Is there a quantifiable benefit to cooking food?

Submitted by Ydlmgtwtily t3_122t69t in askscience

I believe there is a quality benefit in that I'm told that cooking many foods makes them easier to digest (how much easier?) and I'm aware that it is safer, meat in particular, to subject foods to enough heat to kill harmful bacteria.

What I'm interested in is whether there is a nutritional benefit. It seems plausible that cooking could actually harm nutrients, but is there a nutritional benefit that makes up for this?

Follow-up if nutrtion profile does not change: If I have the nutritional data for a food by weight, and I cook the food, it will have less weight. Will the resulting food have the same nutrition as the uncooked food I start with (is the weight loss only water?)

I started thinking about this while being pitched a raw food diet for my dog. The premise doesn't make sense to me for the same reason that dog owners who feed their dogs raw meet likely aren't eating raw meat themselves, but the claim is that it has a health benefit for the dog and I have no knowledge of that but am thinking that if it does, surely it would apply to humans as well.

Apologies if I have the wrong flair or have asked in the wrong forum. Seems like a biology question fundamentally.

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mr_eking t1_jdu03y0 wrote

I'm pretty sure there have been a number of recent studies trying to quantify the benefit of cooked food. Here's one from Harvard that suggests that cooked meat delivers more energy when digested as compared to raw meat:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/11/why-cooking-counts/

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Ydlmgtwtily OP t1_jduc2o5 wrote

That's a great start. Thanks! Looks like we're still early on in our understanding of this.

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Patagonia202020 t1_jdxq2lk wrote

Without the advent of fire for cooking and the nutritional liberation it provided (especially for meat), we simply wouldn’t be here, speaking and typing in complicated human language on screens programmed with different complicated languages. Frontal lobe development in our early human ancestors matches up nicely with evidence of our beginning to wield flame for cooking.

Cooking increases the nutrient concentration of food by dehydration, or rehydration with the broth and liquids of other foods as they cook. It breaks down proteins in ways chewing and acidic stomachs couldn’t as efficiently, allowing our GI tracts to shorten over time as we gave them less hard work to do. Vegetable fibers are either solubilized or broken down into smaller more manageable molecular pieces, many of which are the very favorite food of any healthy gut flora. Some raw (and common!) foods are toxic in the raw state, yet perfectly edible when cooked. It offers sterilization of food, too, which is a massive survival advantage.

There are, of course, some heat sensitive nutrients which are impacted by cooking, which shouldn’t discourage us from cooking; rather, we should simply enjoy some foods raw and some cooked!

On dogs: about 750,000 thousand years separate the advent of human cooking and the domestication of dogs. Dogs have spent, evolutionarily speaking, much less time with altered diets including cooked food, so they capacity to handle food in its raw state remains greater than ours. Their bodies are more recently equipped to handle raw food, and haven’t for as long had selective pressures to adjust to/benefit from/change in response to cooking.

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Ydlmgtwtily OP t1_je05f05 wrote

Thanks, excellent detail, and a lot for me to take away here.

Still, it's very much qualitative rather than quantative. My engineer brain wants to come away with a formula I could apply to cooking a steak in order to quantify the benefit of cooking in a perfect scenario.

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Patagonia202020 t1_je11xq1 wrote

Look into calorimetry and nutritional analysis. It may very well be that you could with the right equipment and to a useful extent, develop some math around this. I’m sure others have!

For me, I’ve noticed the higher the volume of raw fruits and veggies I eat, the fitter I am, regardless of calories consumed. Haven’t tried it with raw meat tho 😅

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iwaseatenbyagrue t1_jdtwhr9 wrote

Humans evolved with the technology of fire. Digesting raw meats is something that humans are not so good at anymore. It takes more energy from the body to process most raw meats than cooked meat. And our teeth aren't adapted for raw meat.

So I think it would be a net negative to try to go back to this.

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