Reply to Wollstonecroft et al.: Cooking increases the bioavailability of starch from diverse plant sources
Year: 2012
Type: letter
Abstract: We thank Wollstonecroft et al. for supporting the evidence that not all calories are equal (1). We found that the bioavailability of calories from lean beef (Bos taurus) and sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) increased with food processing (2). For both foods, cooking had a larger impact on bioavailability than pounding, and when these processing methods were applied in combination, cooking improved a pounded diet whereas pounding did not improve a cooked diet. Our findings emphasize that the biochemical assays used in the production of modern nutrition labels do not fully account for the energetic significance of food processing. Such assays ignore important costs of the digestive process that are typically lowered by processing, including diet-induced thermogenesis and nutrients metabolized by gut bacteria instead of the human host.
Institutions: Harvard University, University of California, Los Angeles
Language: English
Subfield: Nutrition and Dietetics
Field: Nursing
Domain: Health Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2076095100