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Food

Chick-Fil-A is Pushing An All-Chicken-Nugget Diet

The Georgia-based fast food chain would like its customers to know that a diet of straight-up chicken nuggets isn’t such a bad idea.
Photo via Flickr user j.reed

Chick-fil-A has a diet idea for you, and they've put in on their takeout bag.

The Georgia-based fast food chain—which is famously closed on Sundays, in accordance with the Southern Baptist faith of its founder, S. Truett Cathy—would like its customers to know that a diet of straight-up chicken nuggets isn't such a bad idea.

To "encourage healthier living," the chicken-chain's suggestion is to "eat smaller meals (like an 8-count pack of grilled chicken nuggets) every three to four hours."

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When Rodger Sherman of SBNation, the online sports company, decided to tweet the advice, a not-so-shocking thing happened. The Internet had a few things to say about it.

Chick-Fil-A suggests adding "one healthy habit" to your day, like eating chicken nuggets every three hours pic.twitter.com/PO3ADjyWUZ

— Rodger Sherman (@rodger_sherman) January 27, 2016

One commenter, Faint Signal, offered some Chick-fil-A exercise advice:

@rodger_sherman @Beageal I'm thinking their exercise recommendation is to walk to Chick-Fil-A 3 to 4 times a day — faintsignal (@faintsignal) February 1, 2016

Laurence Brothers isn't sure he can keep up with the regimen:

@rodger_sherman @felixgilman That's 64 chicken nuggets a day. Hm.

— Laurence Brothers (@lbrothers) January 27, 2016

Zac-man did some calculations and figured out exactly how many chicken nuggets this diet would call for in a year:

@rodger_sherman @russbengtson 16 hrs awake / day 4 meals / day 8 nuggets / meal 32 nuggets / day 224 nuggets / week 11648 nuggets / yr — zac-man (@WordOfZac) January 27, 2016

Yup—that's a lot of nuggets straight to the face

In fact, though, a full-out diet of chicken nuggets may not be that crazy. Each serving of eight—they're grilled, after all—only contains 140 calories. And each box offers a decent serving of protein: 23 grams.

The problem, however, is the sodium. With each serving containing 530 milligrams of sodium, a day's worth of chicken nuggets would quickly put a dieter at or close to the recommended limit of 2,300 milligrams of daily sodium intake.

And even relatively good things like chicken nuggets—every toddler's and stoner's food fantasy—might get a little old if you were to eat almost 12,000 of them a year. But then again, we've heard of less appealing diets.