this study looks better at first - it's comparing chopped & raw to pureed & heated. you can maybe argue that chopped v pureed is somewhat unfair, and a better comparison (if you're interested in the effects of heating, specifically) would be to raw, juiced carrots. i guess that's my next google search - what i want to compare to isolate what heating does to bioavailability is either chopped & heated v chopped & raw or pureed & heated v juiced & raw. but, let's take this on as it is, first.

this is a crazy link, and it may accidentally be backdooring something:

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/49265391/s00394-003-0430-620161001-13513-16gb3qg.pdf?1475325836=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3Dcarotene_bioavailability_fromdifferently.pdf&Expires=1602226312&Signature=OpHSf8uteHB91G5r-xU6mCFxanKvKyJB~AQKlwySoKDJPPCZFSlw7CzeYM5XO53bs71EV6tfmwxpJLTrkvByxw~ngBZvYlY-oKRnNaJLM5OS2ts6w4r2iLANjgphuQyZsWGMLl-xvclTjYvRUgR3sFKFhkZMWB3kuHw3ISeD4RjNl0bspiT2mGo0LlMyUnV1DrwRV9MvP2FqCEtIcKCk-uVJ14olCT~G-VeNjp6Whq1fTGkKXygKWSkCjX1aLMyV~Trwu3nYQZlKl6RIJx3wXIDVp8PD-~v5~w-Sg0aEQUYXL7WWBTXbZQAOT13d~ZT0fdTmATXAuv3EFgMCh4Wv2g__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

i just pulled it out of a google search, don't look at me.

so, they're arguing that the cooked & pureed has about 20% higher availability than the chopped & raw. qed, right?

but, the trick is that they're standardizing them both at 15 mg, and that doesn't represent the reality that cooking the carrots will decrease the presence of beta-carotene in the sample, in the first place. so, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

rather, if i were to combine the two studies, and start with x g of carrot and decide what the best thing to do with it is, i'd come up with the following deductions:

1) if you eat them raw & chopped, you get about 41% of the y μg in the x mg of carrot. so, that's 0.41y.

2) if you puree them (that is steam them, then blend them) before you eat them, you get 65% of the pureed carrot, which is only 40% of the raw carrot. so, you'd start by taking 0.40y and then take .65 of that. in total, that's .26y.

you'd consequently get more out of the 100 g of carrot by eating it raw, even if you can absorb more of the puree, if you prepare a higher amount of it. and, how much would you need for it to balance out?

.4*.65z>.41 <---> z > .41/(.26) <------> z > 1.57692307692.

which is, strangely, about 1 + euler's constant. weird.

so, you'd need to puree 160 g of carrots to get to the same starting point that you had with 100 g of carrots - and, then, yeah, you'll absorb more of the puree. 

but, that's not exactly a useful result...

gram for gram, you're better off with it raw - even when you're giving the puree a headstart by comparing chopped rather than juiced.