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.

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 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.

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.