Did you know cooked meat provides more energy (i.e. calories) to your body than raw meat. The reason why is that calories expended by your body in digesting the food are higher if the food is raw than if it’s cooked. 

And according to a 2010 study, the same principle also applies to whole versus processed foods.  The experiment fed 17 people different types of cheese sandwiches with equal calorie content — one with cheddar cheese and multigrain bread, and one with white bread and processed cheese. The less-processed sandwich used almost 50% more energy to digest. While the multigrain sandwich used almost 20% of the food’s calories in the digestion process, the processed sandwich used just 10.7%.

The bottom-line here is that most processed foods don’t require your body to work very hard to digest. And since fewer calories are used in the digestion process, that means your body will retain more of the calories.