A couple of years ago I was diagnosed as insulin resistant and pre-diabetic.
My doctor’s first instinct was to put me on medication. My instinct was to understand the problem first. So before agreeing to pills, I started tracking everything — diet, blood glucose, protein intake — using a CGM device and food tracking apps.
What I found surprised me. Despite being a lifelong, committed non-vegetarian, I was not consuming enough protein. Not even close. And I was eating the wrong things in the wrong quantities, convinced I was making healthy choices. I reversed the insulin resistance entirely through food and lifestyle changes, without medication.
That process forced me to look at nutrition data more carefully than I ever had before. And what I found about goat meat — the meat I had built Chevon® around — was both vindicating and infuriating.
Vindicating, because the science was on our side all along. Infuriating, because almost nobody knows it.
Let’s start with the numbers
The United States Department of Agriculture publishes comparative nutrition data on all major meats. Here’s what it says per 100 grams of cooked meat:
Goat meat: 142 calories · 2.6g total fat · 0.79g saturated fat · 75mg cholesterol · 27g protein
Chicken breast: 185 calories · 4g total fat · 1g saturated fat · 85mg cholesterol · 31g protein
Read that again. Goat meat has fewer calories than chicken. Less total fat than chicken. Less saturated fat than chicken. Less cholesterol than chicken.
This is not a marginal difference. Goat meat has roughly 50% less fat than most red meats, and is 40% lower in saturated fat compared to chicken. And yet, for decades, Indians have been told that chicken is the healthy option and goat is the indulgence.
How did this happen?
The white meat myth
The belief that white meat is inherently healthier than red meat was largely shaped by Western dietary guidelines developed in the 1970s and 80s — guidelines built primarily around beef, pork, and lamb. Goat meat was barely on their radar. Indian doctors and nutritionists, following Western nutritional frameworks, passed the advice down in a simplified form: red meat bad, white meat good.
Goat meat got lumped into the red meat category and dismissed. Never mind that it performs better than chicken on almost every cardiovascular health metric.
The irony is that India has been eating goat meat for thousands of years — long before this classification existed. Ayurvedic texts have detailed references to goat meat’s therapeutic properties. It was never considered dangerous. The danger narrative was imported.
What goat meat actually gives you
Beyond calories and fat, three nutrients stand out.
Iron. Goat meat contains approximately 3.2mg of iron per 85g serving. Chicken breast has about 0.42mg. That’s nearly eight times more iron. For a country where iron deficiency anaemia is endemic — particularly among women — this is a significant difference that almost never gets mentioned.
Vitamin B12. Goat meat is a strong source of B12, a nutrient completely absent from plant-based foods and chronically deficient in many Indian diets. B12 supports nerve function, red blood cell formation, and cognitive health. Getting it from food is always better than supplements.
Potassium. Higher than most meats, helping regulate blood pressure — relevant at a time when hypertension is rising sharply across India’s urban population.
Goat meat is also easier to digest than beef or lamb. Lower fat content and less dense muscle fibre means it places less strain on the gut — something that matters more as we age.
The protein deficiency connection
Here’s what my own tracking revealed — and what the national data confirms. India’s average meat consumption is 6.5 kg per year per person. Spread across the 70% of Indians who eat meat, that’s roughly one 120g meat dish per week.
One dish a week gives you about 35 grams of protein from meat. Adults need 100 grams per day.
The gap is enormous. And it rarely gets filled. India is one of the most protein-deficient countries in the world, despite being a significant meat-eating nation. We are eating less meat than we think, less protein than we need, and making ourselves sicker in ways we’re attributing to the wrong causes.
When I fixed my protein intake, my insulin resistance reversed. I am not saying goat meat is medicine. I am saying that understanding what you’re actually eating — and eating more of the right things — changes outcomes.
Goat meat, eaten more regularly and understood correctly, is part of the solution. That’s a very different conversation from the one most people are having about it.
Why this matters to me
I founded Chevon® because I believed India’s most widely eaten meat deserved to be understood, trusted, and eaten with confidence — not reluctance.
The science has always been on Chevon®’s side. What’s been missing is the clarity.
The next time someone tells you to skip the goat and order the chicken because it’s healthier, show them this.
Riz Thakur is the Founder & CEO of Chevon Agrotech — India’s first integrated farm-to-fork goat meat brand.