What is the impact of cooked vs. raw food on the gut? "Because cooking involves exposing food to heat, it tends to change the various foods' physical and chemical properties. But do these alterations change the delicate microbial environment of the gut? That is the question that researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, Harvard University, in Cambridge, MA, and other institutions recently set out to answer. "Our lab and others have studied how different kinds of diet, such as vegetarian versus meat-based diets, impact the microbiome," says the senior author of the new study, Peter Turnbaugh, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco.