On the last day of February 2017, KFC UK and Ireland decided to introduce The Dirty Louisiana burger in a humorous manner. Centered around Figgy Poppleton-Rice, parody food blogger who mocks "clean eating," the advertisement features her attempts to create a "healthier" burger for KFC.
The advertisement ends with The Dirty Louisiana burger literally destroying the "healthy" burger Poppleton-Rice created. But this advertisement raised a question in my mind—is it possible for KFC to become a healthier option for us?
First, I have attempted to understand how many calories The Dirty Louisiana burger has. Then, I am going to find alternatives to each part of the burger to reduce calories as much as possible and make KFC more enjoyable to our body.
Know Your Enemy
Marufish on Flickr
In his book The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." Well, according to the official KFC UK and Ireland website, The Dirty Louisiana burger provides you with 735.00 calories per serving. Yikes.
Taking into consideration that a moderately active female and male of age 19-30 requires 2000-2200 and 2600-2800 calories per day, 735.00 calories per burger grossly exceeds the daily required caloric intake per meal. Considering one also decides to eat some snacks throughout the day, 600-700 should be the ideal calorie one should take in per meal.
The Bun
We all know that whole wheat is better for you than white bread. So ideally, we should be looking for buns made of whole wheat. One serving of a whole wheat hamburger bun contains a mere 131 calories.
The Chicken
Theoretically, choosing fried chicken would be your last choice if you're looking to cut calories, but it wouldn't be called Kentucky Fried Chicken without the fried chicken.
So I decided to use chicken breast which is the healthiest part of the chicken. Surprisingly, boneless fried chicken breast only provides you with 187 calories per 100g.
The Vegetables
This is the part I put some great thought into. While I had the option of going full Subway and placing a bunch of different vegetables into the burger, I decided to stick with the basic lettuce and tomatoes. 36g of shredded lettuce provides us with 5 calories and 20g of sliced tomato also provides us with 5 calories.
The Sauce
ImpromptuKitchen on Flickr
Unfortunately, I could not gather any information on what kind of sauce KFC uses to make The Dirty Louisiana burger ( they probably use a type of secret sauce). To compensate, I decided to use good ol' honey-mustard that never seems to fall short of tasting delicious when paired with chicken. 2 tablespoons of reduced calorie honey mustard provides us with 62 calories.
The Ultimate Burger
After adding up all the calories in my burger, one serving (in theory) provides us with a total of 390 calories–that's way better and healthier than its opponent, The Dirty Louisiana Burger.
If KFC sees this article and offers me to buy my burger, I will definitely name it the Kealthier Fried Chicken burger.