This isn’t true. The calorie count given on food labels and the like are the results of an equation that takes into accounts how efficiently the various constituents of the food are metabolized. Its a somewhat crude calculation, but its generally accurate to within a few percent.
They don’t just blindly list the results of burning the food in a calorimeter.
How could this possibly be true? What form would the additional calories take? And where would they come from?
Cite?
Indeed bomb calorimeter is no longer used, but the Atwater system (which is) doe NOT take into account how efficiently the constituents are metabolized and is notoriously inaccurate.
Not that the difference makes much of difference in the real world in which satiety of foods plays a bigger factor (intake is rarely “one serving size”).
Ambi the calories absorbed by the body, the* effective* calories, goes way up. Uncooked potato starch is poorly absorbed by the body and will pass through, some digested for you by your gut bacteria with lots of gas and gas pains as a result, more just going out in the poop. Cooked potato has calories that the body actually absorbs.
Ahhh, I see. Yes, that makes sense. Absorbed vs unabsorbed is one thing. But a damn potato has the same number of calories no matter how hot you get it. 
You misunderstood me. I didn’t switch to gluten-free products. They are highly processed and I avoid processed foods. My dietary change was simply to avoid carbs and glutens as much as possible. So for example, where I used to make myself a sandwich for lunch every day, now I slap some lunch meat and sliced cheese directly on a plate, wave it under the broiler just to warm up the cheese, and snarf it down with a knife and fork. (Yes, the lunch meat is also highly processed, that’s one of my exceptions. So far I haven’t figured out any other good meat/fat to eat for lunch short of steak/pork/chicken which I don’t have time for.)
I do think there is something allergenic there for me, too. Before the diet I was having near-constant acid reflux and burping. Whether my stomach was empty or full, it was generating a ton of gas. I didn’t know what was causing it. After starting the diet, that’s disappeared except when I do have the occasional few bites of bread.
Beg to differ, but I don’t have this, and never have. I think you need to chew your food better.
[QUOTE=Richard Wrangham]
Yet there were signs that cooking did affect the calorie counts of some foods. Starches, for instance, like those in wheat, barley, potatoes, and so on, are composed mostly of two sugar-based molecules, amylopectin and amylose, which, when raw, are tightly packed and inaccessible to digestive enzymes. Studies have found that cooking gelatinizes starch, which means that amylopectin and amylose are released and exposed to enzymes. Thus, cooked starches yield more energy than raw ones.
[/QUOTE]
From here: Discovery Magazine
interesting hijack
He tried a chimpanzee diet to compare to how our ancestors may have lived, and found how unpalatable it was, and surmises cooking may have been one the reasons humans survived.
/hijack
Wood is pretty high in calories, but your body can’t digest it. If you just eat sawdust you will starve to death.
“A calorie is a calorie” is true by the definition of what a calorie is. One calorie of wood contains the same amount of energy as one calorie of soda. However, your body can easily extract the calorie from the soda, but can’t extract the calorie from wood.
Some foods are easily and pretty thoroughly converted to energy or fat by your body. Others are only partially convertible, and others require your body to expend energy in order to convert them to energy.
Credible scientists don’t yet know. There’s a massive study going on right now, spending millions of dollars, to get to the bottom of this right now. Apparently there is currently research pointing in both directions at the present time.
OMG! Scylla is back!
It’s a really fascinating hijack. Compare his experience to that of animals. Ruminants have evolved specialized digestive systems to be able to break down all the cellulose they eat. Pat of the process is chewing, swallowing and then regurgitating and chewing some more. Carnivores don’t chew their food but just shear off chunks and swallow it and let their stomach acids take care of the rest. But they too, have specialized for that. We are clearly not specialized for any particular diet since we’re omnivores. But cooking the food absolutely makes it easier for us to digest. I think the question is if we never specialized because we invented cooking, or if we invented cooking because we never specialized (and thus sucked at eating well enough to survive as a species)?
I’m not basing it on my feces alone. I look at poop for a living. 
He’s full of fiber.
The Alice B. Toklas Diet, I assume?
nit pick:
Um, actually I know that some of the unused calories are used by gut flora, and not all of the calories used by gut flora are absorbed by your body.
So it could be kind of misleading to say that we “excrete” all the calories we don’t metabolise.
Nice job if you can get it. 
Actually I find it surprising that after eating tons of vegetables (cooked, but still firm enough to require a decent amount of chewing), nothing resembling a vegetable comes out the other end later. Our stomach and intestines (well, mine at least) must be able to break that stuff down pretty effectively.
Counterpoint: Eating junk food and losing weight is possible, proves science teacher. He ate at McDonald’s for every meal (not just the salads, either), limiting himself to 2,000 calories per day, and lost 37 pounds in 90 days.
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds. Nutrition professor ate convenience-store junk food almost exclusively, watching his total calories, and lost 27 pounds in two months.
I’m not saying that calories are all that matters in total health, there’s a lot more to it than that. I will say that it doesn’t seem to matter much where the calories come from, as long as your nutritional needs are otherwise met.
A gallon of gasoline is a gallon of gasoline. Therefore, all cars will travel the same distance on one gallon of gasoline. Or maybe not, but surely it must be true for calories.
Consider this a Like. Well stated.
When you consider a thing like flour, the seeds have been pre-chewed for us by the mill, so a great deal of the energy needed to eat the food, and the greatly expanded net surface area, make it that much easier for us to get the calories out. Seeds are typically constructed to have as good a chance as they can to get through the digestive tract intact, so that they will land in a nice pile of fertilizer.
Not sure what you point you believe those two anecdotes (including the nutrition professor who also did protein and vitamin supplements) are counterpoint to.
Yes and individual can eat little enough calories of junkfood to lose weight, and some people are disciplined enough that despite those foods having low satiety they can stick with it for two or three months measuring carefully.
Such is not all in conflict with the fact that how many calories is little enough depends of course on how many you burn and the same number of listed calories of highly processed food is effectively more calories than the same number of calories of less highly processed foods and satisfies hunger less.