How much chicken is too much

Chicken breast supplies lean protein and a number of essential vitamins and minerals to your diet. Even with healthy foods, though, it’s easy to overeat and get too much of a good thing. Stay within the recommended serving size of chicken breast for the best health benefits.

Healthy Amount of Chicken Breast

Whether you choose lean, skinless chicken breast or another animal protein, a healthy serving is just 3 ounces. That’s considerably less than what many restaurants serve or what you may portion out onto your plate at dinner.

Visualization can help you determine the correct amount. The USDA’s MyPlate portion tool recommends imagining a normal-sized plate divided into fourths and filling one quarter with a protein like chicken breast. Another helpful cue is to picture foods as the same size as common household items. For example, a 3-ounce serving of chicken breast is the same size as a deck of cards.

The USDA advises adults, depending on age and gender, to get 5 to 6.5 “ounce equivalents” of protein foods a day, which may include chicken breast. So a 3-ounce chicken breast supplies about half of your protein needs for the day.

Macronutrients in Chicken Breast

Chicken breast is an excellent, complete source of protein. Protein foods from animals classify as “complete” because they provide all the essential amino acids your body needs to build and repair tissues. In one small chicken breast, you get 27 grams of protein, or 55 percent of the daily value (DV) if you follow a 2,000-calorie diet. The serving gives you 133 calories and 3 grams of fat, of which only 1 gram is the unhealthy saturated variety.

Vitamin and Mineral Content

A serving of chicken breast adds a good blend of minerals and vitamins to your daily regimen. Of particular note among the minerals it offers are phosphorus and selenium – you’ll get 20 and 39 percent of the DV for each, respectively. You need phosphorus to build healthy bones and teeth, while selenium is an antioxidant mineral that helps protect you against free radicals – molecules that can damage your healthy cells.

Chicken breast is a rich source of the B-family vitamins, which work in tandem to help you process food into fuel to run your body. You’ll get 12 percent of the daily value for riboflavin (B-2) in chicken breast, plus a whopping 40 percent of the DV for niacin (B-3) and pyridoxine (B-6). The serving also supplies 18 percent of your needs for choline, a sometimes-overlooked vitamin that contributes to brain and nerve functions, like memory and muscle control.

Chicken Breast in a Healthy Diet

If you fry your chicken breast or smother it in barbecue sauce, you forfeit some of the health benefits by raising the fat or sugar content of an otherwise-healthy food. Baking, broiling, grilling and poaching are the healthiest preparation methods. Add fresh herbs like garlic, rosemary, thyme or marjoram and a dash of lemon juice to boost the flavor. Or “blacken” your chicken breast with spicier seasonings like cayenne, paprika and cumin.

No matter how you prepare it, 3 ounces of sliced chicken breast can turn a leafy green salad into a meal. Chop chicken breast with scallions and red bell pepper and mix with a dollop of plain yogurt for a healthy take on the chicken salad sandwich. Make “fried” chicken in the oven with just a trace of olive oil for a mock version of this favorite comfort food.

A favourite of health-conscious eaters as well as junk food fans, chicken is taking over our diets in the US and Europe – but at what cost?

Tom Levitt

When it comes to diet, many health-conscious consumers have come to the conclusion that protein is king. Specifically: chicken. Diet trends, such as the recently debunked Paleo diet, have overstated the importance of eating a lot of meat. At the same time, consumers have been put off red meat by its associated health and environmental concerns. This has led to consumers increasingly eating more chicken instead.

The global appetite for chicken is growing so large that health and environmental experts say we’re creating an excess protein problem, with damaging consequences for our planet and no additional health benefits for us.

“There is this perception that protein is good for your health, but I am not sure where that has come from,” says Modi Mwatsama, director of global health at the UK Health Forum. “It’s certainly a good marketing ploy.”

Protein is a key part of a healthy diet – but the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends a daily intake of 50g of protein for adults, not the 75g some people in the US and Europe are estimated to be eating.

The problem is being exacerbated by the limited range of proteins we eat, according to Duncan Williamson, food advisor at WWF, the conservation NGO. “Some people don’t realize you can get protein from plants and fish,” he says. “We need to eat less protein from a greater variety of sources.”

Globally, chicken meat is expected to account for almost half of the increase in global meat production over the next decade, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as it surges past pork as the world’s most popular meat by 2020.

Every year, around 52 billion chickens are slaughtered globally for meat, a figure that will double if consumption in India and China catches up with the west.

Chicken also accounts for around half of all meat intake in the US and UK, up from one third in the early 1990s.

And in what could be seen as a generational shift, poultry farmers are predicting per capita consumption of white meat in the US will overtake red meat for the first time on record this year. This has been helped by comparatively slower price increases for white meat (pdf) over the past decade.

In terms of the meat itself, chicken can be a low saturated fat alternative to red meat if you don’t eat the skin and fat and avoid frying. But with UK and US adults already eating 40-50% more protein than needed, on average, there are concerns about the health impact of our growing appetite for chicken, according to Mwatsama.

“Increasingly, we are seeing foods labelled as a source of protein, as if we should consider that to be a good thing,” Mwatsama says. “Yet for the last 20 years or more, people have not been deficient in protein in the developed world.”

As well as producing no additional health benefit, Mwatsama says those sticking to high protein diets such as the Atkins or Paleo diet are risking long term health problems. Following a high protein diet in the long term may increase the risk of colonic disease, while low carbohydrate-high protein diets have also been associated with higher mortality from cardiovascular diseases.

There is this perception that protein is good for your health, but I am not sure where that has come from.

Rather than upping our chicken consumption, Mwatsama advises people to switch to healthier sources of protein with low or no saturated fats, such as pulses, beans, lentils, chickpeas and buckwheat, which also provide a good source of fibre.

There is evidence that intensive chicken farming is the “least bad” option in environmental terms compared to cattle, but that only tells half the story.

Chicks reared in less than 40 days require less animal feed (which in the case of Europe includes imported soya linked to deforestation in South America) and produce less waste and greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat than lamb or beef (see this graphic comparing environmental footprint of meats). However, emissions are still far higher than vegetable protein alternatives.

“From the standpoint of climate change, plant-based diets win every time,” says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and public health at New York University. “Plants have plenty of protein and the protein is high enough in quality as long as the foods are varied – combining beans and rice, for example. All of the major concerns about diets – greenhouse gases, environmental degradation, treatment of animals and human health – all get taken care of by diets that are largely, if not exclusively, plant-based.”

So by cutting back on red meat in favour of ramping up on poultry, we are not resolving the heavy resource use in terms of water, land and greenhouse gas emissions of our meat intake. What’s more, UN scientists suggest that if the rest of the world catches up with European and North American levels of protein consumption, we may not have enough crops, land and water to feed all the necessary livestock.

There’s also the question of animal welfare, Nestle points out, and how comfortable people feel about eating the majority of their meat from animals reared exclusively indoors.

It is these conditions, suggest animal welfare campaigners, that have made chicken such a risk for the spread of zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza, salmonella and campylobacter, as well as antimicrobial resistance with poultry farming heavily reliant on antibiotics to treat and prevent illness spreading amongst the flock. Campylobacter, which is endemic in poultry, is the source of 280,000 cases of food poisoning each year in the UK and more than 1.3m estimated cases in the US.

Meat industry has a cow over US dietary guidelines

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The most sustainable alternative, getting people to switch to eating more pulses, beans and buckwheat, is far from straightforward. So much so that nutritionists argue a better approach would be to reformulate packaged meals, of which sales are soaring.

“I don’t think we’re going to get people to go out and buy buckwheat,” says Dr Wendy Russell from the Rowett Research Institute of Nutrition and Health. “But we can replace a large proportion of the beef in lasagne ready meals or rusk in sausages with buckwheat without the taste being affected, and consumers eating a more sustainable meal.”