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Yeah, I've never understood why burgers are unhealthy if beef, grain, and vegetables are healthy.
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.
My method is two or three ~1" cubes of beef then one 1" cube of pork belly, repeat. Hella juicy.
Hell yes.
My method is smoked pork bellies and hold the hamburger till next week. I'm a huge pork belly fan. I know they're horrible for me, but I don't eat em often.
Very helpful and interesting too!
Burgers aren’t inherently unhealthy, in moderation. The problem comes when you’re buying the burgers from fast food joints.
Beef ain't healthy, White bread isn't either and don't forget, the McDonalds Cheesburger doesn't even have vegetables.
Well, there's a pickle.
And there are the people that open their cheesburger to remove it.
Yup. I am people
Hello people
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.
The grain/carbs is the unhealthiest part. The low quality fat is next.
I've thrown away all the carbs in my pantry and went from keto to now carnivore. My wife's diabetes is reversing and I've lost 35lbs this year!
Look, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life, but you should consider eating some nuts and veggies. Your guts are going to fall apart if you eat nothing but meat, and you're simply not going to get enough nutrients. The entire carnivore diet is unfortunately pseudoscience and no different than other fad diets of the past.
Just balance your diet and you'll likely see many of the same benefits, but you'll a) have less negative impact on the environment and b) have fewer long term health issues down the line.
I thought it was a bad diet until I learned about it more from doctors and nutritionist showing the data from blood work. I get what you're saying that it's pseudoscience, sorry to be blunt, prove it. You haven't said anything I haven't heard already.
I get what you’re saying that it’s pseudoscience, sorry to be blunt, prove it.
But medical experts have pointed out that there is absolutely no scientific evidence to back up these claims, pointing out that the diet could lead to vitamin deficiencies.
The carnivore diet has evolved from the keto and paleo diets, which eschew carbs in favour of protein and fat. Some followers of the lifestyle include fish, dairy products and eggs in their diets too.
Although there are health benefits to meat - it's a great source of protein, B vitamins, iron, zinc and magnesium - many nutritionists and dietitians have raised concerns that following the carnivore diet is unhealthy.
“I honestly think one of the biggest risks of the carnivore diet is colon cancer,” nutrition professor Rachele Pojednic told Lifehacker. “But we won’t have data on that for years to come (and this would also mean that someone needs to do a study on this diet, which I honestly don’t see happening).”
As the lifestyle advocates focussing on fatty meats, followers run the risk of raising their levels of LDL cholesterol, which can lead to an increased risk of heart disease and heart attacks.
“One thing you can't ignore is there are some nutrients you just can’t get from meat,” Harley Street nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert wrote on Instagram.
She explains that only eating meat deprives your body of folate, vitamins C and E, and fibre, which are all essential for good health: "that's why sailors used to get scurvy with not enough vitamin C in their largely fish diets."
What's more, subsisting on meat alone doesn't provide the body with fibre, which is essential to promote a healthy gut.
“Meat also tends to push the balance of our good and bad cholesterol (called HDL and LDL) towards the bad end,” the Re-Nourish author adds.
Like some else said a balanced diet is important, minimize carbs but have at least some, also vegetables and some grains is good too. Your gut bacteria loves diversity.
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.
People eat too much burgers
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.
Can I get some sources? Im seeing opposing arguments about red meat being healthy or not in here and I'm seeing basically no sources.
Red meat is bad, white bread is bad, cheese is also shit. Also like others have said heavily processed
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.