Diet Foods - Chicken Breast

Lean chicken breast is full of protein and essential nutrients

Chicken breast, which contains negligible fat, is the leanest portion of the chicken and is an excellent source for high quality protein.

Eating chicken breast as part of your regular well balanced diet is a great way to build muscle and burn off fat.

The chicken breast is white meat and it contains less fat than the other dark meat portions of the chicken, including chicken legs.

Why Chicken Breast is an Effective Dieting Food

Once you make the decision to start eating healthy, you will want to include more chicken breast in your diet. The reason for this is that the health benefits to eating chicken are so incredible.

Chicken breast is an excellent source for a number of different vitamins and essential nutrients that work to strengthen the immune system effectively.

Several scientific studies on chicken breast have been conducted in order to better assess all of the many different health benefits. Most of the studies produced positive results. In fact, eating chicken breast has several positive health benefits in addition to being an effective dieting food.

Chicken breast is an excellent source of high quality, lean protein, which is essential for proper growth and development. In addition, it also plays a major role in helping individuals who are overweight or obese to lose weight quickly. In older individuals, the protein found in chicken is effective in fighting against bone loss. It only takes one hundred grams of chicken breast to get over half of the daily recommended amount of protein.

Chicken is also high in niacin

In addition to protein, chicken breast is also an excellent source of niacin, which is a B-vitamin that helps the body keep cancer away. Some people may actually have a niacin deficiency that is the direct result of genetic damage. You can get as much as seventy-two percent of the daily requirement for niacin from a single four-ounce serving of chicken breast.

In the higher quality chicken breasts, the trace mineral known as selenium is present. Selenium is essential to a number of major metabolic pathways, including antioxidant defense systems, thyroid hormone metabolism as well as important immune functions throughout the body.

Chicken breast also contains Vitamin B6, which plays a very important role as the methyl donor for the basic cellular process that transfers methyl groups from molecule to molecule. This leads to the formation of a wide array of essential active molecules. The process is known as Methylation. The number of available methyl groups is reduced because of a lack of Vitamin B6, resulting in the possibility of damaged blood vessels.