Research
Energy balance
Cooking starch increases its digestibility and glycemic potential, making it a more effective energy source for the brain than raw starch.
Cooking starchy foods like potatoes, rice, and grains significantly improves your body's ability to extract energy from them compared to eating them raw. This is why cooked starches are a staple in most human cultures.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Salivary amylases are largely ineffective on raw crystalline starch, but cooking substantially increases both their energy-yielding potential and glycemia.
Why this rating
Supported by biochemical evidence of starch gelatinization and enzymatic digestion rates.
Source
The Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution
Karen Hardy et al. · The Quarterly Review of Biology · 2015
DOI 10.1086/682587
narrative_reviewCited 227×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Consumption of cooked, high-starch plant foods (specifically underground storage organs) was an essential evolutionary driver for the expansion of the human brain and body size during the Pleistocene by providing the preformed glucose required for high-energy tissues.Moderate
- High copy number variation (CNV) of the salivary amylase gene (AMY1) in humans is an evolutionary adaptation to a starch-rich diet, particularly following the widespread adoption of cooking.Moderate
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