When food is already broken down, your body doesn't have to work as hard to digest it, so it saves energy and stores more as fat.
Scientific Claim
Food processing reduces the metabolic cost of digestion by pre-masticating and simplifying nutrient structures, thereby increasing net energy absorption.
Original Statement
“Basically, the food processing has enabled and done the work for us. So, our bodies just get lazier and lazier and lazier. Our bodies want efficiency. They try to find it. So, when we enable them and give them efficiency by eating ultrarocessed, pre-masticated freaking gobbledyg stuff. Yeah, it's going to just absorb it easier.”
Context Details
Domain
nutrition
Population
human
Subject
Food processing
Action
reduces
Target
metabolic cost of digestion
Intervention Details
Evidence from Studies
Supporting (3)
Postprandial energy expenditure in whole-food and processed-food meals: implications for daily energy expenditure
This study found that your body uses less energy to digest processed food than whole food, meaning you absorb more energy from processed food — which supports the idea that processing food makes it easier for your body to get calories from it.
Cooking increases net energy gain from a lipid-rich food.
Cooking peanuts made it easier for mice to digest the fats inside them, so they got more energy from the same amount of food — but just blending them didn’t help. This supports the idea that processing food (like cooking) helps your body absorb more energy.
Protein digestion and absorption: the influence of food processing.
Cooking and processing food makes it easier for your body to break down and absorb nutrients, so you don’t have to use as much energy digesting it — this study shows that’s true for proteins.