Why You Should Eat Chicken Every Day to Improve Health

Our family is often asked why we follow a mostly paleo diet, and the big secret is - because eating a wholesome diet rich in clean protein and vegetables just makes us feel better! We didn’t always eat this way, but we found that once we began to follow paleo principles, the health issues that many of us noticed (some minor, some that didn’t feel so minor) started to clear up on their own. No magic prescriptions, no major lifestyle changes. Just clean eating and high quality food!

What is a Paleo Diet?

There are so many diets out there that it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of them. So what sets a paleo diet apart from the rest? In a nutshell, a paleo diet focuses on foods that were available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, before the advent of modern farming and milling practices. So, anything that can be grown or hunted is a focus of a paleo lifestyle, while things like grains (which have to be milled) or processed foods and sugars are to be avoided.

The Mayo Clinic explains a paleo diet pretty well:

A paleo diet is an eating plan based on foods humans might have eaten during the Paleolithic Era. The Paleolithic Era dates from around 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago.

A modern paleo diet includes fruits, vegetables, lean meats, fish, eggs, nuts and seeds. These are foods that in the past people could get by hunting and gathering. It doesn't include foods that became more common when small-scale farming began about 10,000 years ago. These foods include grains, legumes and dairy products.

…The diet is based on the idea that our genes are not well adjusted for modern diets that grew out of farming…Farming made foods such as grains and legumes more easily available. And it introduced dairy. Also, farming changed the diets of animals that people ate. The paleo diet idea is that these changes in diet outpaced the human body's ability to change, or adapt. This mismatch is believed to contribute to obesity, diabetes and heart disease today.

We realize the irony in farmers touting the benefits of a diet that originated from the absence of farming, but the gist of a paleo diet is that it aims to eat as unprocessed as possible, given our modern way of life.

Critics of the paleo diet have mentioned the possible downfalls of eating paleo, including the high amount of red meat and saturated fat that people consume when they follow this lifestyle. While we believe that if you’re obtaining your meat from high quality sources a diet high in animal protein can still be healthy, the truth is that too much red meat has been linked to certain health issues. Chicken offers a healthy alternative that is lower in fat, including saturated fat, and actually higher in protein than red meat such as beef.

What Are the Health Benefits of Chicken?

While all animal protein contains cholesterol, saturated fat plays a part in high cholesterol, and chicken - particularly pasture raised chicken - has much lower levels of saturated fat than beef or pork.

In fact, our Pasturebird pasture raised chicken boasts the following statistics when compared to conventional chicken:

50% more vitamins A and E
3x the omega 3s
3x more NADH
21 % less saturated fat, and
4x more ATP

How do we raise such nutrient rich chicken? Pretty simple, actually. We give them a good life, full of fresh air, sunshine, and daily fresh pasture so they can forage to their heart’s content. They have constant access to insects, worms, nuts, seeds, and grasses, and we supplement with a high quality non-GMO chicken feed to round out their diet. Because of the way our chickens are raised, it is chock full of nutrients and has a much more savory and bold taste than conventional chicken. As a result of their healthy lifestyle, our Pasturebird chickens have naturally robust immune systems, and are never given antibiotics or drugs.

Chicken is naturally high in protein and contains several important vitamins, minerals, and amino acids which help to maintain healthy muscles, bones, and joints. It’s lower in fat than many other meats which makes it a particularly good choice for anyone focusing on weight management or heart health.

Pasturebird Makes it Easy to Eat Chicken Every Day

One of our goals when we started this company was to make wholesome, nutrient-rich pasture raised chicken available on a wider scale. While more farmers are realizing the benefits of regenerative agriculture and raising animals on pasture, when we started our farm over a decade ago, pasture raised chicken was pretty tough to find.

That’s why we make it easy by shipping nationwide, right to your door. Our chicken comes to you frozen so you can have it on hand whenever you need it, and incorporate chicken into your every day diet to improve health. Chicken is easy to cook and super versatile, it’s easy to make a dish like chicken salad that can work as either lunch, dinner, or a snack, or you can make a rotisserie chicken, chicken breasts, or chicken thighs the focus of your meal with healthy (and maybe paleo friendly?) side dishes.

You’ll find lots of chicken recipes on our blog, and we usually try to keep them pretty simple so that it’s easy to incorporate them into your busy lifestyle. Whether you’re an avid meal planner or prefer to wing it, you’ll likely find some recipes that work for you, and help you to incorporate chicken into your every day diet to improve health!