Podcast Episode 58 How Cooking Affects Our Food

In this week’s podcast, we discuss the effects that cooking has on the food we eat. The topic of the podcast starts at the 17 minute mark.

When we are talking about starch based foods, the act of cooking greatly increases their overall digestibility. A raw potato for example will be 50% absorbed by the time it reaches the end of our small intestines, but a cooked and processed potato, say mashed potato, will be over 95% absorbed by the time it reaches the end of our small intestines.

The effects of cooking on meat are a little more complicated. Humans have been eating meat for at least 2.5 million years. However, we didn’t gain the ability to control fire until 790,000 years ago at the earliest. So the bulk of our evolution was taken up by consuming raw meat. The presence of our highly acidic stomachs (pH of 1-2 to this day) echoes this history.

Cooking meat does provide some benefits though. It kills various pathogens, it can render the protein in meat more digestible, and it can make the meat more palatable through the flavors and aromas generated from the Maillard reaction.

We go over this and more on this week’s podcast. If you’re interested, check it out!