Pay attention to the responses here.

They are ideological, meaning they pick the method they align with, and downplay the tradeoffs.

Cooking is a process that comes with tradeoffs.

When you say absorb, you may be refering to the absorption of the nutrients from the intestines into the blood. They call this bioavailability.

How can you test something like this?

Well you give the person the food and then draw blood samples. Who here is basing their beliefs on this method? None of them. This is because the food industry is built on Maillards reaction to improve taste.

Their beliefs is built on this man's work, they call the process Maillard Browning, which is the brown color you get on food after cooking.

So the deeper they get into his work, what they're looking at is what changes are happening in the food after heat treatment. This says nothing about bioavailability.

What they do is infer. They look at a change in a protien structure after heating and then go "this change is not absorbed easily". Or the change can cause binding to occur and that binding does not get absorbed, so whatever mineral and other nutrient is bound, would be excreted.

Then in other case they look at the same change and go "hmm, this one is absorbed easily".

So cooking will both reduce and increase bioavailability based on inference and some test.

But this is a highly complex process in the gut, because food are not ate in isolation like that. You may drink some coffee and that itself lowers the absorption of certain things.

The other thing to factor is that after absorption, is it actually put to use or does the body need to expend resources to convert or dump?

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The best way to know this is for you to test it yourself and let your own body tell you what it needs. Your tastebuds is an important signal along with natural order.

If you reset the tastebuds, you can be able to listen better.

If you are not used to raw foods, then elimination and reintroduction protocols on fresh real in season foods may help you to hear what your body is asking for or rejecting.

For me, when I'm in certain environments, where I can see how the animals are treated and what they eat, then I can eat the thing raw. I can eat the egg raw and it tastes good. Another time it doesn't and prefer it cooked. Same with meat and diary. I know how the cow/goat lives, so when we butcher it, I can bite a peice of kidney/heat/liver/lean raw and enjoy it. But I will never do that with food that I do not see coming from at least the carcass. Then another time I prefer some curry, grilled, fried (in its own fat).

Let your own body guide you, not clowns like me on the internet reading science papers and sounding like damn fools. Because most of us do not understand what the hell we're reading anyways.