I love busting old health myths, and today you’re in for a good one! It turns out, health professionals are now advising against removing and discarding your chicken skin. Now, you can enjoy your chicken skin without all the guilt!
Removing the chicken skin always boggled me from a culinary point of view as people tend to spend a lot of effort into seasoning and preparing the skin, only to remove it after the cooking process. It didn’t make much sense, but many do this for “diet” reasons.
Chicken skin isn’t just “fat” that you are discarding; it’s good for your heart!
Fat can often get a bad rep. Ideally, we are trying to avoid trans fats, usually from processed foods, which can contribute to high blood pressure, and plaque build-up in the arteries.
However, monounsaturated fats such as those found in fatty fish and avocados are good for you due to the omega-3 fatty acids which are essential for brain health. Unsaturated fat, which is the fat found in chicken skin, contains omega-6 fatty acids which are beneficial as well.
To remove the skin is pinching calories!
If you are a calorie counter, which I don’t recommend in the long run beyond determining relatively how much or little you need to eat in order to meet a particular fitness goal, the act of removing your chicken skin would be rendered quite moot as you would only be taking away, fifty calories (in regards to a 12 oz. chicken breast).
Calories are not your enemy. When you are looking at your body in regards to its metabolism, it isn’t the amount of calories that you are necessarily putting into your body that make the difference, but the quality and rate of activity that you balance with it.
Chicken skin can provide the flavor you need without anything extra!
Chicken skin is left on during the cooking process anyway in order to produce moist chicken. Therefore, it only makes sense that you would season the skin before-hand in order to infuse flavor into said chicken.
Eating the flavorful, seasoned skin will prevent you from adding too much excess salt or make you crave sauces that are high in synthetic sugars and processed syrups.
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