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Description
Chicken and turkey are rich in protein, low in saturated fat (if you don't eat the skin), versatile, and easy to cook.
And companies are working their wings off to make poultry even easier. Forget whole chickens, or even boneless and skinless breasts. These days you can buy your birds already seasoned and grilled or oven roasted and cut up into cutlets, tenderloins, strips, or cubes.
The downside? Your wallet...and your blood pressure. Most seasoned chicken and turkey is largely seasoned with salt. You could even end up with a mouthful of salt from what looks like fresh unseasoned chicken. Here's how to find quick-prep poultry that isn't loaded with sodium.
STRIPPED DOWN
You can throw them in a stir-fry, wrap them in a tortilla, toss them in a salad, or scatter them on pasta primavera. They have no more than 2 grams of saturated fat and about 120 calories per serving. And all you have to do is take them out of the bag and heat. What's not to like about fully cooked chicken strips or diced chicken?
Salt. A modest 3 ounces of most strips or cubes from Oscar Mayer, Butterball, or Fast Fixin' supply 700 to 800 milligrams of sodium. That's about a third to half of a day's sodium limit in half a small bag or box.
Some companies shrink their numbers by shrinking their serving size to 2 1/2 ounces (Perdue Short Cuts), or even 2 ounces (Hormel Natural Choice). But at the "official" serving of 3 ounces (which we use in our chart), only a handful of products have less sodium than our cutoffs for a Best Bite (350 mg) or Honorable Mention (480 mg).
Our advice: if you don't want to cook and slice a package of raw, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, try Trader Joe's unflavored Just Chicken.
Of our remaining Best Bites,... |
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