The American Diet Has a Sandwich Problem | Hacker News Reader

The American Diet Has a Sandwich Problem

wsj.com

32 pointslxm125 comments

> Twenty years later, a turkey sandwich contained about 820 calories.

Not sure where they got those numbers from. Just for comparison - in England, where many people eat sandwiches every day, the range is more like 300-500 for a supermarket sandwich. The meat is processed, but chicken is a fairly popular option, and the bread is thinner and less sweet.

Really the main takeaway is to reduce your bread. Carbs are terrible for diets, don't satiate you and most people eat too many. I treat baguettes and large subs as a treat the same way I'd treat a large slice of chocolate cake or ice cream - the bread part of a large sub can be as much as 500 calories by itself. As I got older I usually eat Warburtons 'Danish' bread which is 62 calories a slice, or buy a wrap or something. You could even skip the bread and just eat it with some veg as a salad. It will be just as satiating. And use half-fat mayo if you don't mind the taste.

> Carbs are terrible for diets

Excess, over-processed carbs are terrible. The right amount of carbs from whole or minimally processed foods are just fine.

Over-processed: white flour, refined or concentrated sugar, carb heavy snack foods, deserts, juiced or cooked fruit

Minimally processed: cooked grains or potatoes, whole raw fruit

>Excess, over-processed carbs are terrible

Correct - and for a lot of reasons, one of which is it's just so easy to each so much over-processed carbs without knowing it - satiety.

It's just too easily leads to over-eating. Sugar (or HFCS) is snuck into everything these days, upping the carbs.

There’s a big misconception that wraps are somehow more healthy than bread. They’re more processed and have at least as many calories as bread does, despite often being presented as the healthier option.

Wow, you're right about tortilla wraps (173 cals per tortilla - close to two slices of white bread which is 186). What I mean was stuff like this (100 cals):

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/268319311

It's just compressed bread, or a tortilla (which definitely aren't low-calorie)

Modern bread tastes like cake to me.

Lots of American bread is full of added sugar, but if you look around in the bread aisle you can almost always find a loaf without sugar in its ingredients list. Sourdough is one of my favorites because it rarely has added sugar, and can still be found like that in some of the cheaper varieties.

>Modern American bread tastes like cake to me.

FTFY

Ordinary bread taste nothing like cake and it doesn't even look like that infamous squared sliced American/Anglo-Saxon sweet sponge.

The bread that Subway sell is legally classed as a cake in some places IIRC

> Carbs are terrible for diets, don't satiate you and most people eat too many.

I think most people's experience is precisely the opposite with regards too satiety - non-sugary carbs are the most important component for satiety. Bread, rice, potatoes - these are all commonly eaten to increase the feeling of fullness.

FWIW, a lot of kinds of bread you see on sandwiches in America have sugar. I don't know what the threshold for "non-sugary" bread is, but after having learned how to make bread during the pandemic, I have to, um, wonder, why bread should have any more than zero.

Typically yeast need _some_ sort of sugar to eat in order for the dough to rise, but it doesn't need to be very much at all.

I thought I heard somewhere giving bread at restaraunts makes people hungrier and order more somehow. Maybe it is just an urban legend if it really drives satiety more than other foods.

I have not felt hungrier after eating bread. I think its just served to buy the cooks more time.

I've done keto and been satiated on zero carbs, and when dieting I simply cut down on bread and remove potatoes/rice from my meals entirely and I have not noticed any real difference. If I eat a ton of vegetables (particularly broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts, kale etc.) and some chicken breast, I find it to be very filling indeed.

Other people have said I am demonising carbs, perhaps there is a middle ground (something like brown rice) that could add to the satiation without spiking glucose levels.

The thing is, people tend to overly generalize. What is satiating to you may well not be satiating to someone else.

For myself, I can fill up with tons of protein and vegetables, and still feel the need for some more food a few hours later as the stomach has processed some of the water out and made some room. Conversely, if I eat some non-sugary carbs I much more easily feel full and can stop eating till the next day - which is how I lost about 30kg.

> Bread, rice, potatoes - these are all commonly eaten to increase the feeling of fullness.

And then 2 hours later you're hungry again and craving the sugar hit you got from your last meal.

There's no sugar in rice or potatoes or most non-American breads.

what do simple carbs (ex-fiber) turn into after you eat them?

bread I (and I guess most Europeans) eat has hardly any sugar in it and if it has, you can't feel it at all, you should really check how bread is made

Simple carbs have low satiety and come with a glucose spike. Complex carbs are much better in this regard and are far more nutritious.

The next level past becoming aware of nutrition is becoming aware of meta nutrition, or the culture around nutrition. Do not fall in to the trap of demonizing nutrient after nutrient. It never ends.

It's not so much demonising as knowing most people eat too many carbs, they're in everything so if you cut down you're probably still eating enough.

I do eat vegetables, nuts and seeds, I just don't really consider those "carbs" I guess. You are clearly an advanced nutritionist far beyond my level of knowledge so I apologise for using the wrong terminology.

> It's not so much demonising as knowing most people eat too many carbs

That's not accurate. Complex carbs (e.g. beans) are the foundation of longevity, and most people don't eat enough of them.

If you are counting beans as complex carbs that's a pretty easy statement to make. But most people are referring to whole grain wheat or wild rice or etc which are only a marginal improvements over their alternatives.

Yeah I think this is a terminology issue. Nobody is saying "don't eat vegetables". But even brown rice can cause glucose spikes if you eat too much.

>carbs are terrible for diets

That's an incredibly broad statement and mostly untrue. Carbs are a pretty necessary part of a healthy diet, especially the more complex ones that take longer to break down (or just don't in the case of fiber)

If you're doing any sort of meaningful physical activity, carbs are super important for keeping you going at full bore while preventing brain fog

Based on my personal experience, the calories are coming from a lot of fats which also aren't necessarily a bad thing because you do need a certain amount for satiety and various biochemical processes. It's been shown that excess fats can be problematic

As a Dane - what is Warburton's "Danish" bread - and do you know what makes it Danish?

Haha, it's probably not remotely Danish, but here it is:

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/255727936

It is delicious though. It's quite airy.

> a large sub can be as much as 500 calories by itself

A large sub at somewhere like Jimmy Johns is easily 800-1100 calories depending on what kind of meat is on it.

Carbs are terrible for diets

And when you get a sandwich, it usually comes with chips, pasta salad, or something similarly carby, and in line with the article, sometimes something similarly high in sat fat.

500 calories is not an unreasonable amount of calories at all for a lunch type meal.

Even if you had 500 for breakfast, then lunch, then 1000 for dinner, that's only 2k which pretty close to a typical BMR for an adult male.

The problem is the quality of nutrients. If all those 2000 calories were packed in with lots of fibre, and had a good ratio of protein/healthy fats/carbs that's likely to be enough to keep you from snacking a bunch in the evenings and between meals. If it's empty calories, you're likely to end up eating even more.

Also, bread is not as bad as you portray it. Proper brown whole grain bread can have as much as 20% protein as a percentage of total calorie content. That's a very high relative protein content compared to most foods really, other than lean meats and eggs.

I meant 500 for the bread alone, then 100 for mayo, 200 for cheese (or 1000 if it's the sandwich in the article, lol), and meat... it adds up.

I'm baffled by the notion of 500 cals just in bread. I make sandwiches at home with large sourdough slices, and that's 180 cal for the bread. [The meat is 90 cal, the cheese is 100 cal.] This is a hearty sandwich and I have no satiety issues.

Yeah I don't much care for baguettes for this reason. I just do good old brown, 1cm thick bread. Just enough to soak up the pesto and absorb all its flavours without getting too mushy. Man this is making me hungry, might have to go fix myself one of these :D

> Sandwiches are the number one source of sodium and saturated fat in Americans’ diets, making up about one-fifth of our daily sodium intake and 19% of our daily saturated fat calories

20% of sodium and saturated fat calories for a single meal doesn't really sound very alarming.

Yeah, how many meals do people eat in a day anyways? Like max 5?

I feel most people eat 3 so 20% does not sound alarming at all.

Yes but maybe Americans have high sodium and fat intake.

The problem with a sandwich, and I love bread, is that it’s high in carbs, low in fibre and vitamins.

Can't use white bread, gotta go with whole grain. Throw a couple slices of turkey, a fist full of spinach, a few grape tomatoes and you've got a sandwich that's actually a worthwhile lunch and not a crushing disappointment

Use lettuce as the bun and ditch bread completely.

I have a hard time making sense of those stats. If it’s conditional on having had a sandwich that day, it’s totally reasonable. If it’s not, it seems extremely high. That would mean sandwiches carry 20% of the sodium the population eats, including days that people don’t eat sandwiches and people who don’t eat sandwiches at all.

What fraction of meals are sandwiches? Not everyone is eating a sandwich every day.

This article references salt consumption multiple times. I thought that was a myth of the past. Salt consumption has almost zero to do with blood pressure. IIRC, it's primarily based on eating more calories than one burns.

As always, eat less, move more.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...

I'm actually curious about this: if that's true, why do hospitals still do low-salt diets for critical heart disease patients?

Bad habits are hard to break

What if a diet high in salt is fine for healthy patients but dangerous for patients with heart disease? You can make the same argument for a diet high in sugar for healthy active individuals. It wouldn't be good for those with diabetes.

The difference is, a diet high in (refined) sugar is terrible for all humans, both healthy and unhealthy.

Because if you are a critical heart patient, salt then can matter a lot.

Unfortunately a lot of people suffer from being per-diabetic, which really just means, "you have diabetes, we don't want to say that because: denial" and a lot of guidelines used for "healthy" people don't apply to you, because you're not healthy.

Well there is one aspect where pre-diabetes differs from being fully diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, and that's the fact that you're not at the point of no return. Pre-diabetics, if they make appropriate lifestyle changes, still have a chance at reversing course and not living with diabetes for the rest of their life.

I don't disagree with you, but being pre-dabetic is an uphill battle to then get healthy again, as you are most likely trying to reverse many years of lifestyle habits that have lead you down the road towards diabetes. A car crash in slow-motion. That takes an incredible amount of will power and I applaud anyone that's on that journey, especially since you have to go well against the status quo.

I've at least heard that T2D is somewhat reversible given drastic diet changes, fasting, bariatric surgery - but a moon-shot for sure.

Another aspect that differs is that pre-diabetics bodies are still functioning. They are closer to not being able to keep up, but if they couldn't, then they'd be diabetic.

True, but being tested correctly as "pre-diabetic" isn't so straightforward, as getting sugar/glucose levels at rest doesn't tell the whole story - ie: there's no such thing as having a mild case of diabetes.

Take this with a grain of... of salt,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zZBiTfIp4Q

I think he makes a good point that the proper tests for diabetes is much more involved than what most people get prescribed, or what they will tolerate, as it can take the entire day. (he says a lot more - I'm not standing by everything he's saying)

Easy access to almost over the counter and cheap continual glucose monitors may reveal better patterns to catch pre-diabetic symptoms faster (my hope).

You could be sued for doing something that was potentially considered unsafe by some studies. Business wise it's better to just "play it safe" here with low sodium meals.

Since they also do it in countries where lawsuits are not a risk you need to care about I doubt this is the reason.

Because salt is fine for the normal person. Someone in the hospital with critical heart disease issues is not normal.

Salt is how your kidneys generate osmotic pressure to regulate the water levels in your blood. Critical heart disease patients are very sensitive to changes in blood pressure. Healthy people are much less so.

Hospitals and the medical system in general are always the last to get a memo about health. I wouldn't touch a good chunk of hospital meals with a ten-foot pole even when I'm in perfect health; the fact that any hospital is feeding patients shit like this[1][2][many such examples] borders on malpractice.

[1] https://twitter.com/DrBenRodgers/status/1508084691269738503 (someone having a diabetic emergency, no less!)

[2] https://twitter.com/moreyraortho/status/1635779523651473409

My understanding is that salt leading to high blood pressure is a problem that affects some people, but not all.

There are at least some studies that link salt to increased appetite. Which shouldn't be a shock - eating tasty things makes you want to eat more.

But in this case journalists like padding out lists of unhealthy ingredients.

> I thought that was a myth of the past.

When in heart failure, a low-salt diet is optimal for long-term survival. This has little (but some) to do with blood pressure and lot more to do with water retention when your circulation is already failing.

Agreed. The anti-sodium crowd has done some real damage to nutritional education IMO.

People who train intensely wind up with a sodium deficiency due to this propaganda. You can welcome 6-10g/day into your diet if you just sweat through exercise. Problem is, most aren't doing that.

> I thought that was a myth of the past. Salt consumption has almost zero to do with blood pressure.

Not accurate. Salt affects different people differently. But for many people, it raises their blood pressure substantially, but only transiently, much like caffeine.

For most people the root cause of high blood pressure is going to be weight or lack of exercise, absent other risk factors. So if your morning blood is normally 100 / 60, then reasonable quantities of salt aren't going to raise your blood pressure enough for long enough to cause vascular damage. But if your baseline blood pressure is closer to pre-hypertensive or worse, then eating too much salt is going to raise your blood pressure enough to cause artery damage, and eventually heart disease.

> Sandwiches have grown less healthy in the past 40 years, Dr. Mozaffarian says. Culprits include highly processed grains in bread and the low-fat push that took off in the 1980s, which nutritionists now say led to the consumption of more deli meats marketed as low-fat.

Low-fat wasn't just a "push". Medical experts effectively lobbied the government to introduce dietary mandates at very high levels (like nutrition percentages) and on low levels (school lunches). The end result was carbs, carbs, carbs, cheap carbs.

The glycemic index is probably one of the most underrated aspects for diet. It boggles my mind that the doctor at the end recommended a PB&J. Sure - in a complete vacuum it has fewer calories. But you are going to end up way hungrier and crankier calorie-for-calorie.

"Too much sodium" has been debunked years ago. It's completely unimportant except to some select hypertensive individuals who have a sensitivity to it. Variation in sodium intake has only a very small effect on blood pressure in normal individuals.

I remember reading in Japan's guidelines allow up to 12 grams of salt daily for adult males (4800 mg sodium) who do manual work (i.e. sweat).

The document on this site:

https://www.fao.org/nutrition/education/food-dietary-guideli...

recommends a broad limit of 10 g of salt (4000 mg) per day, claiming that the average consumption in Japan is 12.7 g (based on some pretty dated 1998 study). (Unfortunately, the document pays lip service to the same misconceptions: too much salt causes high blood pressure---and stomach cancer, to boot.) The recommendation is still way above the USDA's crazy figure of 2300 mg.

Anyway, pick a country that isn't generally stupid/corrupt about food and health, and use their recommendations.

https://archive.is/5HpVD

Anyone getting 'your connection is not secure' when trying this page in firefox? There doesn't seem to be any sort of prompt to 'accept the risk and continue' either

No problems for me with Firefox 111.0 (64-bit). Upon clicking, I first went to a captcha page, then to the content.

The lock icon merely offers me this information:

> "You are securely connected to this page."

> "Verified by: Let's Encrypt"

> Since a soggy PB&J is unappealing, Dr. Roberto says it’s pretty easy to rein in the amount of sweet jam. “There’s a built-in mechanism against overjellying,” she says. “It’s a really nice type of sandwich.”

The trick is to put peanut butter on both pieces of bread so it can't absorb the jam. Then you can put as much as you like :-).

Hard disagree. Soggy PB&J is excellent. Soggy PB and honey is even better.

I used to make a bunch of PB&Js on Sunday, and take 2-3 with me for lunch every day. Later in the week they'd achieve this perfect ratio of jelly having soaked into the (toasted) bread. It was great.

Yes, working long hours in construction causes one to adopt some strange habits.

Honey and PB on sourdough toast is awesome

Triple deckers, jelly on both sides of the slice of bread in the middle, you'll get a 1cm layer of goodness by lunchtime when it has fully saturated the bread

The problem: refined sugars, refined flours, seed oils

The solution: eat less sodium and less saturated fats (which by the way were consumed in greater quantities in the past and hearth disease was virtually non existent)

This is strange to callout "saturated fats" as one of the primary issues, therefore "eat less bread".

I generate, I agree that eating less bread is important (in general), specifically white bread, but the idea that "saturated fat" is bad is old and many studies in the last decade have actually reversed this opinion.

The entire rise of keto diet is based on having as much saturated fat as possible, and to stay away from polyunsaturated (and only go to monounsaturated if possible).

More data in: https://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Fat-Surprise-audiobook/dp/B00...

That book is pseudoscience. As are a lot of the books and videos promoting high fat diets. We don’t need to be afraid of fat, but replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats has been shown to lead to better heart health outcomes by gold standard studies and meta reviews.

I appreciate that you have an alternate opinion. I've gone through quite a few studies myself as well as other doctors say the contrary.

Rather than just "saying you're wrong, I'm wrong", can you the gold-standard studies you're claiming?

Also not sure what about the book is "pseudoscience", can you name specific aspects in that make it pseudoscience? (it actually doesn't recommend anything... so curious how it's pseudoscience)

https://archive.is/5HpVD

Prediction before reading to test myself:

Whole grain all the things. Oats or rye where possible for more beta-glukans(clinically proven to lower LDL). Multi-grain is ideal.

Use lean meats or fish.

Don't sweat it about the dairy. Dairy fat is surprisingly good compared to fats from meat due to the high proportion of the saturated fat that's made up of short or medium chain fatty acids. These don't affect cholesterol and may even improve HDL/LDL ratio on their own. If you throw some pesto on there you get even more healthy fats from the olive oil and choice of nuts in the pesto, as well as a nice little splash of green from basil. Add some salad if you want more greens.

Here's my recipe for an absolutely delicious, and yet healthy and wholesome sammich based on all this.

Multigrain whole grain bread. Pesto, premade or homemade with a nut of your choosing. I really like pistachio or cashew for homemade pesto though it's far too pricey to do every day. Mostly I just use the barilla stuff.

Pre-heated chicken breast, with ehatever spices you like.

A full fat cheese of your liking. My favourites include real buffalo mozzarella(luxury choice) and Jarlsberg(day to day).

Add salad or other veg to your liking, or omit.

Heat in a panini press and enjoy.

Edit after reading: yeah pretty much, though I think they left out some crucial details on how fats work that a lot of people are miseducated about.

Do you find wholegrain bread is more filling / less sleep-inducing than white? I don't find there to be a huge difference personally, especially compared to just reducing how much bread I eat. (Same with rice)

Jarlsberg is delicious!

Absolutely. White bread spikes your blood sugar much faster because it's almost pure starch. The resulting drop can definitely be sleep inducing in my experience.

Whole grain bread also has a lot more protein, which is also more filling. But can also be more sleep inducing. The topic of post-prandial somnolence is a complicated one indeed. All sorts of hormonal, blood sugar, psychoactives in some foods, factors involved. And still poorly understood in many ways.

Sort of related: if I eat any amount of white bread or other processed grains I tend to get a lot of abdominal pain. I have a bunch of scar tissue down there due to appendicitis with bad complications many years ago. Whole grains help keep me pain free, it's the only consistent remedy I've found.

Do you live outside Norway? Is Jarlsberg expensive as an imported product? It's pretty affordable here so I might be amiss in listing it as the cheap option.

Californian, Jarlsberg is more expensive than the cheapest cheddars, but nothing that prices you out of buying it if you like it.

Good, that's how it should be!

I live in the UK and it's relatively cheap here, and very popular.

I recently, unintentionally, stopped eating mostly sandwiches for lunch and started eating pre-prepped meals from a company that delivers them weekly. I'm down from ~195lbs to ~180lbs in a couple of months pretty much on accident

What company?

God I really hate these "war on x food" articles. CARBS MUST DIE. SUGAR MUST DIE. FAT MUST DIE. Well no, most adult bodies are pretty good at dealing with most of those.

Bread is fine much like most other foods. If you eat 2500 calories a day of broccoli you will gain weight. From broccoli.

American portion sizes being out of control is a problem. If you want to lose weight you can by all means order a sandwich. But if it's a honker then save half for lunch tomorrow, too. Two delicious meals for the price of one, and no pressured anxiety around ordering something you love to eat.

It would be about 45 cups of broccoli.

2500 calories of broccoli is approx 3 gallons. From broccoli.

> Well no, most adult bodies are pretty good at dealing with most of those.

I mean, they aren't, that's why people get addicted to sugar and overeat ridiculously. Maybe the body can handle it but the brain can't, right?

UK portion sizes are nothing like the US and our obesity rate still sucks. People are going to keep drinking sugary drinks and eating chocolate and chips and cookies, getting drunk every weekend and ordering a kebab at 3am.

> Maybe the body can handle it but the brain can't, right?

The brain is part of the body.

The study is saying carbs or bread have an adverse influence on health. But that's false. It's creating anxiety about a loaf of bread that is patently idiotic.

Eat a reasonable amount of bread and your body is fine. The human body is really great at adapting dietarily in most healthy humans.

Weight is only one dimension of health.

The whole point is that carbs are addictive and most people demonstrably cannot eat a reasonable amount of carbs and just stop, similar to any other addiction.

> Each serving a day of processed meat is associated with a 42% increased risk of heart disease and a 19% increased risk of diabetes

The wording of this either is confusing or is a huge understatement. Does this mean that eating a serving a day for some time period correlates with a huge increase in heart disease and diabetes or, read literally, that each day you eat a serving of processed meat correlates to a huge increased risk (which would further increase across more days)?

The explanation that would make sense to me is

y = x ^ 1.42

Where x is the average number of servings of processed meat per day and y is the annualized risk of death due to heart disease.

2 slices of white bread is about 180 calories

1 tbsp of mayo is 90 calories

Oscar Meyer sliced turkey is 45 calories, let's double that and make it 90

Total of 360 calories. Seems perfectly reasonable.

20oz soft drink is 250 calories, 1-3/4 oz bag of Doritos is 260, this adds 510 calories, for a total of 870

The problem is fast food. Head over to Arby's, and the Marketfresh Roast Turkey Ranch & Bacon Sandwich is 800 calories. We'll skip the soft drink and fries.

Out of curiosity, what are popular lunch alternatives from other countries that are similarly quick and easy to sandwiches, but healthier? Would selfishly love some ideas to eat better lunches.

Salad bowls can be made arbitrarily hearty, and they have the nice property of being incremental. Whatever ingredients you have on hand can be tossed in: boiled eggs, sliced fruit, diced meat or salami, cubed cheese, etc.

Alternatively, if you’re okay with hanging on to some carbs, rice bowls are similar. You can cook rice in bulk and then use that as the base for different types of bowls.

Beans!

You can cook them up in large batches, they take all sorts of flavors and ingredients well, and are very satisfying as a lunch.

Lettuce wrap?

Increase the amount of meat (and cheese if you have the budget), wrap with lettuce, hold lettuce, get your munch on.

do you have a recommended lettuce variety? Most of them crumble away before I can use them.

I hope whoever was making the sandwiches used in that article has never actually eaten a sandwich, particularly that first one.

When I roast a chicken I save the breast for sandwiches, but there's a reason people don't make their sandwiches that way: processed meats are much cheaper. You might as well write an article that the American sandwich has a cost problem.

Face it: the sandwich is a luxury food. Healthier things are often cheaper, too. The vegetable street taco at my nearest taco truck is almost a complete diet by itself, and it's the cheapest thing on the menu.

Aside from being cheaper I like the texture of processed chicken more, they are usually easier to eat and have herbs and spices infused in them. I try to avoid bacon, ham, beef and sausages and hopefully that's good enough!

in my experience deli meat is quite expensive. Turkey is like $10 a pound

Ugh, bad time to read that as I’m about to go to an office lunch where Italian sandwiches are being served.

Good luck with the rest of your afternoon …

Nothing tortillas can't fix.

Can't tell if this is sarcastic. Hispanic communities suffer from large amounts of obesity, some due to genetic issues, but diet is an overwhelming factor. A proper tortilla has three ingredients: flour, lard and salt. Not exactly a staple in a slimming diet.

Tortillas are low calorie (100-150 calories), most likely better for you than bread. I guess it depends how many you eat, and if they're fried.

? They are made out of the exact same stuff. 2 slices of wonder bread has 140 calories.

Yeah but the majority of bread is NOT 140 calories. In the UK there is literally one loaf of bread that small because they shrunk the size down and added air to it.

who knew that larger volumes of bread have more calories than smaller volumes. What the hell is your point even?

flour tortillas are bread. They are nutritionally equivalent.

The flour tortillas used for wraps and burritos are 300-500 calories. A small flour tortilla will be in the range you listed and a taco sized corn tortilla is around 50.

A Mission sandwich wrap is only 210, and there are more health-oriented brands out there. Even their low-carb line is only 80 calories.

https://www.missionfoods.com/products/original-wraps/

Yes, but almost every wrap or burrito you buy at a restaurant are using wraps much larger than that. Perhaps I'm jaded living in southern California and having burritos the size of small logs.

Fair enough, I'm not from the US.

I think one reason might be that most tortillas in supermarkets are processed to death as well. Most won't go to a solid Mexican grocer and pick up the good stuff (or it's not available) and to top that off, one thing I've noticed outside of California at least, people double wrap small amounts of food in tortilla, instead of loading up, so they eat 2-4x more tortillas than 'normal' (I'm biased because I am in California and grew up here, we understand tortilla physics and tensile parameters, YMMV).

Whether they are "better for you than bread" depends a whole hell of a lot on the bread, and how its made.

Nothing whole-grain corn tortillas made with vegetable oil at home in a press can't fix.

Proper corn tortillas have no lard. If you live near any sizable community of Mexicans it shouldn’t be hard to find fresh masa to press.

Or rice noodle wraps.

No one's brought up keto bread?

Keto bread is an abomination and a horrible food to subject yourself to.

What do you mean? I've bought sola bread in the past and it... functioned exactly as bread in a sandwich. I just preferred larger sourdough slices so I stopped but it functioned the exact same as bread.

The article immediately lost credibility the moment it mentioned sodium as being harmful. Sodium is an important nutrient that's extremely difficult to over-consume under normal kidney function and when not hijacked by other satiety pathways. Even saturated fat isn't a problem. Neither of those things are a problem when consumed absent exogenous carbohydrates.

> “The standard deli sandwich with processed meat and cheese, you’re literally eating a heart bomb,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and professor of nutrition and medicine at Tufts University.

Rubbish. Neither of those things are a "heart bomb." We can debate whether they should be eaten, but that's dishonest hyperbole.

> Sandwiches contribute 7% of daily added sugars, the same percentage as breakfast cereals and bars.

Added sugar isn't that relevant. When you consume bread, those carbohydrates are converted into glucose anyway.

> Excess sodium increases blood pressure, which raises the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Define excess.

> People also eat an extra nearly 100 calories on the days they eat sandwiches,

Calories are a unit of heat. The human body doesn't have a calorie counter. It's an electrochemical system that responds to mass with hormones. 100 "calories" is so trivial here it's laughable. Good luck measuring to the degree of hundreds of calories. The average person doesn't have adequate tools to do this, nor would it even be worthwhile in the first place.

> Our sandwiches weren’t always this bad for us.

The bread in a sandwich is not good for you at all. Doesn't matter how much fiber you leave in it.

> Each serving a day of processed meat is associated with a 42% increased risk of heart disease and a 19% increased risk of diabetes, according to a review of research co-authored by Dr. Mozaffarian and published in the journal Circulation in 2010. More recent research has found similar results. Eating processed meats has also been linked to an increased risk of certain types of cancer.

Processed meat may not be a good thing.

However, this is not "risk." It's an association with heart disease, diabetes, etc. Not the "risk" of either. Risk requires cause and effect.

> Be sparing with mustard [...] who calls them “salt vehicles.”

Horseshit. There's no reason for a healthy person to avoid mustard other than that it's not required nutritionally. A squirt of mustard on your sandwich is an absolutely trivial amount of sodium.

> Ketchup is often high in added sugars, too.

Yeah, it's high in sugar. But then again, why eat bread if that's going to raise your blood glucose more than a squirt of ketchup?

> Load your sandwich with tomato, lettuce and other vegetables for fiber and important nutrients.

You don't need to eat any of those, and there's especially no reason to eat leaves.

> Peanut butter has protein and healthy fats that keep you full.

It's also usually full of added sugar, unless you go out of your way to get sugar-free peanut butter, which is often hard to find.

> Choose jam low in added sugar, too; it’s even better if you can see chunks of whole fruit.

A nutritionist shouldn't be recommending to eat jam or jelly of any kind.

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