Cooked starches are said, by many, to be easiest of digestion. Toasted bread is said to be dextrinized. Are these things so? It has long been known that animals digest raw starch best and that they do not fare well on cooked foods. Farmers quit cooking food for their animals years ago. Milo Hastings says:

"Closely akin to the idea of predigesting cereals by roasting and toasting them are the old notions that raw starch is indigestible and that all home cooked starchy foods need very long, tedious periods of cooking. This idea was almost universal a generation ago and is probably still taught in school text-books, which are usually a generation behind.

"I got suspicious of the idea that humans couldn't digest raw starch when I was in college and read about experiments in cooking grain for farm animals, in which the scientists proved that the cooked foods were less digestible than uncooked foods--for animals.

"The human food teachers came back by saying that man's digestive system has been changed by long ages of cooking and had lost the power to digest raw starch. So I tried it, and did my college thesis with a series of experiments on the digestion of raw versus long cooked cereal starches. I found out that my own particular digestive organs worked just like the pigs' and cows'. Worse yet for the popular theory, my mother insists that I wasn't descended from raw turnip eaters, but that our folks came over in the next ship after the Mayflower and had been cooking as long as the rest of them."

The Department of Agriculture, in Washington, conducted experiments which revealed that raw corn, rice and other starches are digested in amounts up to eight ounces, daily. Raw potatoes showed digestibility of seventy-eight per cent.

Kellogg, Langworth and Devel have each shown that raw starches digest quite easily. The Scotch Highlanders have, from time immemorial, eaten their oatmeal simply scalded. Hon. W. N. Beaver for many years a magistrate in Papua, New Guinea, says that the natives of Kiwai formerly ate their rice raw.

Raw cabbage digests in two hours whereas it requires four hours for cooked cabbage to digest. As almost everybody has difficulty with cooked cabbage and almost nobody has trouble with raw cabbage these differences are common knowledge.

High temperatures are required to change most sugars although the sugar of milk is changed in pasteurizing.

Actual feeding tests have shown that the brown crust of bread has less food value than the soggy inside. In other words the most thoroughly cooked portions of food (any food) are less valuable as food than the less cooked portions.

The facts are that cooking renders starches less digestible, while boiling them so that they are saturated with water, prevents all salivary digestion. Very little dextrinization of starch is produced I by cooking. It is the office of the salivary enzyme (ptyalin) to perform this work and we profit by permitting salivary digestion to digest our starches. Toasting bread charcoalizes rather than dextrinizes it.