Chicken breast protein, raw and cooked
Raw skinless chicken breast is 22.5 g of protein per 100 g. Cooked, the same cut reads 31 g. Nothing was added. About a quarter of the weight left as water, so what is left is more concentrated — and if you weigh at one stage and log at the other, you are wrong by roughly a third.
| Per 100 g | Calories | Protein | Carbs | Fat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skinless breast, raw | 120 | 22.5 g | 0.0 g | 2.6 g |
| Breast, meat only, roasted | 165 | 31.0 g | 0.0 g | 3.6 g |
Weigh raw, or weigh cooked. Pick one and stay there.
Both are correct. Mixing them is not. If you weigh 200 g of raw breast and it comes off the pan at 150 g, those are the same chicken and the same 45 g of protein — 200 g at 22.5 per 100, or 150 g at 31 per 100 do not land far apart. Log the raw weight against a raw entry, or the cooked weight against a cooked entry.
Weighing raw is usually easier to keep honest: it is one number, taken before anything variable happens. How long it sat in the pan changes the cooked weight and does not change the protein.
Common portions
| Serving | Weight | Calories | Protein | Carbs | Fat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 oz | 113 g | 136 | 25.4 g | 0.0 g | 3.0 g |
| 1 piece | 272 g | 326 | 61.2 g | 0.0 g | 7.1 g |
| 1 package | 926 g | 1111 | 208.3 g | 0.0 g | 24.3 g |
Raw, skinless, boneless.
The things that actually change the number
- Added solution. A lot of supermarket chicken is injected with salt water — often labelled "up to 15% solution". USDA carries that as a separate record. You are paying for brine and logging it as meat.
- Skin on. Skin-on records run substantially higher in fat. If you cooked with the skin and ate it, log it that way.
- What it was cooked in. The breast has 3.6 g of fat per 100 g roasted. A tablespoon of oil in the pan is about 14 g. The oil is the bigger number.
Source: USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy release 2018-04. Figures are per 100 g as published; serving weights are USDA’s own. Records used: Chicken, broiler or fryers, breast, skinless, boneless, meat only, raw (FDC 171077), Chicken, broilers or fryers, breast, meat only, cooked, roasted (FDC 171477).
Common questions
22.5 g raw and 31 g cooked, per USDA. The cooked figure is higher because roughly a quarter of the raw weight is water that leaves during cooking.
Either, as long as you log it against a matching entry. Raw is easier to keep consistent, because cooked weight depends on how long it was on the heat.
4 oz is 113 g. Raw, that is about 25 g of protein and 136 calories.
No. It loses water. The total protein in the piece is unchanged, which is why the per-100-g figure goes up rather than down.
Compare it with
| Food | Per 100 g | Protein | The page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turkey breast | 147 kcal | 30.1 g | Leaner than chicken, by a small real margin |
| Shrimp | 99 kcal | 24.0 g | The best protein-per-calorie ratio here |
| Canned tuna | 86 kcal | 19.4 g | In water, not oil — and drained is not the tin |
All twenty-four are on the food macros index.
Log it without doing this arithmetic
Scan the barcode or weigh it in grams and EatSleepRep does the conversion. The scanner is free forever, there are no ads, and every entry exports as CSV whenever you want it.