Yesterday I was told by a fellow diabetic that sweet potato supposedly has been found to reduce blood sugar in diabetics. It seems improbably considering that 1 cup of sweet potato contains 29g of carbs. However, I kept searching for results and found the following articles of interest:
Are Sweet Potatoes Good for Diabetics?Being diagnosed with diabetes often means eliminating or limiting many of your favorite foods. Foods with a high carbohydrate content, such as many desserts, large amounts of pasta, breads, sugary breakfast cereals and soft drinks, can make your blood sugar levels skyrocket within a few minutes after eating. Over time, this can damage your small blood vessels and lead to heart diseases, blindness, kidney diseases, stroke and even amputations. Diabetics can include a variety of carbohydrates that are digested more slowly, such as the ones found in non-starchy vegetables, fresh fruits, nuts and sweet potatoes to stay healthier with their condition.
Glycemic Index
White potatoes, whether you have them mashed, baked, as french fries or potato chips, have a high glycemic index, which means that their carbohydrates are quickly turned into sugar, which elevates your blood sugar levels after your meal. The glycemic index of sweet potatoes is a lot lower, which is better for diabetes control, according to a 2002 article in the "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition." Eating sweet potatoes in moderate amounts will help you keep your blood sugar levels in the healthy range even if you have diabetes.
Carbohydrate Content
A medium sweet potato contains 26 grams of carbohydrates, of which 3.8 grams are dietary fiber, while a cup of mashed sweet potatoes has 58 grams of carbohydrates and 8.2 grams of fiber. Fiber, which is part of the total carbohydrate content, does not elevate blood sugar levels and can be subtracted from the total grams of carbohydrates to have a better idea of the blood sugar-rising potential of a food. In the case of a baked sweet potatoes, subtract the 3.8 grams of fiber from the 26 grams of carbohydrates to determine that they contain only 22.2 grams of available carbs per serving. With mashed, sweet potatoes, subtracting the 8.2 grams of fiber from the 58 grams of carbs gives you a total of 49.8 grams of available carbs per cup. If you are carb counting to control your diabetes, use available carbs to be more accurate.
Serving Size
The American Diabetes Association recommends that you consume no more than 45 to 60 grams of carbs per meal, which means that you can easily include sweet potatoes as part of your diabetic meal plan. For example, you could have a medium sweet potato, providing 22.2 grams of available carbs along with other foods that are free of carbohydrates like chicken or salmon, broccoli and butter. Add a serving of plain yogurt and berries to get a total of up to 45 to 60 grams for your meal.
I have controlled my diabetes by lowering my daily intake of carbohydrates to 20gm or less. However, the following link shows that sweet potato has high anthocyanin content, so it can help with diabetes if it is due to an underlying inflammatory condition.
What's New and Beneficial about Sweet Potatoes Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes may be one of nature's unsurpassed sources of beta-carotene. Several recent studies have shown the superior ability of sweet potatoes to raise our blood levels of vitamin A. This benefit may be particularly true for children. In several studies from Africa, sweet potatoes were found to contain between 100-1,600 micrograms (RAE) of vitamin A in every 3.5 ounces—enough, on average, to meet 35% of all vitamin A needs, and in many cases enough to meet over 90% of vitamin A needs (from this single food alone).
Sweet potatoes are not always orange-fleshed on the inside but can also be a spectacular purple color. Sometimes it's impossible to tell from the skin of sweet potato just how rich in purple tones its inside will be. That's because scientists have now identified the exact genes in sweet potatoes (IbMYB1 and IbMYB2) that get activated to produce the purple anthocyanin pigments responsible for the rich purple tones of the flesh. The purple-fleshed sweet potato anthocyanins—primarily peonidins and cyanidins—have important antioxidant properties and anti-inflammatory properties. Particularly when passing through our digestive tract, they may be able to lower the potential health risk posed by heavy metals and oxygen radicals. For more details on purple-fleshed and orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, please see our Description section below.
It can be helpful to include some fat in your sweet potato-containing meals if you want to enjoy the full beta-carotene benefits of this root vegetable. Recent research has shown that a minimum of 3-5 grams of fat per meal significantly increases our uptake of beta-carotene from sweet potatoes. Of course, this minimal amount of fat can be very easy to include. In our Healthy Mashed Sweet Potatoes recipe, for example, we include 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, and with just this one tablespoon, each of our 4 servings for this delicious recipe provides 3.5 grams of fat.
Some nutritional benefits from sweet potatoes simply may be easier to achieve if you use steaming or boiling as your cooking method. Recent studies show excellent preservation of sweet potato anthocyanins with steaming, and several studies comparing boiling to roasting have shown better blood sugar effects (including the achievement of a lower glycemic index, or GI value) with boiling. The impact of steaming is particularly interesting, since only two minutes of steaming have been show to deactivate peroxidase enzymes that might otherwise be able to break down anthocyanins found in the sweet potato. In fact, with these peroxidase enzymes deactivated, natural anthocyanin extracts from sweet potato used for food coloring may be even more stable than synthetic food colorings. This benefit isn't limited to the food's appearance since the anthocyanins have great health benefits as antioxidants and anti-inflammatory nutrients.
Most dry beans and tubers have their own unique storage proteins. Soybeans have glycinins, potatoes have patatins, yams have dioscorins, and corn has zeins. While researchers have long been aware of sporamins—storage proteins in sweet potato—only recently has research shown some of their unique antioxidant properties. The potential health benefits of the sweet potato sporamins in helping prevent oxidative damage to our cells should not be surprising since sweet potatoes produce sporamins whenever subjected to physical damage to help promote healing.
Conclusions:
While sweet potato offers some health benefits, it nonetheless has too much carbohydrate for me to consider consuming them at this time; however, after more time with controlled blood sugar I might consider experimenting with consuming them to see how my blood sugar responds to their consumption.
Other links here on the topic of sweet potato:
low-carbohydrate vitamin C sourcesSam's health blogAnthocyanin, a natural anti-inflammatory
