Things You Should Absolutely Never Order At KFC

First — and arguably worst — of all is the chicken pot pie. Now a mainstay on the KFC menu, the pot pie contains "tender bites of the world's best chicken," diced potatoes, peas, carrots, and a savory sauce. The pot pie originally began as a limited-release regional dish before becoming a national regular in 2012. The marketing campaigns that accompanied its full introduction were all full of retro, old-school imagery, likely in an attempt to provoke nostalgia in the people who grew up eating chicken pot pie.

The only problem is that if you grew up regularly eating KFC's chicken pot pie you'd probably be dead before you left puberty. That's because it's staggeringly unhealthy. It contains 790 calories, 45 grams of fat, and a genuinely mind-boggling 1970 milligrams of sodium. For what it's worth, the American Heart Association recommends you consume no more than 2,300 milligrams per day — with less than 1500 milligrams being the ideal amount.

But where the chicken pot pie really excels is with its saturated fat content; according to KFC, it contains a whole 25 grams of the stuff. Put in perspective, that's the same amount of saturated fat as 17 KFC original recipe drumsticks, 25 Kentucky Fried Wings with honey barbecue sauce, five large orders of popcorn nuggets, or almost four entire Famous Bowls. In one pie.

BBQ and chicken are natural bedfellows. So it makes perfect sense that KFC would offer up all kinds of BBQ sandwiches on their menus, right? The year 2018 saw the restaurant introduce the Smokey Mountain BBQ Sandwich, for example, which they themselves describe as: "...crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, and delicious on every side." Obviously, that wasn't the first BBQ burger KFC have had on their menus over the years, and it wasn't the last. There's a good chance you've tried one of their past attempts at bringing a lil' barbecue to their stores — something they try to revive pretty frequently.

Next time, however, you might want to give them a miss. In 2015, a Reddit thread asked fast food workers exactly what customers should avoid at their restaurants. One user responded: "Worked at KFC for [around] 4 years. The BBQ sandwich is actually made from chicken too old and stale to give to the homeless shelters, so they soak it in BBQ sauce until it can be pulled and then they keep it on the heater for a month."

It's hard to know exactly which BBQ sandwich the user was referring to, but pulled chicken featured heavily in the Ultimate Burger, which was released only a few months before the thread was posted. Either way, it's hardly encouraging to know that BBQ sauce is used to soak old chicken back to life — and it's not hard to imagine some stores might still do something like this when there's a barbecue sandwich on the menu.

Another side, here — another winner for KFC's potatoes. Although this particular side is mercifully free of black-fat-oil-crap-gravy, it's still a real loser on the KFC menu — mostly because it's shockingly unhealthy. According to the chain's own nutrition guide, the potato salad contains 340 calories, 19 grams of carbs and 25 milligrams of cholesterol. Nothing too bad there... but we're not done yet.

The potato salad from KFC also contains 28 grams of fat, a whopping 43 percent of an adult's recommended intake. Oh, and 4.5 grams of those are saturated fats, too, which is around 23 percent of the guideline intake. Finally, you've got 290 milligrams of sodium. And if that doesn't seem like a lot, that might be because so far you've only seen sodium in high enough quantities to kill a mongoose. The truth is, 290 milligrams is still 12 percent of your recommended daily intake of sodium, meaning the potato salad still makes a hefty dent on your body's daily nutritional routine. Add in the fact that you're very unlikely to be eating the potato salad alone, and you're looking at some seriously sky-high figures.

One thing that can be said for KFC is that they've got a hell of a range of sauces and condiments. Far from content to simply offer the standard ketchup/mustard/mayo combination, KFC's menu features a whole range, including Sweet N Tangy Dipping Sauce, Summertime BBQ Dipping Sauce, Creamy Buffalo Dipping Sauce, and more. And although you might assume that condiments all tend to have a similar kind of nutritional value as each other, you'd be wrong. The truth is that, when it comes to clogging up your arteries, some sauces are more equal than others.

According to KFC's nutritional guide, there is one Unholy Trinity of condiments that you ought to stay away from: Buttermilk Ranch Dipping Sauce, Finger Lickin' Good Dipping Sauce, and Honey Mustard Dipping Sauce. One serving of each of these contains at least 100 calories, with the most calorific of all — the Finger Lickin' Good Sauce — containing an impressive 130 calories. They all contain at least 10 grams of fat, and at least a gram of saturated fat each. They're heavy in sodium too, with the Buttermilk Ranch Dipping Sauce hitting as many as 240 milligrams of the stuff. And if you've got a real sodium aversion, stay away from the Creamy Buffalo Dipping Sauce — it might not be as fatty or calorific as the others, but it contains a staggering 510 milligrams of sodium to make up for it.

Maybe that ketchup doesn't seem so bad after all.

Of course, we wouldn't be giving KFC their dues if we weren't hitting up their dessert menu, so here it is: the Reese's Peanut Butter Pie is Colonel Sanders' unhealthiest treat.

In fairness, though, there's not a lot in it — the Reese's Peanut Butter Pie isn't a runaway winner for the title. At 300 calories, 17 grams of fat, nine grams of saturated fat (which, uh, really isn't great), 33 grams of carbs and 22 grams of sugar, it just about beats out the majority of its competitors. The only areas in which it's beaten are in the carbs, where the Oreo Cookies and Creme Pie squeak through with 35 grams — but that particular item comes with slightly smaller stats on everything else.

None of the restaurant's desserts are genuinely good for you, obviously. The Chocolate Chip Cookie bottoms out the calorie count with 120, which really isn't all that bad, but even that contains six grams of fat and three grams of saturated fat. Generally, the rule of thumb here seems to be that, dessert-wise, you're okay going for pretty much any of them — but ideally you shouldn't have anything at all.

Ah, yes — here's the inconvenient, unpleasant, kinda irritating truth: if you really want to walk away from KFC clean of body and clean of soul, you're best not eating any of their chicken at all.

Obviously, nobody is under the impression that the chickens who become KFC's main dish lead particularly happy lives, but even so, the true extent of their suffering is shocking. In 2019, The Independent reported on a World Animal Protection report that found a number of mainstream fast food chains, including KFC, McDonald's, and Domino's, are "subjecting billions of chickens to lives of misery that end in a painful death."

The report itself, which followed a global investigation, found "an almost-universal disregard among the brands ... for improving the treatment of chickens throughout their global supply chains." Each year, around 40 billion chickens are raised in factory farms, suffering from conditions such as lameness, skin lesions and heart failure. according to the report. Two-third of these chickens are intentionally developed so quickly that their legs cannot bear their weight, and are raised in dark warehouses so as to suppress their instincts.

Earlier that year, the WAP had approached KFC with a petition demanding better conditions for its chickens. But their report found that the company was lacking in transparency, and offered little information on how they were performing when it comes to chicken welfare.

As it stands, there is no indication that KFC is improving when it comes to the way they breed and farm their chickens. So if this is something that you care a lot about, you may just want to skip KFC altogether. Or maybe just stick to the coleslaw.