. However, the majority of the 43 ingredients come from the bun and the sauce, and in the case of the latter it's mostly spices and flavorings you'd recognize. So, what exactly are you putting in your body when you eat a McRib?

Lots of people might consider the most suspicious part to be the meat, but it's actually pretty simple. Yes, McDonald's molds the McRib patty into that shape, and no it isn't actually rib meat — but it is pork. According to McDonald's, it's boneless pork shoulder mixed with water, salt, rosemary extract, and dextrose. The last item might be of some concern as it has a high glycemic index, but dextrose is essentially a sweetener that comes from corn or wheat that doubles as a preservative. Add in the onions (ingredients: onions), and we still only have six ingredients.

The pickles push up the number a bit. There are some components you'll recognize, like cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, turmeric, and the ever-mysterious "natural flavors." Then a few you likely don't: calcium chloride, alum, potassium sorbate, and polysorbate 80. The first two are added to maintain crispness in foods, potassium sorbate is a preservative, and polysorbate 80 is a synthetic emulsifier. It takes a lot of work to keep those pickles crunchy, and our list is up to 14 ingredients.

Now we get into the non-literal meat of that 43 ingredient list. The McRib sauce (which McDonald's once sold by the half-gallon) contains 15 ingredients all by itself, including tomato paste, vinegar, molasses, and spices. The only three that might raise eyebrows are xanthan gum, sodium benzoate, and modified food starch. (Some people might not like the high fructose corn syrup, but it's not exactly mysterious.) Xanthan gum is a widely-used food additive that helps thicken and stabilize products, modified food starch is natural starch that has been altered and is also used for thickening, and sodium benzoate is an artificial preservative made by combining benzoic acid and sodium hydroxide.

Then there's the bun, with 14 more ingredients. Most of this comes from the additives in the enriched flour, which is a common form of processed flour that's had nutrients like iron, folic acid, and riboflavin added back in. Thiamine mononitrate, for example, is a synthetic form of vitamin B1. Most of the remaining ingredients are recognizable, like sugar, corn meal, and yeast, but two items stand out: enzymes is one, mono- and diglycerides is the other. Monoglycerides and diglycerides are a kind of emulsifier that's often chemically produced, while enzymes are added to commercial baked goods to speed up the natural reactions that produce bread.

In the end, that adds up to 43 total ingredients, and it's a mixed bag. The vast majority of that long McRib ingredient list are fine and natural, but there are still a decent amount of additives. That's just how it goes with fast food these days.