Cooked Meal Counts

Introduction

Dieticians got it all wrong. Cooked meat provides more energy than raw meat, concludes a research. Harvard University scientists fed two groups of mice either meat or sweet potatoes prepared in four ways: raw and whole, raw and pounded, cooked and whole, and cooked and pounded. Researchers tracked the changes in the body mass of the mice for 40 days. The results showed that cooked foods delivered more energy than their raw versions. The study also reaffirms that cooking played a vital role in human evolution. Two million years ago, humans suddenly evolved to have bigger brains and stronger bodies. It was in this period that they learned how to control fire and started to cook, say the researchers at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

Source

Down To Earth, December 2011