why does a hardboiled egg have more calories than a raw one?
In: Biology
Cooking food actually changes its chemical structure – for many foods, our body can actually digest them better and get more nutrients out of them after they’ve been cooked. This is most apparent in meats, but many vegetables have an increased nutritional value after being cooked as well, sometimes in terms of the big calorie-provided chemicals like sugars, fats, and proteins, sometimes in terms of other vitamins and such.
So a raw egg will provide some calories (mostly fats and some proteins from the yolk), but a lot of the egg white will not be digested by your body – about half of the protein content will actually be undigestible and go straight through you. Once you cook that egg white, the protein structure changes, some chemicals change structure or become denatured, and now you’ll be able to digest, absorb, and use much more of that calorie-rich protein.
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