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If you’re like us, being able to eat out again after a year and a half of Covid lockdowns was truly blessing. Not having to shop, prep, cook and clean up after a meal, and just to sit in a dining room with other people (even strangers!), was such a thrill. But dining out again came with some unintended side effects, too. Food prepared in restaurant kitchens can have more salt, butter and other unhealthy ingredients than you might be inclined to cook with at home. And by proxy, the extra pounds you gained during quarantine didn’t seem to want to go anywhere. And it was dishes like Olive Garden’s Chicken Marsala that certainly didn’t help. Health experts say this is one of the most unhealthy chicken dish that is available in any restaurant in the U.S.–and that’s saying a lot for a country with 42.4% of the population being obese according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While the Italian restaurant chain removed the even unhealthier “Stuffed” version of the dish from menus while back, this “healthier” option made with “lightly” floured grilled chicken breasts is still staggering in its nutritional content. Here’s everything you need to know before ordering this fattening menu item, or anything similar, next time you venture out to eat:
Olive Garden Chicken Marsala
At a whopping 1,080 calories and 56 grams of fat, this one is a doozy. Made with those lightly-floured chicken breasts, topped with mushrooms and a marsala wine-based sauce, and complete with a side of fettucine alfredo pasta, this dish has everything you could ever dream of. No really, this high-sodium, saturated in fat dish is truly the stuff of nightmares. It contains 500 calories from fat, 56 grams of fat, 31 grams of saturated fat, 2,690 milligrams of sodium, 68 grams of carbs, 8 grams of sugar and 69 grams of protein.
If you’re following a low-fat diet, this dish alone contains more than your entire day’s worth of fat (around 50 grams). The previous version had heavy cream and was stuffed with cheese–but shaving 300 calories off the meal by removing them hardly made a dent on its nutritional rating from health experts.
“The Chicken Marsala may be one of the better items on the menu, but it certainly shouldn’t be considered healthy,” registered dietitian Trista Best tells us. “The grilled chicken may reduce the fat minimally, but the refined carbohydrates in the fettuccine noodles and dense fat in the alfredo sauce easily cancel out any benefit of the chicken being grilled. Half of the fat this meal contains is from saturated fat, which is known to increase body weight and risk of cardiovascular disease,” she continues. Lastly, “All 68 grams of carbs from this meal are refined and are highly inflammatory and will ultimately lead to overeating later on,” she warns. Yikes–that’s more than enough reasons to stay away from this dish.
They originally pulled the Stuffed Chicken Marsala from menus, but then Reddit users started noting that they had returned to select locations about 10 months ago. We think they might want to consider keeping them off!
