Low & Lower carb sandwiches....

Today's post: Thursday, 10-9-2008

As many of you who read this blog regularly know, refined grain foods are NOT good for you. They are high in carbs and have a high glycemic index. They also have much lower fiber and a much lower amount of nutrients than whole grain foods and vegetables have. Even worse, refined grain foods often have bad things added to them such as extra salt, high fructose corn syrup, and partially hydrogenated fats (transfats.)

But sandwiches are a common food, particularly for lunch. They are convenient to make and take to work. They are also sold in various versions at places where you go out for lunch.

Made with bread made of refined grain, such sandwiches help make you fat and sick however.

That makes sandwiches made with refined grain foods both useful, familiar, easily available, and convenient on one hand; and unfortunately, it also makes them bad for your health to eat.

This is a bit of a dilemma.

An excellent article on solutions to this problem was in today’s Early to Rise. After I include it, I’ll have some other comments.

One of their readers wrote to Early to Rise requesting one of their health writers to provide some solutions. The writer himself asked for help. The resulting article is quite good. My own title for it is: Substitutes for refined grain bread in Sandwiches.

Here it is.:

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.”

“Dear ETR: What's a good substitute for bread?

"As bread is always being lambasted as being too high in carbs, exactly what can be used as a substitute that is both nutritious AND practical - i.e., that can be used every day to make a sandwich for lunch? Everything I can think of has a grain in it!"

Jim Crossman
Somerset, UK

Dear Jim,

Good question.

I asked my nutrition expert friend Isabel De Los Rios (thedietsolutionprogram.com) for some help. Here's what she said...

You can go one of two ways with this, or use a combo of both:

1. Choose organic, sprouted grain breads (such as Food For Life Ezekiel Bread) whenever possible. The process of "sprouting" grains makes them much more digestible and nutritious. Compared to "processed grain," sprouted grain is much higher in protein and fiber and lower in carbs.

2. Use vegetables - such as romaine lettuce, sliced tomatoes, sliced eggplant, and portabella mushrooms - instead of bread. For instance, instead of a boring sandwich, you could make:

turkey, roast beef, and cheese lettuce wraps (Don't forget a drop of mustard.)
sauteed chicken and vegetable lettuce wraps
tuna salad on sliced tomatoes
turkey or beef burgers on portabella mushrooms
scrambled eggs and bacon on sliced tomatoes
Happy eating!

- Craig Ballantyne

[Ed. Note: Supplement the above suggestions for low-carb meals with a fat-burning exercise routine. Learn how to build muscle and blast fat with Craig's Turbulence Training program. And for advice on how to lose weight, eat right, and exercise better, sign up for ETR's free natural health e-letter.

Have a question for an ETR expert? Write to us at AskETR@ETRfeedback.com and one of them may respond to you in ETR]“

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My comments and other ideas for replacing refined grain bread in sandwiches.:

1. Their first solution listed works even better than you might think. My wife has very low level type II diabetes. So she checks the effect on her blood sugar of virtually everything she eats. If she eats refined grain foods of any kind, for sure if she eats refined grain bread, her blood sugar spikes by an extra 20 to 45 points.

She found though, that when she eats the Food For Life “Biblical” breads we buy at Whole Foods Market that the ETR article recommends, the Ezekiel and Genesis kinds in particular, that her blood sugar only goes up a normal amount. The extra 20 to 45 point surge no longer happens. So, the article’s advice on this bread is even better than it may sound.

I’m also very pleased that this company, Food For Life, does NOT add nonfood additives to this bread. Plus I’m very pleased to read that it’s also more digestible and nutritious than the refined grain bread my wife used to eat. (Because it has no junk additives to give it long shelf life, it’s stocked in the frozen foods section by the way.)

2. I do something different with my lunch. I take some walnuts, some pecans, some organic broccoli florets, and some kind of orange veggie -- usually either carrots or sweet potato. Then I start my lunch with a half sandwich using only ONE slice of a sprouted whole grain bread that has mustard, onion, lettuce and tomato in it.

That way, I get the full flavor of the sandwich without the extra carbs of a full sandwich.

3. The third method that some of their suggestions require is to simply use no bread at all and use a glass container with a lid as a carrier instead of a plastic bag and bread as a container.

That same method also works well in restaurants and even fast food restaurants. (It works very well at Subway fast food locations because they have so many decent veggies you can add to the meat part of the lunch to substitute for the food part of the bread.) For this method, you let the restaurant transport the food and provide a plate to substitute for the transport use of the bread and sandwich bag.

And, you eat extra veggies of some kind to provide the extra fill up the bread would have provided.

As you can see by their examples, this can be tasty and filling without any bread at all.