Is chicken healthier than red meat?

The objection

“Every health warning about meat turns out to be about red meat. The cancer agency named beef, pork and lamb, and the NHS limit is for red and processed meat, so I moved to chicken years ago. A skinless breast is about the leanest protein you can buy, and if it were a problem somebody would have said so by now.”

The answer

Chicken does come out of the long-term studies better than red meat, mostly because red meat carries risks that chicken hasn’t been shown to share. The World Health Organization’s cancer agency, IARC, classes processed meat as carcinogenic to humans and red meat, which means all mammal muscle meat including pork and lamb, as probably carcinogenic, with the strongest evidence for bowel cancer (WHO, 2026) [1]. Does red and processed meat cause cancer? sets out the size of that risk. Cancer Research UK (2025) says white meat such as chicken and turkey is not linked to a higher risk of cancer, and suggests chicken or turkey mince in place of beef or pork mince [2]. One small Italian cohort study of 4,869 people, in an analysis its authors called preliminary, found more deaths from gastrointestinal cancers in people eating over 300 g of poultry a week than in those eating under 100 g (subdistribution hazard ratio 2.27, 95% CI 1.23 to 4.17; Bonfiglio et al., 2025) [3]. For the heart, the pooled studies mostly find chicken neutral, and in a 2019 trial that compared the two directly with saturated fat held equal, LDL cholesterol was as high on white meat as on red meat and lower on protein from non-meat foods [9][10].

Chicken meat comes from broiler chickens, breeds selected so intensely for growth that in the 50 years before 2008 their growth rate rose from about 25 g a day to about 100 g a day [4]. In a survey for the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, researchers scored the walking of 51,000 birds from 176 UK flocks: at an average age of 40 days, 27.6% walked poorly and 3.3% were almost unable to walk, despite culling meant to remove the worst cases, and the main risk factors were those tied to fast growth (Knowles et al., 2008) [4].

Is chicken better for your heart than red meat?

Chicken looks safer for the heart than red meat, and most pooled studies find it makes little difference either way. In an Oxford meta-analysis of 13 published studies covering 1.4 million people (Papier et al., 2023), each extra 50 g a day of unprocessed red meat went with 9% more ischaemic heart disease (relative risk 1.09, 95% CI 1.06 to 1.12) and each 50 g of processed meat with 18% more (1.18, 1.12 to 1.25), while poultry, across 10 studies, showed no association [5]. A 2021 meta-analysis of 22 cohort studies (Lupoli et al.) compared the people eating the most white meat with those eating the least. Their rates of death from heart and circulatory disease (0.95, 0.89 to 1.01) and of non-fatal heart and circulatory events (0.99, 0.95 to 1.02) were about the same, and their death rate from any cause was about 6% lower (0.94, 0.90 to 0.97) [6].

A pooled analysis of six US cohorts did find a small link between poultry and cardiovascular disease. Zhong and colleagues (2020) followed 29,682 adults for a median of 19 years and found that two extra servings of poultry a week went with 4% more cardiovascular disease (hazard ratio 1.04, 1.01 to 1.06), close to the figure for unprocessed red meat (1.03, 1.01 to 1.06); over 30 years that came to a difference in absolute risk of 1.03 percentage points for poultry (0.36 to 1.70) and 0.62 for red meat (0.07 to 1.16) [7]. Poultry was not linked to a higher death rate (0.99, 0.97 to 1.02), while red meat was (1.03, 1.01 to 1.05) [7]. The authors suggested the poultry link might partly reflect fried chicken, which they couldn’t separate out because the cohorts didn’t consistently record how food was cooked [7]. All of these are observational studies, so they can’t fully separate a food from the habits of the people who choose it.

The Nurses’ Health Study, which followed 84,136 women for 26 years, found less coronary heart disease in women who ate more poultry, fish and nuts, and more in those who ate more red meat (Bernstein et al., 2010) [8]. In the authors’ statistical model, a daily serving of poultry in place of one of red meat went with 19% less coronary heart disease (95% CI 3% to 33%), fish with 24% less (6% to 39%) and nuts with 30% less (17% to 42%) [8].

Does chicken raise cholesterol less than red meat?

In the APPROACH trial (Bergeron et al., 2019) it didn’t: with saturated fat matched, LDL cholesterol was as high on white meat as on red meat, and higher on both than on protein from non-meat foods [9]. In the trial, 113 generally healthy adults aged 21 to 65 completed three diets of four weeks each, in random order, with their protein coming from red meat, from white meat or from non-meat sources [9]. One group ate all three with 15% of energy from saturated fat and the other with 7%, and within each group the three diets had the same shares of protein, fat and saturated fat (ClinicalTrials.gov record, 2011) [10]. LDL cholesterol and apolipoprotein B (apoB) were higher on both meat diets than on the non-meat diet at either level of saturated fat, and did not differ significantly between red and white meat [9]. The difference lay mainly in large LDL particles, while the small and medium particles didn’t change with the protein source [9]. The non-meat diets also held less cholesterol, and in a 2019 correction the authors estimated this would lower LDL by about 0.07 mmol/L, which may explain part of their advantage [11]. On blood fats alone, the authors concluded, their results gave no reason to choose white meat over red to lower the risk of heart disease [9].

The trial didn’t test the everyday swap from beef to chicken breast, which also cuts saturated fat: per 100 g, grilled 85% lean beef mince has 5.9 g and roast skinless chicken breast 1.0 g (USDA, 2019) [14][16]. In the same trial, more saturated fat raised LDL cholesterol and apoB whatever the protein source [9].

A 2019 meta-analysis of 36 trials with 1,803 participants (Guasch-Ferré et al.) sorted the diets that replaced red meat by type, poultry among them, though its abstract gives no separate result for poultry [12]. Against all the replacement diets together, red meat made no clear difference to LDL cholesterol [12]. LDL fell 0.198 mmol/L less on red meat than on legumes, soya and nuts (95% CI 0.065 to 0.330), and 0.173 mmol/L more on red meat than on fish (0.086 to 0.260), and the authors concluded that replacing red meat with those plant proteins improved blood fats while replacing it with fish or refined carbohydrates did not [12].

If you take a statin or another medicine for cholesterol, speak to your GP before making big changes to how you eat, and don’t stop or change any medicine without their advice.

Is eating chicken linked to type 2 diabetes?

Possibly, though the link is a little weaker and less certain than for red meat. In a 2024 analysis that pooled individual data from 31 cohorts in 20 countries (Li et al.), each extra 100 g a day of poultry went with 8% more type 2 diabetes (hazard ratio 1.08, 95% CI 1.02 to 1.14), close to the 10% for 100 g of unprocessed red meat (1.10, 1.06 to 1.15), while each 50 g a day of processed meat went with 15% more (1.15, 1.11 to 1.20) [13]. The analysis covered 1.97 million adults, 107,271 of whom developed type 2 diabetes over a median of 10 years, and allowed for body mass index among other factors [13]. The poultry result was weaker under other modelling assumptions, and replacing processed meat with unprocessed red meat or poultry was linked with less diabetes [13]. Intakes were modest by the standard of those increments: median poultry intake ranged from none to 72 g a day across the cohorts [13].

Is chicken leaner than beef mince?

Skinless chicken breast is much leaner, with about a sixth of the saturated fat of 85% lean beef mince per 100 g and more protein, but chicken thigh roasted with its skin has about two thirds of the mince’s saturated fat and four times the breast’s (USDA, 2019) [14][15][16].

Per 100 g (USDA, 2019)	Calories	Protein (g)	Saturated fat (g)	Fibre (g)
Chicken breast, no skin, roasted	165	31.0	1.0	0
Chicken thigh with skin, roasted	232	23.3	4.1	0
Beef mince, 85% lean, grilled patty	250	25.9	5.9	0
Firm tofu, calcium-set	144	17.3	1.3	2.3
Lentils, boiled	116	9.0	0.05	7.9

The NHS advises choosing chicken and turkey without the skin, or taking it off before cooking, because poultry skin is much higher in fat than the meat [19]. Firm tofu has about as much saturated fat as chicken breast and lentils almost none, and they carry 2.3 g and 7.9 g of fibre per 100 g against none in the meats, though less protein [17][18]. Cancer Research UK suggests replacing some or all of the red meat in a dish with pulses such as chickpeas, beans or lentils [2].

Can chicken give you food poisoning?

Yes. Studies reviewed by the UK’s Food Standards Agency (2024) identify chickens and chicken meat as the most frequent cause of Campylobacter infection, which the agency calls the leading bacterial cause of foodborne illness in the UK [20]. Between 2014 and 2017 the share of chickens on sale carrying more than 1,000 colony-forming units of Campylobacter per gram fell from 19% to 5%, but case rates stayed at around 100 per 100,000 people between 2014 and 2019 [20]. Experts consulted by the agency thought the likeliest reason was that 1,000 units per gram was the wrong target, and once the evidence was weighed they ranked imported poultry meat first, with other foods also on their list [20]. In the US, the CDC (2024) estimates that about 1 million people a year fall ill from eating contaminated poultry, names Campylobacter, Salmonella and Clostridium perfringens as germs raw chicken can carry, and says 1 in 25 packages of chicken in shops is contaminated with Salmonella [21].

Beef and other foods cause food poisoning too. Using US outbreak records from 1998 to 2023, the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration of the CDC, the FDA and the USDA (2026) attributed 19.1% of Salmonella illnesses to chicken and 7.8% to beef, and 18.6% of E. coli O157 illnesses to beef against 67.9% to vegetable row crops, while warning that outbreaks may not represent all illnesses [22].

Poultry has to be cooked all the way through because, the NHS says, bacteria can be found throughout it; when it is done the juices run clear and no pink meat is left inside [19]. The CDC gives a safe internal temperature of 165°F, about 74°C [21]. The NHS says washing meat before cooking increases the risk of food poisoning, and the CDC says raw chicken is ready to cook without washing [19][21].