Cooking increases calories?!

tuckerrj

"Cooking or processing breaks down cell structures and unravels the proteins in food, so more energy is available through digestion".

So says this article: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/02/calorie-count-inaccurate-microbiome-cooking-processed

That's a new one on me. Have you heard this before?

55in13

Yes. Here is another source:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/02/have-we-been-miscounting-calorie.html

If you read through it, it does seem a little like nit picking because it generally is not much different.

tuckerrj

bump

HeidiCooksSupper

This is the argument put forward in the book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. The underlying idea is that the increased nutrition made available by cooking allowed humans to develop large brains. I never did finish the book because his conclusion leaps became a bit tedious as I worked my way through it. Turns out, his science is pretty loosey goosey and he's probably wrong.

Cooking food may increase or decrease the available calories depending on the food involved and how or how much it is cooked. Cooking meat to release its fats decreases the calories you consume if you drain away that fat. If you eat raw corn and it shoots out the poop chute still resembling corn, it probably didn't let you keep many of its calories.

All calorie counts on our foods are an ESTIMATE based on the energy released by burning the food in a vacuum multiplied by a constant of 85% because that's an average figure of how efficient the human body is in using available calories. Oh yeah, and its divided by 1000 so what we see as calories on nutrition labels are more rightly kilocalories.

Bread bakers know that the amount of water weight in flour can vary with the weather. Thus the calories-by-weight of flour can vary with the weather. The variance, however, is minimal. In contrast, the amount of flour in a given volume of flour, e.g. a cup of flour, can vary greatly by how densely packed the flour is thus professional and many home bread bakers measure flour by weight rather than volume.

iplayoutside19

Mother Jones? I'm not taking anything there seriously. However, a cross reference from Science Mag lends some credibility.

Way I look at it, unless you're an Olympian, professional athlete, or compete in extreme length events like Ultras and multi-day Adventure Races the minute details these scientists are talking about probaly don't apply. MFP/Weight Watchers/Counting Calories works because you're accountable to some number. If you stick to your plan you won't be mindlessly consuming more calories than you need.

55in13

All calorie counts on our foods are an ESTIMATE based on the energy released by burning the food in a vacuum multiplied by a constant of 85% because that's an average figure of how efficient the human body is in using available calories.

My reading of the science article (not the symposium abstract; that lost me pretty quickly ) leads me to believe that what they are saying is that sometimes they need to use 90% instead (not exactly, but you get my drift). Not earth shattering.

Stargrace2

"Cooking or processing breaks down cell structures and unravels the proteins in food, so more energy is available through digestion".

So says this article: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/02/calorie-count-inaccurate-microbiome-cooking-processed

That's a new one on me. Have you heard this before?

Haven't you ever wondered when logging food why a large hard boiled egg has 78 calories, but a raw one has 70-72 or so?

55in13

Haven't you ever wondered when logging food why a large hard boiled egg has 78 calories, but a raw one has 70-72 or so?

Here's a great diet tip - eat a raw egg every morning and nothing worse will happen to you all day long! :laugh:

MissMormie

Here's a great diet tip - eat a raw egg every morning and nothing worse will happen to you all day long! :laugh:

Lol! Thanks for that comment

Stargrace2

Haven't you ever wondered when logging food why a large hard boiled egg has 78 calories, but a raw one has 70-72 or so?

Here's a great diet tip - eat a raw egg every morning and nothing worse will happen to you all day long! :laugh:

They're not so bad in smoothies

Mokey41

Haven't you ever wondered when logging food why a large hard boiled egg has 78 calories, but a raw one has 70-72 or so?

Haven't you ever wondered if two different people made those entries and one is not right?

Achrya

"Cooking or processing breaks down cell structures and unravels the proteins in food, so more energy is available through digestion".

So says this article: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/02/calorie-count-inaccurate-microbiome-cooking-processed

That's a new one on me. Have you heard this before?

Haven't you ever wondered when logging food why a large hard boiled egg has 78 calories, but a raw one has 70-72 or so?

No. I do sometimes wonder why my quest bar says 190 but there are 3 entries that say 210, why my preferred salad dressing has an entry that say it was 30g of fat per 90 calories (What is math?), and why there's a tuna entry with no protein/fat/carbs listed.

I suspect PEBKAC.

55in13

Haven't you ever wondered when logging food why a large hard boiled egg has 78 calories, but a raw one has 70-72 or so?

Haven't you ever wondered if two different people made those entries and one is not right?

They came from different chickens; one of them does IF and the other ones eats back exercise calories. They argue all the time...

endoftheside

If it depends on gut bacteria, it is going to be variable from person to person and even for the same person it will vary based on illness, antibiotic use, etc. I do much better with cooked vegetables (vs. raw) when my digestion is off for whatever reason and it makes sense to me that I am digesting them more completely/getting more calories and nutrition (a good thing!) from them when they are partially broken down already by cooking.

geralynhoerauf

I actually ran across this issue today while researching nutritional values for boneless, skinless chicken thighs. On the Perdue web site, they give separate and different values for cooked and uncooked chicken thighs. 3 oz of uncooked has a calorie count of 130 and cooked, the 3 oz is 180. I didn't spend a lot of time pondering, but my assumption was that the 3oz pre-cooked weight must weigh something less than that when cooked and so the calories and fat content would be higher in the actual 3 oz of cooked chicken? The 50 calorie difference is pretty significant in this small amount of chicken.

55in13

I actually ran across this issue today while researching nutritional values for boneless, skinless chicken thighs. On the Perdue web site, they give separate and different values for cooked and uncooked chicken thighs. 3 oz of uncooked has a calorie count of 130 and cooked, the 3 oz is 180. I didn't spend a lot of time pondering, but my assumption was that the 3oz pre-cooked weight must weigh something less than that when cooked and so the calories and fat content would be higher in the actual 3 oz of cooked chicken? The 50 calorie difference is pretty significant in this small amount of chicken.

Perdue chicken is quite tasty, but I think that it is because they soak it. It is hard to use in some recipes, particularly where it is sauteed, because it will release so much water when cooked that it is hard to brown it in a skillet. So the lower calories is probably due to it having about 1/4 of the weight in water that will cook away (still leaving it moist; there is a lot of water).