Have you ever noticed thin white stripes in your chicken and wondered what they are?

Chicken is the most commonly eaten meat in the UK and us Brits eat a whopping 2.2 million birds per day.

But to keep up with that huge demand, poultry farmers have had to adapt their methods which has led to some interesting changes in quality.

Increasingly people are noticing thin white stripes running through their raw chicken.

The group Compassion in World Farming has released a video about ‘white striping’ in chicken, explaining that they are strands of fat, reports our colleagues at the Daily Mirror .

Traditionally, people tend to think of chicken as quite a lean, healthy meat but according to the video report, it isn’t as good for us as it once was.

It’s normal for chicken breasts to have a small amount of fat at the sides, but a relatively new phenomenon to see it running through the meat itself.

According to Compassion in World Farming, chicken farmers now have to produce meat on such a huge scale that they have to make their chickens bigger and ready to eat quicker than before, and this process makes the birds fattier.

A recent study by the University of Arkansas and Texas A&M found white stripes of fat in 96 per cent of the chickens they tested – this was in America but it’s on the rise in the UK too.

And of course the more the demand for chicken goes up in the UK, the higher the chance that the fatty birds will increase too.

But what does the extra fat in the chicken mean for us as the consumers? According to researchers it’s less healthy, the meat isn’t as tender and it doesn’t absorb marinades as well as less fatty chicken.

However, it’s worth noting that the meat is still perfectly edible.

A spokesman for the National Chicken Council told Buzzfeed that white striping only affects a “small percentage of chicken meat” and “does not create any health or food safety concerns for people and the welfare of the chicken itself is not negatively impacted”.

So it might be a good idea to be on the lookout for white striping in raw chicken and avoid it if you can – but you certainly don’t have to throw it away.