Not too long ago, a scientist studying nutrition was puzzled, because he wanted to know the nutritional difference between raw and cooked food, and couldn’t find any research about it.
Then he discovered that when calories of food were determined with an elaborate device called a calorimeter, which determines calories by incinerating food, no distinction was made between raw and cooked food.
He knew that digestion can only get a fraction of the nutrition from raw food compared to cooked food, so there should be a huge difference in “available calories”.
To check this out, he studied people who were on a raw food only diet, and discovered that even if they ate considerably more raw food calories, almost every one had at least some form of malnutrition.
The implications of this are that the calorie tables put on food are wildly inaccurate, and need significant adjustment. Proteins, fats, carbohydrates and their subset sugars, as well as vitamins and minerals, are all very different from what they are alleged to be.
However, it is not easy to tell how much nutrition is obtained from food, and how high up in the digestive tract. But until this is done, nutritional labels on food are wrong.
Your statement is interesting.
Many cat breeders have found their breeding stock stays healthier when fed a raw food diet. Evidently potency drops when felines are fed cooked food as opposed to raw. And forget about feeding kibble! The dry food is only for the convenience of pet owners, or just for an occasional meal.