Nutrition

Best Lean Meats For Weight Loss

June 6, 2009
By J White

It goes without saying that lean meats are essential for rapid weight loss. They are low in fat and pack full of high quality protein, which is extremely important for a well-balanced diet. In fact, protein’s thermic effect and long digestion time help you to burn more fat calories during digestion than either complex carbohydrates or fat.

How to Choose?

In choosing lean meats, it is also important to know what is considered lean. For instance, the USDA considers a serving size of lean beef as having 10 grams of total fat. That’s a whooping 90 calories of fat, with almost half coming from saturated fat. Even their criteria for extra-lean beef stills has 45 calories or 5 grams of fat per serving. So just because certain meats meet a particular guideline to be labeled as “lean” does not mean it is actually low in fat.

What’s Lean?

All meat is going to have some fat per serving. However, the best sources of lean meats have less than 2 grams of fat per serving. Since many meat fat is from saturated fats, you would like the fat content to be as low as possible. To ensure that this is the case, it’s important that you know how to read food labels.

Best Lean Meats List

The following is a list of some of the best lean meats you can purchase. Given that there are many varieties of fish on the market, you will of course have a wider selection of lean fish to choose from. The only criteria for these meats is that they contain less than 2 grams of fat per-serving. To get the necessary fat in your diet, use olive oil or other fats that are high in mono and polyunsaturated fats.

Chicken Breast: 1.5 grams per serving

Turkey Breast: 1.4 grams per serving

Tuna: 1 grams per serving

Cod: 1 grams per serving

Grouper (Red Grouper): 1 grams per serving

Ocean Perch (Redfish): 1.6 grams per serving

Pinnacle (Whiting): 1.2 grams per serving

One last word. Since lean fish are a great source of lean meats, the fat that you do get from them gives you the added bonus of omega 3 fatty acids, which in the modern diet is a in low amount. Plus, these fatty acids are also believed to lower blood pressure and enhance immune function.

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