Americans love buns. We put hamburgers on buns, chicken patties on buns, fish on buns, hot dogs on buns…if it’s a meat we find a way to put it on a bun, wrap it up, and sell it as fast food. We even put vegetable burgers on buns. When you assess foods placed between two buns, the reality is this: buns are a problem for people with blood sugar; what’s inside is not (unless it has a bread coating).
Not only are buns a major source of carbs but they are almost always made from white flour, which is the least healthy type of flour. Buns have little fiber and high carbs. They lounge in your colon too long, block things up, and cause general mischief. Consider the common McDonald’s cheeseburger. It is made up of the following ingredients: the bun, the beef burger, cheese, some bits of onion, and ketchup. There are a total of 33 grams of carbs in this burger. The carb grams break down as follows: 28 come from the bun, 1 from the cheese, 1 from the onions, and 2 from the ketchup. Those 33 grams are too much and are actually about the same you would get from a candy bar.
But you can do a quick carb-reduction surgery and make the situation much more to your needs. I have done it over and over again. Open the wrapping, pull off the top bun, use the top bun to wipe off most of the ketchup (you can leave a little on for taste), place the top bun in the wrapper, squish it thoroughly for satisfaction, and eat the burger minus the top bun. We might assume we have just cut our bun carbs in half. But in most cases we will have done a little better than that. Usually the top bun is plumper and heftier than the bottom bun, so by taking off the top bun you have probably cut the carbs by about 60 percent.
A Big Mac contains a total of 45 grams of carbs, 39 of which come from the bun. The Big Mac bun actually contains a middle bun layer as well as a top and bottom. By removing the top and middle layer, you have gone from a 45-gram carb meal to something like an 11-gram carb meal—and have done a significant favor for your pancreas and the rest of your body. Obviously you could save more carbs by getting rid of the bottom bun as well, but now you’ve got a really messy meal you won’t be able to hold in your hands and eat without looking like a complete idiot, or else you’ll have to eat it with a knife and fork. Besides it no longer feels like a hamburger.
One of the goals of our lifestyle change is to make changes we can live with. Most people are going to feel cheated by giving up the bun altogether, but you should be able to live with losing only the top half of the bun. At fancy restaurants that serve monster hamburgers smothered with cheese, onions, and mushrooms, I do sometimes remove both top and bottom bun. Since the hamburger is so filling, I don’t feel cheated. I add a garden salad and I’m a happy guy.
Some of the burgers you get from restaurants have buns that significantly outsize the beef within (remember the “Where’s the beef?” campaign?). Whoppers from Burger King are especially notorious for this. Here is a great opportunity to save a few more carbs. Move the burger over to far edge of the bun and see how much the bread overlaps the meat on the one side. Tear off the overlapping bread until the bottom bun matches the patty.
I have done this so often it is second nature to me. Sure, there probably have been a few folks here and there who have observed my unusual practice and wondered what kind of odd character I was. But that is a small price to pay to keep the roaring lion of diabetes away from my door. And the practice of removing the top half of the bun works with more than hamburgers. Do it with subway sandwiches, hot dogs, Philly steak sandwiches, and any other foods that come between a top and bottom bun.
Another thing you can do if you’re especially hungry is to order two burgers, remove the insides from one and put them on the other bun, and then remove the top bun from that assembly. This works great with roastbeef sandwiches. Now you have twice the beef but all on only one half of a bun. You have done yourself a great favor!
I know I am suggesting you do some things very few people do, and maybe some folks will comment or look twice at your little surgeries. But high blood sugar is an incredibly destructive force in your body, and you have to get a little radical. You can’t put out a forest fire with teaspoons of water, and you can’t bring your blood sugar under control with tiny little minor modifications. This practice, by itself, is not going to make all the difference, but when you add this practice to the other suggestions in this book, it will make a huge difference. The life and limbs you save may be your own.