Does grilling change cheese?
Fats don’t just spontaneously appear out of nowhere. While it’s true that cooking can alter the chemical structure of foods, it’s typically in less fundamental ways, like denaturing proteins. Converting other molecules into fatty acids is likely to be a multi step process that even your body only accomplishes with the help of a host of enzymes and much expenditure of energy. That frying pan doesn’t have much of a chance. So yes, your girlfriend doesn’t appear to know what she’s talking about. The first two posters make good points, because grilled cheese requires adding butter to the outside of the sandwich. This means that when you look up the nutrition facts for a cheese sandwich vs. grilled cheese sandwich, the fat content will likely be higher in the latter.
cheese somehow gains more fat when it is heated Cheese has whatever fat is in it when it is packaged. Heat, if anything, breaks down fats — this is why you keep cheese and butter in the fridge, so that they don’t go rancid as quickly — but I doubt there’s enough heat in melting cheese to do this to any significant degree. The idea of heat is to release aromatics — warm cheese is more fragrant and tastes better than cold cheese. Perhaps the better question is: Does melted cheese get digested differently, so that your body metabolizes more of the nutritional content of the cheese (“absorbs more fat”)? Warm, melted cheese might be chemically digested more efficiently than unmelted cheese, as digestion enzymes work better at body temperatures. Cold, unmelted cheese might need to be warmed up — but chewed up bits of unmelted cheese sitting in your stomach will probably warm up fast enough that there’s no significant difference in en
There is nothing about heating up cheese that makes more or less fat appear. The fat in cheese does tend to liquefy and separate out when heated. That’s one of the reasons why processed cheese was invented: to prevent this tendency. So yes, speaking literally, oil does appear when the cheese is heated. But I don’t see why it would be worse for you in liquid form, any more than melted butter is worse for you than solid.
