Is turkey healthier than chicken?

People ask me this in the aisle, holding one pack in each hand, and the honest answer is that they are asking the wrong question. Chicken and turkey are close enough that the bird barely matters. What matters is which part of it you are holding, and whether the skin is still on.

Four ounces of cooked skinless breast gives you about 35 grams of protein whichever bird it came from. Turkey breast carries about 2 grams of fat and chicken breast about 4, and that is the whole difference between them. It is a real difference, but it is small next to everything else on the plate.

The skin is a different story. Leave it on a chicken breast and the fat roughly doubles, from about 4 grams to 9, with no more protein to show for it. A thigh without its skin gives you about a fifth less protein than a breast for more than twice the fat. With the skin on, four times the fat. Between a quarter and a third of the fat in poultry is saturated, whichever part of the bird it comes from, so more fat means more of the kind that shows up in a cholesterol result.

So far, so simple: skinless breast, either bird. The place people go wrong is the ground meat, because there the label works against you.

Ordinary ground turkey is not ground turkey breast. Under the federal labeling rule it may contain dark meat as well as white, and the skin and its fat go in too, in the proportions they occur on the bird, unless the label says otherwise. The “93% lean” on the front is measured raw. Cook it, and the water goes while the fat stays, so four ounces of cooked 93% lean ground turkey carries about 13 grams of fat. That is more than a chicken breast with the skin on. The 85% lean kind cooks to about 20 grams. Ground chicken, unless the package says breast, comes in around 12.

The pack you want says ground turkey breast, usually with 99% fat-free on the front. It cooks to about 3 grams of fat in four ounces, which is why it is the one the recipes in my book call for. If the front of the package is ambiguous, turn it over: on the Nutrition Facts panel you are looking for two grams of fat or less per four-ounce serving. Anything showing eight or ten grams raw is the ordinary kind, whatever the front says about lean.

None of this means dark meat is a bad food. It means that if the reason you are eating poultry is to get a lot of protein without much saturated fat, and on my plate that is exactly the reason, then the breast does the job and the rest of the bird does it less well. A thigh now and then is not a problem. A pound of 85% lean ground turkey every week, bought in the belief that it was the lean choice, is the kind of quiet mistake that adds up over years.

The figures above are averages from the USDA's food composition database, per hundred grams and scaled to four cooked ounces. A given bird or brand will differ by a gram or two. Chapter three of The LP3 Diet has the full comparison, cut by cut, in one table.