by Lindsay Price

Created on: June 11, 2009

What is the difference between white and dark meat?

Every holiday the first question often asked over the turkey is white meat or dark meat? When offered a piece of chicken you might be asked: 'Would you prefer breast or leg? White or dark?' Sometimes the person asking the question stares into your soul as they wait for the answer: whether you eat white or dark meat could provide great illumination into who you are as a human being...or it could be that you just like one over the other.

On the surface the difference between the two is rather mythic: dark meat bad! White meat good! Dark meat juicy! White meat dry! Some think the difference between the two lies solely in the colour of the meat.

Let's look a little bit deeper at the differences between white meat and dark. It all comes down to white meat and dark meat being two different types of muscle, which have two different uses and two different types of energy sources.

Being flightless birds, turkeys and chickens use their legs and their thighs much more than their breasts and their wings. The walking muscles are more active than the flying muscles. These stronger more active muscles are called slow twitch muscles. They are slower to contract, and good for endurance. Think of the muscles needed to help a marathon runner go the distance.

The breast is an example of a fast twitch muscle: faster to contract and are used for short bursts. A muscles that is only needed for a short period of time, every once in a while. These are the types of muscles a sprinter uses.

Because the leg and thigh muscles are more active, they need a constant flow of oxygen to keep going. The transportation system for oxygen in these muscles is called myoglobin. The presence of myoglobin is why a drumstick is darker than a breast. White meat doesn't need oxygen and therefore there is no myoglobin.

Now let's look at the energy sources for white and dark meat.

The muscle in breast meat receives it's energy from glycogen. You may recognize the word glycogen more if you know that glycogen is a form glucose which is a form of sugar.

Dark meat uses both glycogen and fat. As dark meat does has more saturated fat than white, this is why those on the diet trial are encouraged to eat the white meat of the breast of chicken, over the drumstick.

It's interesting to note that flying birds (such as ducks) are all dark meat, because they use their flying muscles just as muck as their legs and thighs.

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