why does a hardboiled egg have more calories than a raw one?
In: Biology
Cooking food actually changes its chemical structure – for many foods, our body can actually digest them better and get more nutrients out of them after they’ve been cooked. This is most apparent in meats, but many vegetables have an increased nutritional value after being cooked as well, sometimes in terms of the big calorie-provided chemicals like sugars, fats, and proteins, sometimes in terms of other vitamins and such.
So a raw egg will provide some calories (mostly fats and some proteins from the yolk), but a lot of the egg white will not be digested by your body – about half of the protein content will actually be undigestible and go straight through you. Once you cook that egg white, the protein structure changes, some chemicals change structure or become denatured, and now you’ll be able to digest, absorb, and use much more of that calorie-rich protein.
Another example is from an article I found yesterday about nuts. They are lowering the calorie count in a portion of nuts because science has shown that the portions that are not pulverized in chewing are not digested, meaning they contribute no calories. The article mentioned that nuts made into butters (peanut, almond, etc.) reflect this in a higher-per-nut-used calorie content because their purified form is easier to digest.
When we eat something, our bodies produce enzymes to break it down so we can digest it. If we can’t break it down, it goes through us and poops out undigested.
A raw egg, we may only digest half of (and most of that is yolk) as far as calories go. But when you cook an egg, the proteins become a different shape (this is why cooked eggs are solid, and raw eggs are liquid). In this form, we can now digest more of the cooked egg than the raw egg. This is also why cooking is a big deal to how humans evolved. We can now get more energy with less food.
Carrots are the same way, but with sugars instead of proteins.
When talking about food, the number of calories listed aren’t how many calories there physically are in the food, but how many you can get out of them.
It’s easier to digest a boiled egg, so you get more calories out of it than a raw egg.
Latest Answers