Chicken: Nutritional Value

Nutritionally the chicken and egg are almost certainly the most readily and universally available source of food in both industrialized and emerging areas. The flesh of the chicken has no known special nutritional qualities that distinguish it from other sources of meat. The most striking feature of the chicken is its white breast meat, characterized by the absence of the oxygen-binding protein myoglobin. The myoglobin gives the flight muscles the ability to scavenge oxygen from the blood with greater efficiency. Chickens do not migrate and are not well adapted for long flights, their activities being mainly terrestrial during the day. By contrast, in birds that migrate long distances and for which endurance is an essential survival characteristic, such as ducks and geese, the breast is dark because of its high content of myoglobin. The chicken’s white breast has the sprinter’s advantage, however, being characterized by very powerful “fast twitch fibers” that are capable of launching even a heavy-bodied bird into a tree or onto a roost for the night. There is no significant nutritional difference between the two types of flesh beyond the larger amount of iron present in the myoglobin-rich dark meat.