The burger itself is probably the healthiest part of it.
It’s the bun (full of corn syrup and carbs), a massive amount of sodium, the condiments (also corn syrup), a side of fries (mostly carbs), a soda (even more corn syrup). By the time you’ve finished a decently sized burger you’ve eaten enough sugar, sodium and carbs for the entire day.
A Big Mac and large fries at McDonalds comes to 1040 calories and 102 g of carbs (9 g of which are added sugars). That's 39% of the calories coming from carbs, which is generally considered to be a moderate level of carbs in the medical literature.
Get a double Quarter Pounder with cheese instead and its 1230 calories and 101 g of carbs (10 g of which are added sugars). That's 33% of calories from carbs, which is also in the moderate carb range.
As far as the burger itself goes, a doubler Quarter Pounder with cheese is 740 calories and 41 g of carb (10 g of which is added sugars). That's 22% of calories from carbs and would count as a low carb item in much of the medical literature.
Americans tend to go overboard. They hear that cutting back on carbs has been shown to have some benefits, and they think this means they have to cut back from the 50-60% calories from carbs diets they are on to 5-10%. That is very hard since it eliminates most breads, pastas, rice, potatoes, and deserts. It is costly and/or time consuming to maintain such a diet. Most who try will fail for those reasons.
In fact much of the benefits from reducing carbs will come with a more modest reduction to around 40%, which can be achieved without having to largely give up the aforementioned foods. It is much easier to stick with it when you can still eat at most restaurants, including most fast food places.
It's not necessarily the wheat itself, though residual glyphosate and other herbicides are a concern, it's more the industrial processing of it. Industrial baking is very different to traditional baking, and the proteins may be exposed to the immune system in very different ways as a result, i.e. different epitopes.
Fascinating. I was curious because I eat the three I mentioned kind of like rice (along with barley and oats).
I’m behind on this science. A 50x increase in gluten sounds crazy, but I don’t know how much gluten is known to be bad. For example, I sometimes eat things with wheat gluten powder as a primary ingredient. It doesn’t seem to cause harm, but maybe I’m missing something.
I certainly don’t think of it as a health food (nothing so heavily processed is), but is it actually harmful?
The science on gluten is ongoing and controversial, but the position I believe will ultimately be vindicated is that some people seem to derive no ill effects while many others develop a mild allergy to it, which can fly under the radar and lead to all sorts of chronic inflammation issues if the person keeps eating it. As a result, there's no 'standard safe dosage' of gluten, some people become violently ill if they encounter a trace, others (myself included) find a lot of seemingly unconnected annoyances clear up if they avoid it for a few weeks. Excess weight gain seems to be one of those, though in my case the major symptom was actually an excessively fast metabolism.
