Why Should People Trying to Lose Weight Remove the Skin From Chicken?

Trying to lose weight? Remove the skin from your chicken before you cook it for an easy way to cut calories and fat from your diet. Skinless chicken is a good source of lean protein, so losing the skin lets you lose pounds while maintaining a healthy diet.

Benefits

• Chicken skin is a concentrated source of saturated fat, cholesterol and calories, so taking it off your chicken before you cook it prevents you from taking in needless calories.

History

• The ubiquitous boneless, skinless chicken breast is a relatively recent phenomenon in American cuisine. For years, gourmet chefs balked at the idea of removing the most flavorful part of the bird, while traditional home cooks wouldn't think of tossing out a tasty and filling part of what they paid for. However, as obesity rates rose rapidly in the 1990's, Americans looked to cut fat and calories where they could to lose weight, and the skinless chicken was born.

Fat

• Overall, chicken is very lean meat, packed with lean protein and little fat. Except for the skin, that is. Chicken skin is high in saturated fat and cholesterol--84 percent of a chicken skin's calories come from fat, which means that it has a high calorie-to-size ratio.

  Remove the chicken skin to cut back on calories and fat, but don't add more chicken just because you've taken the skin off. Remember, you need to cut calories to lose weight, not just substitute lean calories for fatty calories.

Cholesterol

• You should be aware that while the skin contains most of the saturated fat in a chicken, the meat still contains fairly high levels of cholesterol. High cholesterol levels can make exercise and losing weight more difficult, in addition to increasing your risk of heart disease and heart attack. If you have high cholesterol, you should limit the amount of chicken and other meat you consume to one or two servings a day.

Considerations

• You should always consider the tradeoffs associated with dietary choices such as removing the skin from chicken. A big one here is flavor. Chicken skin is far more flavorful than the meat, so you may be tempted to eat more skinless chicken to get that "chicken taste," making your calorie savings negligible. As with all weight loss diets, you need to carefully monitor your portion sizes to avoid excess calories.

Warning

• Skinless chicken has very little fat, and you may be tempted to use more oil when cooking to avoid sticking and to add flavor. But even vegetable oils are essentially pure fat, so you may actually be adding more calories than if you cooked the chicken with its skin intact. Instead of adding oil, use nonstick or cast iron cookware to keep the calories down and your weight loss plan on track.