Interresting stuff. I have been watching videos from an primatologist called Richard Wrangham who thinks that part of what allowed humans to thrive is their ability to cook. According to him, when starch is cooked, it increases its digestibility such that a larger portion of the calories it contains are absorbed by the human body and a smaller amount of energy is used to digest it.
He sites quite a few evidences too. He says that it's partly why rawfoodists are so tin even when they eat a lot, so tin in fact than many rawfoodist women stop having their periods from being underfed. He says also that if you measure the amount of glucose in the blood of someone who just ate uncooked starch versus cooked starch, the glucose curve in the one who eats cooked starch raises a lot higher. He says that rats, pigs, fishes and farm animals who are fed cooked plants tend to grow faster than those who eat un-cook food. And finally, his says that if you collect the waste food from the poop sack of patients who have had an Hemicolectomy, you can measure a lot more undigested carbs than you normally find in human poop, which suggests that the intestinal flora might be eating a large part of the starch from uncooked food.
