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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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)

> 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

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

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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