Cooking, industrial processing and caloric density of foods

- Adoption of cooked foods has been a major factor shaping human body evolution.
- The abundance of high density calorie cooked foods is one of the causes of obesity.
- Mediterranean cuisine provides many examples of healthy practice of cooking.
- Food technologies can be used to design appealing food with reduced energy content.

During human evolution, the development of a wide range of cooking processing techniques enabled humans to provide their social group with maximum benefits from limited food resources. Industrial processing and mass market distribution made available high food calorie density foods to the world population boosting the developing of obesity. Western diet are very much in line with human evolutionary heritage because foods are soft, easy to chew, with a high content of fat and free sugar.The same processing technologies, which created high-calorie dense foods, should also be used in other ways to design products that are still appealing, tasteful and palatable, but do not provide an excess of energy.