WHY THE CALORIE is broken.

Wrangham and his colleagues have since shown that cooking unlaces microscopic structures that bind energy in foods, reducing the work our gut would otherwise have to do. It effectively outsources digestion to ovens and frying pans.

Wrangham found that mice fed raw peanuts, for instance, lost significantly more weight than mice fed the equivalent amount of roasted peanut butter. The same effect holds true for meat: there are many more usable calories in a burger than in steak tartare.

Different cooking methods matter, too. In 2015, Sri Lankan scientists discovered that they could more than halve the available calories in rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice in the refrigerator.

Wrangham’s findings have significant consequences for dieters.

If Nash likes his porterhouse steak bloody, for example, he will likely be consuming several hundred calories less than if he has it well-done.

Yet the FDA’s methods for creating a nutrition label do not for the most part account for the differences between raw and cooked food, or pureed versus whole, let alone the structure of plant versus animal cells. A steak is a steak, as far as the FDA is concerned.

Industrial food processing, which subjects foods to extremely high temperatures and pressures, might be freeing up even more calories.

But it all seems so precise and objective.