Cooking Increases Calories in Food
It’s thought to be a survival mechanism: The more energy we can extract from food, the longer it will sustain us. Thanks to Brent for sending me THIS ARTICLE, which discusses research showing that cooking food increases its energy value.
Aside from food labels not accounting for the energy it takes to digest a particular food, this means those same labels are also flawed in that they don’t account for the energy increase that occurs if we cook that food.
Granted, the aforementioned study was done on mice… But its findings certainly give some weight to the “eat raw for weight loss” argument; however, they also suggest that we have, in fact, evolved to eat cooked food. The problem lies in our changed environment: We now live in a world where food is ample rather than sparse, so we don’t need to extract more calories from what we eat.
That’s not at all to say that cooking is responsible for the obesity epidemic, but this is just one more example of how our biology and environment are still in conflict. Let’s just hope we evolve to survive in the current world before this conflict kills us…
Filed under: Did You Know?, fat loss, nutrition
