>>13007985Ah, now I understand your question. It's not the absorption aspect specifically, but the total quantity of nutrients. Yeah, that's a totally valid question. It probably depends a lot on what you're eating specifically. Boiling spinach, for example, removes basically everything healthy about spinach. On the other hand, the nutrients in raw spinach aren't very bioavailable, so there's some sweet spot where cooking can make the nutrients more available, but not remove them completely, but both processes are occuring simultaneously, so it's just an optimization problem. The claim that cooked foods are more "nutritious" isn't necessarily true, but "nutritious" is a somewhat vague term. The claim I've heard more often is that cooking food allowed us to consume a greater number of calories with lesser time and effort, and that aspect is certainly true. Digesting cooked foods is easier because the nutrients are in simpler forms, as claimed above. When it comes to eating grass, for example, the limiting factor isn't that there is too little grass. It's that even keeping your stomach constantly full of grass, your body couldn't turn grass into calories fast enough for you to stay alive. So cooking food increases the rate of calorie intake, even if it reduces the overall quantity of calories absorbed. As others have said, there are also bacterial/parasitic concerns that can be alleviated via cooking. These could almost certainly be alleviated by other methods as well, but those methods weren't available in the past, so human culture developed the norm of cooking meat, and of course you'll now be looked at very strangely for consuming raw meat. Altogether, nutrition is complicated and poorly understood. It could possibly be that raw meat consumption is nutritionally better, but as a public health policy, it's unwise due to the aforementioned health risks of bacteria/parasites, and malnutrition can be addressed by less risky means
