
Did cooking make us human?
CrowdScience
00:00
The Benefits of Cooking
For plant foods one of the main sources of calories comes from starch which is a type of carbohydrate and starch when it's raw exists in a tightly packed granule. So what cooking does is it essentially loosens those bonds it causes them to wiggle. As that happens the starch granule swells with water and this process is called gelatinization. When that happens it's very easy for our enzymes to go in and start to cleave off those sugars. This process of gelatinization helps explain what was happening to the starches in that delicious tuber I tried earlier. What about protein? You can kind of imagine protein exists in sort of a tangled ball of yarn and what cooking essentially does is
Transcript
Play full episode