Is a sandwich a balanced meal?

It can be. What’s inside it and what’s next to it decide that, and the bread barely does. A deli turkey sandwich on its own grades C in our checker, and with a soda it drops from 70 to 58 out of 100. Put a palm of real roast turkey on whole wheat with a side salad and an apple, hold the mayo, and it grades A.

When people try to make a sandwich healthier, they usually go after the bread. They swap white for whole wheat, or skip the top slice. In our checker that swap moves a turkey sandwich from 70 to 74 out of 100, a C either way. The things holding it back are somewhere else. There isn’t much protein in it, so it misses Muscle and Hunger, and most of it is ultra-processed, so it misses Processing.

That’s a big deal for a lot of people, because sandwiches are everywhere. In the CDC’s latest national survey, ultra-processed sandwiches (burgers included) were the single biggest source of ultra-processed food for US adults, 8.6% of all the calories they ate.

We’d build a sandwich around a palm of real protein (roast chicken or turkey, tuna, eggs), put a vegetable or fruit next to it, and drink water. The bread is the last thing we’d worry about.

Think of the bread as the envelope and the filling as the letter.

How do common sandwich lunches grade?

The grades are for a 170 pound person eating 2,000 calories over three meals.

The mayo is the surprise. On the roast turkey sandwich, one tablespoon tips the plate past 30% ultra-processed, so it misses Processing and can’t be an A, even though it clears the other five.

Why does deli meat fall short?

Four slices of deli turkey look like a lot in a sandwich, and they’re about 64 g of meat with about 10 g of protein. A palm of roast turkey is 85 g with 25 g. Deli meat is also ultra-processed, so a sandwich built on it misses the Processing meter before anything else goes on. In a 2019 NIH study, people eating ultra-processed meals ate about 500 more calories a day than on unprocessed meals offering the same nutrients.

The side does more than the bread

Adding a side salad and an apple to the same white bread sandwich lifts it from C to C+, 70 to 79 out of 100. That’s a bigger jump than any bread swap, because it brings two servings of plants and about 6 g of fiber, enough to clear Hunger and lift Nutrients. Swapping the chips and soda for those sides takes off about 200 calories and 37 g of sugar too.

What to do

• Fill it with a palm of protein: leftover chicken, roast turkey, tuna, or two or three eggs.
• Put a plant next to it: a side salad, carrots, an apple or a cup of soup with beans.
• Drink water. A soda takes 11 points off a sandwich lunch and sinks its Glucose meter.
• Then pick the bread you like. Whole wheat adds about 2.5 g of fiber over white across two slices.

Try yours in the meal checker.