When you cook, you have the ingredients that you use, and each of those has a certain amount of calories. When you mix them together and cook them, does the calorie count change as they are getting cooked?
Does the law of conservation of energy apply to calories? Where they can’t be destroyed or created, only transferred?
Am I overthinking this?
In: Biology
Cooking doesn’t have any significant effect on the calorie count. If you actually *burn* something, like overcook it until it turns black, now you’re releasing the same energy that your digestive system would have extracted and the calorie count is going down. Unfortunately you’re also making the food taste yucky.
Conservation should definitely apply to the chemical energy in food, just like anything else. Human-usable food energy is created when plants absorb sunlight, as long as they convert it into sugars or starches we can digest. If the plant converts that energy into cellulose fiber, then it’s still energy but our guts can’t access it.
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