The Economist has an article on how cooked food was the evolutionary leap that has made your grandpa, homo erectus, so endlessly win for the last 1.8 million years.
Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.
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Another telling experiment, conducted on rats, did not rely on cooking. Rather the experimenters ground up food pellets and then recompacted them to make them softer. Rats fed on the softer pellets weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than those fed the same weight of standard pellets. The difference was because of the lower cost of digestion. Indeed, Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests—in America, at least—is a myth) but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer.
This paragraph is one New York Times feature away from catalyzing fucking Dr Wrangham's Hard Food Revolution. 'Sorry, no banana for me, I'm on Hard Foods. Hand me those Ritz crackers.'
I read this! I was referencing it in a thrilling conversation about children's eating habits today at lunch.