Unhealthiest Chicken dishes in USA
#8: WORST CHICKEN SANDWICH
Chili’s Buffalo Chicken Ranch Sandwich
1,560 calories
86 g fat (14 g saturated)
4,010 mg sodium
Take a minute to free associate. What comes to mind when you hear “chicken sandwich”? A light-and-healthy dinner? A good post-workout lunch? Both of those sound about right. But here’s where this sandwich veers from expectations: It sucks up three-fourths of your day’s calorie allotment. Plus it exceeds your daily recommendation for both fat and sodium. That’s what you call a dirty bird.
#7: WORST CHICKEN SALAD
California Pizza Kitchen Waldorf Chicken Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing
1,570 calories
30 g saturated fat
2,082 mg sodium
Salads are healthy, right? Well, CPK’s got some gnarly greens. Fully half the restaurant’s salads top a thousand calories, but this one is hands-down the worst. To be fair, part of the day-and-a-half’s worth of saturated fat comes from the blue cheese dressing. The trouble is, even if you switch to the restaurant’s lighter Dijon vinaigrette, you’re still facing 1,485 calories. Not a massive savings.
#6: WORST CHICKEN RICE DISH
Applebee’s Crispy Orange Chicken Bowl
1,880 calories
13 g saturated fat
4,250 mg sodium
Applebee’s is making strides toward a healthier menu, but as of yet the chain still has a lot of ground to cover. To its credit, it recently launched a sub-menu featuring entrees that all fall below 550 calories. Unfortunately the regular menu still carries caloric catastrophes like this tortured bird. For starters, the Crispy Orange Chicken Bowl delivers nearly a day’s worth of calories, but to top that, it throws in more sodium than you’d find in a dozen large orders of McDonald’s French Fries—a whopping two days' worth! That might be good for thawing your driveway in a snowstorm, but it’s not so great for fueling your body.
#5: WORST CHICKEN NACHOS
Baja Fresh Charbroiled Chicken Nachos
2,020 calories
110 g fat (41 g saturated)
2,980 mg sodium
Okay, so you already knew nachos were trouble, but could you have ever predicted anything like this? This one plate has more fat than an entire package of Chewy Chips Ahoy! cookies. (Yes, an ENTIRE package.) In fact, you could snarf down the whole 32-cookie set, then move on to a twin-wrapped package of Twinkies, and still come out ahead on fat.
Outback Steakhouse Alice Springs Chicken Quesadilla
2,141 calories
133 g fat (61 g saturated fat)
3,477 mg sodium
Since 2008 we’ve been harping on Outback to clean up its act, but so far the chain has refused. In fact, the only reason we were able to track down this nutrition information is that New York and California laws forced restaurant franchises to disclose their numbers. And only after we made it public did Outback start offering the numbers to all its customers. A victory for nutrition? Not yet—not with numbers like these.
#3: WORST AMERICAN CHICKEN ENTREE
The Cheesecake Factory Chicken and Biscuits
2,511 calories
66 g saturated fat
2,725 mg sodium
Doesn’t it seem like there’s something un-patriotic about transforming a traditional American meal into a caloric saboteur? It’s as if The Cheesecake Factory has declared nutritional warfare on the waistlines of this country. Or maybe they’re in cahoots with the denim companies—the more your gut bulges, the more new pants you’re forced to buy. (Okay, doubtful.) But whatever the guiding principal, you can guarantee it has nothing to do with your welfare.
#2: WORST CHICKEN CUTLET
The Cheesecake Factory Crispy Chicken Costoletta
2,556 calories
85 g saturated fat
2,755 mg sodium
This entrée comes served with mashed potatoes and asparagus, and it’s described on the menu as being “lightly breaded.” Sounds relatively healthy, right? Therein lies the Curse of The Chicken Entree: It always sounds relatively healthy. You’d never guess the damage this dish was capable of unless The Cheesecake Factory decided to be completely forthright and disclose on the menu that it carries so much butter that it could exceed the saturated fat limit for an entire family of four!
#1: WORST CHICKEN ENTREE IN AMERICA
The Cheesecake Factory Farfalle with Chicken and Roasted Garlic
2,579 calories
62 g saturated fat
1,983 mg sodium
Healthy it may sound, but chicken-in-pasta is the culinary equivalent of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In fact, The Cheesecake Factory’s menu features fully half a dozen chicken-pasta entrees in excess of 2,000 calories apiece. That’s a full day’s energy needs in one meal. Level that with the rest of the oversized entrees and The Factory emerges as the absolute worst restaurant in the country. (You’d be better off going on a Haagen-Dazs binge.)
