This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The development of cooking was a major milestone in the evolution of human civilization because it made food easier to digest and more energy-efficient. Heating food can also kill harmful pathogens and make certain foods taste better.
Overcooking, on the other hand, can have adverse effects, particularly on proteins. Severe heating can modify proteins in ways that reduce their nutritional value. For this reason, people do not tend to overcook food, but some processed foods may be subject to severe heating during production.
Scientists have suspected that a diet including proteins treated at high temperatures may lead to nutritional deficiencies, yet it has not been well understood exactly how long-term intake of these treated proteins affects physiological and behavioral responses. This motivated a team of researchers at Kyoto University to investigate how such a diet would affect mice. "What happens to food-derived molecules after we eat them?" says first author Tomoko T.
"I wanted to know whether food processing changes these proteins' absorption as well as their biological effects." The work is published in the journal npj Science of Food. The team prepared soy protein isolate as a 10% aqueous solution and heated it to 121 degrees Celsius (250 degrees Fahrenheit) for 20 minutes. They then conducted in vitro digestion to examine the soy protein isolate's amino acid composition and digestibility.
After examining the effects of heating on the soy protein, the team fed it to mice for six weeks. Following this feeding period, the researchers observed the physiological and behavioral outcomes of this diet. The results revealed that the 20-minute heat treatment decreased amino acid levels and increased the amount of insoluble protein and larger soluble peptides in the soy protein isolate.
This, in turn, led to lower blood amino acid levels in the mice, reducing bioavailability, or the amount that can be absorbed by an organism. The heated soy protein diet also lowered peripheral serotonin levels and altered social novelty behavior, which refers to responses to unknown individuals. These findings suggest that severe heating in food processing could not only decrease amino acid availability and protein digestibility but also extend to broader physiological and behavioral responses.
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