I know it's a shipost and this meme is at least 15 years old. But meat, cheese, and white bread (especially the ones in the US with added sugar) were never healthy
Although high in nutrients, the difficulty in digestion makes it a carciogen. Particularly red meat - bird and fish (pre omnipresent plastics and heavy metals) are relatively healthier.
Since the grain industry gained power in the 1940s. They funded much research to say
Meat is hard to digest (when in fact carnivorous animals have the shortest gut; we're omnivores and have a medium gut, we also have the most acidic stomach acid of the mammals which is an adaptation to eating meat)
Grain is the healthiest food (the only type of animal that does well on seeds is birds, they don't have teeth for bread to get stuck between and rot. The ancient Egyptians lived on bread and had the worst dental health)
That humans need a balanced diet of many different things - which we do when we're eating nutritionally poor foods like bread, but many thrive on simple diets of fatty meat (Inuit before they adopted the standard American diet; Buffalo hunting native Americans; modern followers of lion, carnivore, zero carb)
The standard diet as recommended by science (much of which was bought by the wheat peak bodies) has made us fat. Getting fatter is the most unhealthy state, it leads to diabetes, hypertension, bad cholesterol and early death
Specially processed meat, cheese and bread. In the case of fast food these ingredients are basically "hacked" to make us crave more and consume more. These industries have "food scientists" working on exactly that.
Meat, cheese and bread in their more natural form is definitely healthy when consumed in moderation.
Hacking implies a lot more than simply adding fat and sugar, and that's all you gotta do.
I've seen several threads where chefs confess that all they do to make their dish(s) popular is load it down with butter and sugar.
Wouldst thou like the taste of butter, wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
In related news, this American finally figured out why Europeans find our bread sickening sweet, why I love sourdough and why it's called "sour". You're only gonna need one guess.
Take care not to make statements so inaccurate they are effectively meaningless.
"US white bread" isn't a singular brand and most brands don't "contain[s] a carcinogen"...
You never mentioned what the carcinogen was. Probably because it would compromise your argument that "US white bread" as a whole contains it when it does not. (It's Potassium Bromate/Bromide (it's used interchangeably online sometimes), for those wondering.)
It's not limited to white bread in where it can be used. It was an additive to flour in general.
A lot of the fear mongering blogs, written by 'influencers' whose research consists of 10 seconds of Googling but not verifying a single fucking thing they write about, name brands that contain potassium bromate... but actually don't. Example: Wonder bread (https://wonderbread.ca/our_products/white-bread-675g/) Chex Mix. Looking up their ingredients list shows the item in question is not used at all. https://www.chexmix.com/products/chex-mix-traditional/
TLDR: Think before you repeat vague, meaningless shit next time.
BTW, You should look into the horrors of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
It seems odd putting meat in the same category as bread.
In terms of pure health, there's not much out there better than most meats. Yes, beef is a bit lower than pork and chicken, but properly portioned (looking at most of us Americans) it has very few downsides.
Bread on the other hand can be one of the worst foods we can eat. Of course, it is still all about moderation.
EDIT: Why the reddit-like downvotes folks? There's really no cohesive argument that puts meat below bread healthwise in most situations. If you want to avoid meat, avoid meat. If you want to be morally opposed to anyone eating meat, so be it. Facts are still facts and misinformation isn't the right way to fight that battle.
Of course. The unhealthiness of food is an emergent property arising from the arrangement of their constituents components relative to each other. The next time you have a burger and want to be healthy, just take it apart! Taps head
In all seriousness, for anyone confused by this, whether or not something is healthy for you is all about quantities and ratios. Specifically, that of your diet as a whole, not of individual items. So while I don't agree with this sentiment, burgers can be considered unhealthy because:
There is very little vegetables in relation to meat and bread
It is very calorically dense
Red meat is considered by many to be unhealthy in its own right, and burgers tend to have a lot of that
It is usually consumed with large portions of fries and drinks or other sides that are also very calorically dense with little diversity in micronutrients
I'm sick of people claiming calorie dense food is unhealthy. It's not. Calories are required for your body to function. An adult needs 2000kcal per day; whether they are spread out over 8 meals or 3 makes no difference. Eating the amount of calories of a hamburger every day is nothing special, especially if you do sports regularly.
Only thing wrong with calorie dense food is that people eat too much. Guess you could add ignorance in there as well. Pretty shocking when you look at the numbers on the menu.
Not that people actually look. They got every excuse in the world for being fat, except the big one, placing calories in their mouth.
Coming from the >30 BMI gang, a lot of the food in the West (especially the United States but a lot of other countries are having this problem too) has a shit-ton of calories and very few other nutrients. That's the biggest problem with caloric density, when food has a lot of calories and no nutrients it encourages either obesity or nutrient deficits.
whether they are spread out over 8 meals or 3 makes no difference.
While I agree with your overall point, this isnt true. While there is still debate about the "best" frequency to eat meals in, its generally agreed upon you dont want to eat all of your daily calories at once as you overstress your gut and cant process it efficiently.
Additionally, eight ounces of steak might be lean. (It also might not, of course.) Eight ounces of hamburger, especially one from a fast food restaurant, is absolutely not lean beef.
Ratios and amount are the most important thing in healthy eating. For reference, vegetables should be more than half your food intake, the rest split between whole-grain carbs and protein (either meat or plant based) in order to be healthy. And we need to pay attention to how much total food we eat too since our monkey brains that evolved under extreme food scarcity don't do a good job of moderating nutrient input.
I'm fat by nature (and environment) so I have examined and tried many diets, and I think I can only say for sure a few thing about healthiness of diets:
if you eat carbs, fats beyond what is necessary to eat, are unhealthy
If you don't eat carbs you need to eat fats, some fats are better than others
If you don't eat carbs and you don't eat fats you starve - to thin then to death
I cannot do it eating a low fat diet. I find portion control impossible, I get very hungry when I eat carbs
The only success I have had has been on very low carb diets, but they are hard to stick to long term. I found the only one I can do easily is "zero carb"
Ed. It's unbalanced - choose either:
Carbs, protein & minimal high quality fats; or
Fats, protein & minimal to zero carbs
If you eat balanced fat, carbs, protein then you will not be healthy
Butchers won't save you from sugar in bacon, many bacon brine recipes call for sugar, but a butcher will be able to tell you what the bacon was pickled in
Raw, unprocessed meat (steak, chops, chicken) is generally fine
What about protein? There's a whole other macro you can use to make up for calories with if you cut out carbs. Eating near exclusively protein probably isn't good for you, but you won't starve. From what I've seen there can even be a lot of advantages to eating a little more protein, especially if you're doing some strength training.
Protein is vital and is available on any kind of diet. Many vegetables, all meats, all fungi
Humans can either live on carbs or live on fats, in both cases we must also eat protein
Humans cannot (though cats can) live on protein, look up rabbit starvation. You will starve if you eat only protein, where eating only fat or only glucose will kill you much more slowly with vitamin deficiencies
White bread, cheese (at least not the one on burgers) and red meat aren’t exactly known as healthy foods. Definitely not in the proportions of a burger. Even more definitely not when you boil the meat in oil (often together with the onions).
First of all there's a huge gap between home made hamburger and, well, anything else tbh. Actually, let's expand it, there's a huge difference between home made anything and any other kind of food, be it restaurant or assembly line made.
Backing up a little though, if you make a hamburger at home, with lean good quality beef that you grind up yourself or ask them to grind it for you at the counter, lots of veggies and very little oil, on a home made bun or on actual bread (the kind made with flour, water and salt, that's it), then it's quite healthy. Still wouldn't eat it more than once a week since red meat yada-yada, but still, not that bad.
What you get at a fast food though is very low quality meat with lots of fats, dipped in other fats, sugar and spices to mask the flavor, processed bread, processed cheese, very little veggies and, usually, a side of french fries and a soda, which are a meal onto themselves. Let's take McDonald's, looking at their website a quarter pounder is 500+ kCal, the medium fries are 300+ kCal and a medium coke is 200+ kCal. That's 1000+ kCal for a "meal" full of fats, sugar and processed food. Also it's a huge spike in insuline which will lead you to a huge crash just a few hours later leaving you hungry and craving for more.
Restaurants are also a bit guilty of this. They tend to add much more fats than you'd ever do at home in order to drastically improve the flavor of their dishes. Can't even fault them for it, if I wanted a bland healthy meal, I'd have eaten at home. If I'm going to the restaurant it's because I want a great tasting dish. Ready made meals you can get at a supermarket are also full of fats, vegetable oils and preservatives in order to mask the shitty flavor.
So at the end of the day I'd say the best thing is to avoid as much as possible processed foods, avoid all take outs and deliveries, go out to eat maximum once a week and cook all your meals yourself starting with simple ingredients. It's not that hard either and cooking can be fun.
if you make a hamburger at home, with lean good quality beef that you grind up yourself or ask them to grind it for you at the counter
If you use lean beef to make a burger, you're Doing It Wrong™. Make the burger smaller or eat them less often if necessary, but don't go below about 20% fat.
More concretely, I recommend using brisket to grind for your hamburgers. It has the correct amount of fat, plus a whole brisket is among the cheapest cuts of beef you can buy.
Because the stuff is heavily processed using a lot of sugar, saturated fats and salt. Also the gravy the meat is fried in. Also the poor quality of the meat, being made from god knows which scraps of the animal, that couldn't sell otherwise.
Real answer (since there's a lot of crap going around).
Grain really isn't that healthy in large quantities, but isn't bad. But if you grind it into flour and bleach out the bran and germ, it's far less healthy. When you bake it into a bread, you create this extremely high-density/high-calorie end product with very little nutritional value.
And beef, similar story. Beef is below-average on healthiness of meat (high cholesterol, though it's complicated the same as high-salt foods would be). But in a burger, you usually use especially fatty beef, like 80/20. Restaurants will sometimes supplement the fat in the beef with pork fat to make for an even tastier (and more unhealthy) burger.
Nobody will ever say that tomato, lettuce, or pickle on a burger are unhealthy.
Beef, under no circumstances, is healthy. Raw beef, beautifully seared beef, ground beef, AAA Chuck Sirloin whatever, doesn't matter. Animal fats are linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The maillard reaction when you cook any meat at all is carcinogenic.
Afaik the least healthy part of that is the grain. Most breads, aside from a handful of micronutrients, are pretty close to empty calories. The killer with fast food is the soda and fries, usually.
It's really only unhealthy if you're eating that every time you eat. And mostly what makes it unhealthy is the fat/lean ratio. Hamburgers usually use fattier hamburger. You can make them with leaner meat tho. They just don't taste nearly as good.
While cheese may not be healthy, it's not necessarily unhealthy either. It's got a good amount of protein, iodine, and b vitamins. All of which are very important and usually lacking in other foods (particularly the iodine and b vitamins). Are there options with similar nutrition that are better for you? Absolutely. But I wouldn't say it's necessarily bad for you either