First of all there's a huge gap between home made hamburger and, well, anything else tbh. Actually, let's expand it, there's a huge difference between home made anything and any other kind of food, be it restaurant or assembly line made.

Backing up a little though, if you make a hamburger at home, with lean good quality beef that you grind up yourself or ask them to grind it for you at the counter, lots of veggies and very little oil, on a home made bun or on actual bread (the kind made with flour, water and salt, that's it), then it's quite healthy. Still wouldn't eat it more than once a week since red meat yada-yada, but still, not that bad.

What you get at a fast food though is very low quality meat with lots of fats, dipped in other fats, sugar and spices to mask the flavor, processed bread, processed cheese, very little veggies and, usually, a side of french fries and a soda, which are a meal onto themselves. Let's take McDonald's, looking at their website a quarter pounder is 500+ kCal, the medium fries are 300+ kCal and a medium coke is 200+ kCal. That's 1000+ kCal for a "meal" full of fats, sugar and processed food. Also it's a huge spike in insuline which will lead you to a huge crash just a few hours later leaving you hungry and craving for more.

Restaurants are also a bit guilty of this. They tend to add much more fats than you'd ever do at home in order to drastically improve the flavor of their dishes. Can't even fault them for it, if I wanted a bland healthy meal, I'd have eaten at home. If I'm going to the restaurant it's because I want a great tasting dish. Ready made meals you can get at a supermarket are also full of fats, vegetable oils and preservatives in order to mask the shitty flavor.

So at the end of the day I'd say the best thing is to avoid as much as possible processed foods, avoid all take outs and deliveries, go out to eat maximum once a week and cook all your meals yourself starting with simple ingredients. It's not that hard either and cooking can be fun.

Beef ain't healthy, White bread isn't either and don't forget, the McDonalds Cheesburger doesn't even have vegetables.

Burgers aren’t inherently unhealthy, in moderation. The problem comes when you’re buying the burgers from fast food joints.

Because the stuff is heavily processed using a lot of sugar, saturated fats and salt. Also the gravy the meat is fried in. Also the poor quality of the meat, being made from god knows which scraps of the animal, that couldn't sell otherwise.

Real answer (since there's a lot of crap going around).

Grain really isn't that healthy in large quantities, but isn't bad. But if you grind it into flour and bleach out the bran and germ, it's far less healthy. When you bake it into a bread, you create this extremely high-density/high-calorie end product with very little nutritional value.

And beef, similar story. Beef is below-average on healthiness of meat (high cholesterol, though it's complicated the same as high-salt foods would be). But in a burger, you usually use especially fatty beef, like 80/20. Restaurants will sometimes supplement the fat in the beef with pork fat to make for an even tastier (and more unhealthy) burger.

Nobody will ever say that tomato, lettuce, or pickle on a burger are unhealthy.

People eat too much burgers

Beef, under no circumstances, is healthy. Raw beef, beautifully seared beef, ground beef, AAA Chuck Sirloin whatever, doesn't matter. Animal fats are linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The maillard reaction when you cook any meat at all is carcinogenic.

Red meat is bad, white bread is bad, cheese is also shit. Also like others have said heavily processed