Eli5: lettuce, tomato, meat, pickles, cheese = healthy, burger = unhealthy, how ?
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Burgers (especially from restaurants or fast food) can be very high in sodium and bad fats… even sugar or other things we get too much of when you count toppings. They can also be really calorie dense (lots of sauces, etc.) and carb heavy (bun ratio). Red meat isn’t bad in moderation, but many people eat it too much and that can be a problem too. Additionally, burgers are often paired with twice-deep-fried and heavily salted potatoes (i.e. french fries), cheese, etc. All in all it’s easy for a typical burger experience to be high in a lot of things that people need to watch out for.
That said, on the other end… a non-burger sandwich isn’t necessarily healthy either. Processed meats have issues like high sodium as well. Sandwiches in general can also lead to us eating more carbs (bread ratio) in general and more calorie/sugar/etc dense sauces. Sandwiches are definitely not inherently healthy. They are from an era when filling up on bread was the most viable thing for a lot of people.
But it is all relative. Healthy eating is about moderation and whether a burger creates an issue for you isn’t something you can answer without seeing the rest of a person’s diet. I think the thing is that “the kind of diet” that is heavy in burgers is often heavy in other unhealthy things (e.g. french fries, fast food, excesses of red meat, fat and sodium) and also that that style of food (slapping some meat and veg between big pieces of bread) may be conducive to the wrong proportions of nutrients. Most people probably need to eat a much higher proportion of vegetables but if you look at most sandwiches and burgers, the proportion that is vegetables is often a minority.
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