Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinagel. And this

week, I want to talk about plant-based chicken. Plant-based meats are hot. From fast food chains

to upscale groceries to warehouse clubs, meatless meat alternatives are continuing to colonize

our restaurant menus and refrigerator cases. Beefless burgers, such as the Beyond and the

Impossible burgers, were really the first products to break through from the alternative food

space into the mainstream. And I've talked about those in several previous episodes. But

2022 seems to be shaping up as a year of poultry-less chicken. Most of the plant-based brands have

now rolled out some form of chicken nugget. So I wondered how they stacked up nutritionally

and otherwise against one another and against real chicken. So what are these plant-based

chickens made from? Well, 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. And some brands are now using

protein from other legumes, such as peas or fava beans in place of soy. But obviously,

if you avoid either soy or gluten, you're going to want to read these 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 to the quote-unquote chicken itself. I only found one brand called

a daring that offers a plain unbredded plant-based chicken. And it 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

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 a recent episode on the food

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