The Healthiest Piece Of Fried Chicken You Can Eat At Popeyes

What's the healthiest piece of fried chicken you can eat at Popeyes? Fried chicken is never particularly good for you; it is, after all, a treat. However, some pieces of chicken are better for you than others. Specifically, as Health Digest highlights in a piece about fast food items that are actually good for you, the leg is healthier than the rest. On the Popeyes nutritional chart, the leg boasts the least amount of calories of any of the Bonafide Chicken options, as well as the least fat, carbs, cholesterol, and sodium. 

This might surprise readers as conventional wisdom, such as that shared on LiveStrong, states that chicken breasts are healthier than chicken legs. The reason? For a 100 gram portion of chicken, the breast (with skin still on) contains 7.7 grams of fat while the drumstick beats that with 9.7 grams. And while there probably are oils accrued within the breast during its cooking, the leg is healthier than the breast at Popeyes simply because it's smaller. So you need to eat two chicken legs to ingest 100 grams of protein, which is equivalent to the protein content in the breast.

So, in perhaps a cheap way of answering the question, the healthiest piece of fried chicken you can eat from Popeyes is the smallest portion of fried chicken. 

Of course, as stated in the beginning, fried chicken is never particularly healthy, even when eaten in the smallest amount. For while a fried chicken leg from Popeyes only contains just over a third of the 1,230 milligrams of sodium found within the breast, that's still 460 milligrams of sodium. If you eat two legs, that's 920 milligrams of sodium.

For reference, the American Heart Association recommends a diet with no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day, with a suggested limit of 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day. Additionally, even if you limit yourself to two Popeyes chicken legs, you still have the option of sauce, the drink, and the side to consider, which could pump even more sodium into you. In an infographic concerning the subject of excessive sodium in the American diet, the foundation lists possible risks to include heart failure, strokes, and osteoporosis.

However, as an occasional treat, a couple of fried chicken legs would indeed be the healthiest option at Popeyes.