ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
Energetic consequences of thermal and nonthermal food processing.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 214 citations in OpenAlex.
- Roles of the gut microbiome in weight management.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2023Pooled it
- Primate energy input and the evolutionary transition to energy-dense diets in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Pooled it
- The Co-Evolution of Sleep and Diet: Toward an Emerging Framework of Evolutionary Chrononutrition in Circadian-Metabolic Health.Nutrients · 2026Review
- From scarcity to ultra-processed foods: a conceptual analysis of how their properties interact with characteristics of food intake regulation mechanism.Frontiers in nutrition · 2026Review
- The Homo erectus Female Revisited.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- A bioenergetic approach favors the preservation and protection of prey, not cooking, as the drivers of early fire.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Article
- Refined carbohydrates and the overfat pandemic: implications for brain health and public health policy.Frontiers in public health · 2025Review
- Precision nutrition across climates: decoding diet, tradition, and genomic adaptations from South Asia to the Arctic.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Review
- Neural and metabolic factors in carbohydrate reward: Rationale, design, and methods for a flavor-nutrient learning paradigm in humans.Contemporary clinical trials · 2024Article
- Creation and validation of a NOVA scored picture set to evaluate ultra-processed foods.Appetite · 2024Article
- Interplay between particle size and microbial ecology in the gut microbiome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Interplay between particle size and microbial ecology in the gut microbiome.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Is obesity the next step in evolution through brain changes?Neuroscience applied · 2024Article
- Dietary proteins: from evolution to engineering.Frontiers in nutrition · 2024Review
- Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion.Communications biology · 2023Review
- Comparative physiological anthropogeny: exploring molecular underpinnings of distinctly human phenotypes.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- Ultraprocessed Foods and Obesity Risk: A Critical Review of Reported Mechanisms.Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.) · 2023Review
- The impact of caloric availability on eating behavior and ultra-processed food reward.Appetite · 2022Article
- The Burden of Carbohydrates in Health and Disease.Nutrients · 2022Review
- Divergence-time estimates for hominins provide insight into encephalization and body mass trends in human evolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Processing food extensively by thermal and nonthermal techniques is a unique and universal human practice. Food processing increases palatability and edibility and has been argued to increase energy gain. Although energy gain is a well-known effect from cooking starch-rich foods, the idea that cooking meat increases energy gain has never been tested. Moreover, the relative energetic advantages of cooking and nonthermal processing have not been assessed, whether for meat or starch-rich foods. Here, we describe a system for characterizing the energetic effects of cooking and nonthermal food processing. Using mice as a model, we show that cooking substantially increases the energy gained from meat, leading to elevations in body mass that are not attributable to differences in food intake or activity levels. The positive energetic effects of cooking were found to be superior to the effects of pounding in both meat and starch-rich tubers, a conclusion further supported by food preferences in fasted animals. Our results indicate significant contributions from cooking to both modern and ancestral human energy budgets. They also illuminate a weakness in current food labeling practices, which systematically overestimate the caloric potential of poorly processed foods.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.