Does Lamb or Chicken Have More Protein? (It's Not Close)

Chicken, and it's not close. Per 100g raw, skinless chicken breast has 22.5g of protein; ground lamb has 16.6g. Even chicken thigh, the "fatty" cut, carries 19.7g — still more than lamb. And that's the flattering comparison for lamb, because it ignores what the protein arrives with: ground lamb brings 282 calories per 100g against chicken breast's 165.

Run it per calorie and the gap stops being a gap and becomes a chasm. 100 calories of chicken breast buys you about 13.6g of protein. 100 calories of ground lamb buys you 5.9g. If protein is what you're shopping for, chicken gives you more than twice as much of it per calorie spent. That single number answers most versions of this question, so let's put the rest of them on the table too.

Lamb vs chicken, per 100g raw

All figures are USDA values for raw weight — the same numbers behind every food page on this site. "Lamb" here is ground lamb, which is the honest default for how most lamb is bought; more on the cut question below.

Full breakdowns: lamb, chicken breast, and chicken thigh— or see the two side by side on lamb vs chicken breast.

Does lamb have more protein than chicken?

No — and the persistent idea that it might comes from a real place: red meat feels denser, richer, more substantial. But what makes lamb feel rich is fat, not protein. Ground lamb is 23.4g of fat per 100g. Skinless chicken breast is 1.9g. That twelve-fold difference is doing all of the sensory work, and none of the protein work.

One honest caveat about cuts. Our lamb figure is ground lamb; a trimmed lean cut like leg or loin carries noticeably more protein and far less fat than the ground version, so the gap narrows if you're buying lean cuts and trimming well. It narrows — it doesn't flip. Skinless chicken breast remains the higher-protein, lower-fat option, which is why it's the reference point every other protein source gets measured against in our chicken cuts breakdown.

Is lamb leaner than chicken?

Also no, by any reading of the word. Ground lamb has six times the fat of skinless chicken thigh and twelve times the fat of skinless breast, and its saturated fat alone (10.2g per 100g) outweighs the total fat of either chicken cut. If "lean" is the property you're optimising for, this is the least competitive matchup in the meat aisle.

Does lamb or chicken have more calories?

Lamb, by a wide margin: 282 calories per 100g raw against 165 for chicken breast and 119 for skinless thigh. Nearly all of the difference is fat. This is the number that quietly decides the "which is better for weight loss" question too — at equal portion sizes, swapping lamb for chicken saves roughly 40% of the calories while increasing the protein. There aren't many food swaps where both numbers move in your favour at once. How many of those calories you actually have to spend is a budget question — the protein calculator gives you the protein side of that budget in about a minute.

Is lamb or chicken healthier?

"Healthier" is doing a lot of unpaid work in that question, so here's the honest split. On the metrics most people mean — calories, fat, saturated fat, protein per calorie — chicken wins every column, and it's not a subtle win.

Lamb's genuine case is iron: 1.55mg per 100g against chicken breast's 0.35mg — more than four times as much, and in the well-absorbed heme form that red meat is actually good at delivering. If you're eating red meat partly for iron, lamb is a legitimate pick, and its extra calories are a feature rather than a bug if you're in a surplus trying to hit a high protein target without living off dry breast meat.

So: cutting calories, chasing protein density, or watching saturated fat — chicken, clearly. Eating for iron, for a surplus, or because lamb is the meat you'll actually cook on a Tuesday — lamb earns its place. A food you enjoy and eat consistently beats an "optimal" one you abandon, and no chart shows that column.

The part nobody logs correctly

Whichever meat wins your Tuesday, the numbers only help if they make it into your log — and lamb is exactly the kind of food where logging goes wrong, because "lamb" on a menu might be a lean grilled cut or ground-lamb kofta, and at 282 calories per 100g for the ground version, guessing wrong on a dinner-sized portion is a triple-digit-calorie mistake. Nobody stops mid-dinner to look that up. That's the actual failure mode: not choosing the wrong meat, but giving up on tracking the week you eat anything more complicated than chicken breast. Sunn exists for that moment — send a photo or a one-line description on WhatsApp, get the calories and protein logged in seconds, and keep your streak alive at ±20 calories instead of abandoning it in search of perfection.