Why cooking counts
Next time you’re out to dinner, you may want to think twice before ordering your steak rare. In a first-of-its-kind study, Harvard researchers have shown that cooked meat provides more energy than raw meat, a finding that challenges the current food labeling system and suggests humans are evolutionarily adapted to take advantage of the benefits of cooking. Led by Rachel Carmody, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and published online ahead of print this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS Early Edition), the research bridges the fields of human evolution and modern human nutrition. “Every day, humans in every global society devote time and energy to processing food — cooking it, grinding it, slicing it, pounding it — yet we don’t understand what effect these efforts have on the energy we extract from food, or the...