From fast food chains to upscale grocers to warehouse clubs, meatless meat alternatives continue to colonize restaurant menus and refrigerator cases. Beefless burgers such as the Beyond and Impossible burgers were the first products to really break through from the alternative food space into the mainstream. But 2022 seems to be shaping up as the year of poultry-less chicken. Most of the plant-based brands have now rolled out some form of chicken nugget. Let's see how they stack up—nutritionally and otherwise—against one another and real chicken.
Is the Vegan Impossible Burger Healthy for You?
Is The Beyond Burger Healthy for You?
What is plant-based chicken made from?
As with other meatless meats, most plant-based chicken products are based on either wheat or soy protein, doctored up with vegetable oil, salt, and various spices and other additives, including vitamins and minerals. Some brands are now using protein from other legumes (such as peas or fava beans) in place of soy.
Those who avoid either soy or gluten will need to read labels carefully.
Most of the meat-based chicken products available today are in the form of breaded chicken nuggets and, to be fair, a lot of the ingredients in these rather long lists actually seem to belong to the breading and not the "chicken" itself.
The only brand I found (Daring) that offers a plain, unbreaded, plant-based chicken has a pretty short list of ingredients, all of which I actually have in my kitchen right now. However, these are not products that any of us would be able to produce using equipment available in our home kitchens. Which leads us to the burning question:
Is plant-based chicken an ultra-processed food?
In the widely-cited NOVA classification system (which I discussed in greater detail in this episode), all plant-based meat alternatives (and for that matter, most plant-based dairy alternatives) would be classified as a Category 4 (or, ultra-processed) food. This is a class of foods that we are advised to minimize in our diets.
Nutrition researcher Mark Messina argues that, despite their classification as ultra-processed foods, many soy-based meat and dairy alternatives actually compare quite well nutritionally with their animal-based counterparts.
Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips"The NOVA food classification system over-simplifies the complexity of food. It fails to distinguish between a nutrient-dense, protein-rich, plant-based chicken nugget and a cupcake. Both are classified as ultra-processed foods."
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