China Travel Forum

[Jordan]

Sweet potato, with skin

Although sweet potatoes may be part of the Thanksgiving tradition, be sure to add these wonderful naturally sweet vegetables to your meals throughout the year; they are some of the most nutritious vegetables around. Sweet potatoes can be found everywhere in China year-round, however they are in season from October to January.

The sweet potato has yellow or orange flesh, and its thin skin may either be white, yellow, orange, red or purple. Sometimes this root vegetable will be shaped like a potato, being short and blocky with rounded ends, while other times it will be longer with tapered ends. There is often much confusion between sweet potatoes and yams; the moist-fleshed, orange-colored root vegetable that is often called a "yam" is actually a sweet potato.

Unique Proteins with Potent Antioxidant Effects
Recent research studies on sweet potato focus on two areas of unique health benefit. First are some unique root storage proteins in this food that have been observed to have significant antioxidant capacities. In one study, these proteins had about one-third the antioxidant activity of glutathione – one of the body's most impressive internally produced antioxidants. Although future studies are needed in this area, count on these root proteins to help explain sweet potatoes' healing properties.

An "Antidiabetic" Food

Second is the recent classification of sweet potato as an “antidiabetic” food. Sweet potato has been given this label because of some recent animal studies in which sweet potato helped stabilize blood sugar levels and lowered insulin resistance. (Insulin resistance is a problem caused when cells don't respond to the hormone insulin , which is supposed to act as a key and unlock the cell in order to allow sugar to pass from the blood into the cell). Some of its blood sugar regulatory properties may come from the fact that sweet potatoes are concentrated in carotenoids. Research has suggested that physiological levels, as well as dietary intake, of carotenoids may be inversely associated with insulin resistance and high blood sugar levels. Once again, more research is needed in this area, but the stage is set for sweet potato to show unique healing properties in the area of blood sugar control