This is quite contrary to the popular notion. However, as we have just seen, cooking robs food of much of its value and adds nothing to it. It does not increase, but in most cases decreases, its digestibility.

The United States Department of Agriculture's Bulletin, No. 22, says: "Ladd, while connected with the New York State Station, reported analysis of cooked and uncooked clover, hay and corn meal and determination of digestibility of the same. These showed that the percentage of albuminoids and fat and the relative digestibility of the albuminoids were more or less diminished by cooking. The experiments made by our experiment stations in preparing food have been mostly with pigs. At least thirteen separate series of experiments in different parts of this country have been reported on the value of cooking or steaming food for pigs. In these cooked or steamed barley meal, corn-meal, and shorts; whole corn, potatoes, and a mixture of peas, barley and rye have been compared with the same food uncooked (usually dry). In ten of these trials there has not only been no gain from cooking, but there has been a positive loss, i. e., the amount of food required to produce a pound of gain was larger when the food was cooked than when it was fed raw, and in some cases the difference has been considerable."

Was not Dr. Oswald right, then, when he declared: "For even the most approved modes of grinding, bolting, leavening, cooking, spicing, heating and freezing our food are, strictly speaking, abuses of our digestive organs." And not of our digestive organ only, but of the whole body. Cooking is the oldest and most widely used method of denaturing our foods.