 |
| Advertisement |
Original Post: ELI5: Why does cooked food offer more calories than its raw counterpart? -
Some of the top answers and expansions
The heat from cooking partially breaks down the food making it easier to extract the calories of the food. So since you use less energy to get the energy from the food you net more calories.
Also cooking methods often involve adding things like butter that give them more calories.
To add slightly to this: when you cook, you might notice that most foods weigh less and shrink a little compared to being raw. This is almost entirely the result of water evaporating which doesn’t reduce the calories.
The system we currently use to understand calories includes but has trouble accounting for digestion itself using energy. Imagine if I ate a given amount of ice cream, which is very fast to digest, vs. eating something like raw kale, which takes a while to digest. The amount of energy you get from either one is going also include energy used in the process of breaking it down into useful energy.
Back in 2001, researchers fed adorable little mice cooked vs. uncooked meat and sweet potatoes, and at the end of 40 days there was sufficient evidence to conclude that the cooked food provided more usable energy. The furry little white mice fed raw meat and sweet potatoes needed their digestive systems to work longer and harder to extract usable nutrients from their food.
Cooking, thus, is the beginning of the digestive process, delegating some of the work to things like an oven or a stovetop or a microwave. The energy is still expended in digesting, but it's energy from electricity or the burning of gas or the inductive heating of magnets instead of our body's biological processes.
When you cook food, water tends to evaporate. The cooked weight and raw weight of the same portion is therefore different. The amount of macronutrients and therefore energy content of the food has not changed, only the overall mass.
100g of raw beef might lose enough water to end up as something like 85g for the same caloric value because it lost 15% of its mass from water evaporation.
When you read a nutrition label, the portion sizes tend to be standardised. you might compare 100g of raw beef with 100g of cooked beef and see that the cooked portion has more calories.
[Edit: True to ELI5's spirit...]
ELI5: The cooking process is like unwrapping a sweet (piece of candy). If you eat a sweet with the wrapper on, your body will not digest it, but if you remove the wrapper you expose the sugar inside for your body to digest. Some sweets come with a hard outer shell which your body can digest, but it has to spend a lot of energy doing so. Cooking can help soften or break down that shell, saving your body from having to do the hard work itself.
Obviously, it's correct that the amount of calories per gram increases when you remove water, as others have stated. However, that doesn't really address the question properly. The real reason why cooking food can increase the digestible calories is that cooking helps break down the food, which both makes more calories available and saves your body from spending calories digesting the food. Some things cannot be digested by humans, like cellulose, but if you cook the food you can break open the cellulose and release the nutrients inside which are digestible. This is why we cook potatoes. Also, cooking breaks nutrients down which saves your body from having to do so. This results in a net gain of calories by cutting the amount spent on digestion.
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2TagS88
