Cooked food provides more energy than raw variety--study

According to experts adoption of cooking techniques may have spurred the evolutionary increases in body and brain size of humans as well as their adaption of high-energy activities such as long distance running.

Lead author of the study, Rachel Carmody, evolutionary biologist at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences stated, "It is astonishing that we don't understand the fundamental properties of the food we eat.

“All the effort we put into cooking food and presenting it - mashing it up, or cutting it, or slicing or pounding it - we don't understand what effect that has on the energy we extract from food, and energy is the primary reason we eat in the first place.”

Cooked food VS raw food
In order to get valuable insight into the energetic effects of cooking on body mass, the researchers conducted an animal study.

As a part of the experiment the rodents were split into two groups. The animals were assigned to different diets of meat or sweet potatoes over 40 days.

The food prepared was raw and whole, raw and pounded, cooked and whole and cooked and pounded.

Over the study period, the researchers monitored body mass changes in each mouse as well as their physical activity on the exercise wheel.

Findings of the study
The results clearly indicated that cooked food rather than raw increased energy levels and led to bigger and stronger mice.

Though pounding of food contributed to some weight gain in the rodents, the benefits of cooking surpassed those of pounding.

Co-author Professor Richard Wrangham, also from Harvard stated, "For the first time, we have a clear answer to why cooking is so important cross-culturally and biologically - because it gives us increased energy, and life is all about energy."

The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.