How many teaspoons of sugar in chicken breast?

Chicken breast has no row of its own on any of Dr Unwin’s charts. The common foods chart names chicken in its side panel, with oily fish, almonds, mushrooms, cheese and meat, as a food in the very low glycaemic range, but prints no figure. The figure on this page was therefore calculated for this site, one of only three foods in the dataset produced that way.

The calculation needs one input. USDA FoodData Central, the United States government’s food composition database, lists roasted chicken breast as containing 0.0g of carbohydrate per 100g (SR Legacy, FDC ID 171477). Glycaemic load is GI multiplied by grams of available carbohydrate, divided by 100. With no carbohydrate, the load is 0 whatever GI is assumed, so no GI is needed or given.

A glycaemic index cannot be measured for plain chicken at all. The standard test gives volunteers a portion containing a fixed amount of carbohydrate, and no portion of chicken contains any.

The USDA entry is for the meat without skin. Skin adds fat but not carbohydrate. The figure does not cover breaded, battered or marinated chicken: coatings add flour, and many sauces and glazes contain sugar, honey or starch. Processed chicken products such as nuggets are different foods.

At a figure of zero, the size of the portion makes no difference, so a larger breast gives the same result as a small one.

The other two calculated foods are salmon and ground beef. All three sit with eggs in the calculator’s meat, fish and eggs category.