Does That Chicken Make Me Look Fat?

If you don’t want people to start chanting, “Fatty, fatty two-by-four, can’t fit through KFC’s door,” you might want to put down that drumstick and pick up some Gardein buffalo wings instead. A recent study of hundreds of thousands of Europeans revealed that the more meat people ate, the more weight they gained over time—and chicken is the big culprit.

This is important to tell everyone: Researchers found that the people who were most likely to gain weight were also those who ate the most chicken, followed by processed meats and red meat.

Researchers at Imperial College London in the U.K. found that people who ate more meat gained about a pound a year on average, even if they consumed the same amount of calories as people who ate less meat. And most meat-eaters eat far more calories than do vegetarians or vegans. And predictably, the more meat people ate, the more weight they gained. For every additional 8.8 ounces of meat that people ate daily, they packed on about four and a half extra pounds over five years.

“Our results suggest that a decrease in meat consumption may improve weight management,” wrote the study’s authors in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Hurry—surf on over to GoVeg.com and order a copy of our vegetarian/vegan starter kit today!

Written by Alisa Mullins