Five Reasons to Eat More Sweet Potatoes

Five Reasons to Eat More Sweet Potatoes: From cognitive protection to immune support here are five compelling reasons to incorporate sweet potatoes into your everyday diet:

1. Rich Nutrition Profile
One cup of cubed sweet potatoes provides the following:[ii]

Water -- 103 grams (g)

Energy -- 114 kilocalories (kcal)

Protein -- 2.09 g

Carbohydrate -- 26.9 g

Fiber -- 3.99 g

Sugar -- 5.56 g

Calcium -- 39.9 milligrams (mg)

Iron -- 0.811 mg

Potassium -- 448 mg

Phosphorus -- 62.5 mg

Sodium -- 73.2 mg

Vitamin C -- 3.19 mg

The orange and purple varieties are rich in antioxidants such as beta-carotene, chlorogenic acid and vitamin C.[iii],[iv] There's an abundance of colors of sweet potatoes worldwide, including white, yellow, orange and purple. In the American market, however, sweet potato typically has a deep-orange flesh color, a skin color of light to medium rose, copper or red, a sweet flavor and moist texture.[v]

2. Enhanced Memory and Cognitive Health
A 2013 study found that a purple sweet potato extract rich in caffeoylquinic acids led to a neuroprotective effect on the brain of animal models, potentially helping improve spatial learning and memory.[vi]

Purple sweet potato color comes from a class of naturally occurring anthocyanins that have strong antioxidant and neuroprotective activity.[vii] In animal subjects, it showed great promise in improving cognitive function. In further animal studies, purple sweet potatoes were shown to protect the brain by reducing inflammation.[viii]

3. Immune Support
Sweet potatoes with orange flesh are among the best natural sources of beta-carotene, which is converted to vitamin A in the body.[ix]

Vitamin A is critical to a healthy immune system. "It is not surprising that vitamin A deficiency is associated with impaired intestinal immune responses and increased mortality associated with gastrointestinal and respiratory infections," researchers wrote in Nature Reviews Immunology.[x]

Purple sweet potatoes are also of particular interest in immune support, with polysaccharides including water-soluble polysaccharide, dilute alkali-soluble polysaccharide and concentrated alkali-soluble polysaccharide (CASP) evaluated for immune-enhancing effects.[xi]

All three polysaccharides evaluated were found to stimulate immune responses of macrophages as well as positively regulate the subjects' adaptive immunity by enhancing immunoglobulin production. Separate research also indicates that purple sweet potato extract may address immune dysfunction by mobilizing antioxidant defenses.[xii]

4. Anticancer Potential
Anthocyanins, a group of antioxidants found in sweet potatoes, have been widely evaluated for their anticancer properties, particularly against colorectal, colon, bladder, breast and gastric cancers.[xiii],[xiv],[xv],[xvi]

Against colorectal cancer, sweet potatoes may induce cell-cycle arrest, antiproliferative and apoptotic, or cell death, mechanisms. In bladder cancer, sweet potato anthocyanins had an antitumor effect. Taiwanese purple-fleshed sweet potatoes, too, were found to have anticancer activities through their ability to inhibit the growth of cancer cell lines such as breast cancer, gastric cancer and colon adenocarcinoma.

Even sweet potato peel, usually discarded as waste, contains constituents that may help prevent various types of cancer from developing.[xvii]

5. Diabetes Control and Prevention
Anthocyanins can also serve as a functional food for diabetes. Antioxidants in general have been found to reduce oxidative stress due to hyperglycemia, and anthocyanins from purple sweet potatoes positively affected liver and renal activity as well as blood pressure in diabetic animal models.[xviii]

This class of antioxidants, found in purple sweet potato, also had beneficial effects on diabetes-induced endothelial dysfunction in animal subjects.[xix] You can learn more about sweet potatoes and their health benefits through studies on the GreenMedInfo.com database.

How to Clean Your Arteries With One Simple Fruit

How to Clean Your Arteries With One Simple Fruit: The future of cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment will not be found in your medicine cabinet, rather in your kitchen cupboard or in your back yard growing on a tree...

How can something as benign and commonplace as a fruit extract reverse so many aspects of coronary artery disease, simultaneously, as evidenced by the study above? The answer may lie in the fact that our ancestors co-evolved with certain foods (fruits in particular) for so long that a lack of adequate quantities of these foods may directly result in deteriorating organ function. Indeed, two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling argued that vitamin C deficiency is a fundamental cause of cardiovascular disease, owing to the fact that our hominid primate ancestors once had year-round access to fruits, and as a result lost the ability to synthesize it.

There's another obvious clue as to how pomegranate may work its artery opening magic. Anyone who has ever tasted pomegranate, or consumed the juice, knows it has a remarkable astringency, giving your mouth and gums that dry, puckering mouth feel. This cleansing sensation is technically caused, as with all astringents, by shrinking and disinfecting your mucous membranes. Anyone who drinks pomegranate juice, or is lucky enough to eat one fresh, can understand why it is so effective at cleansing the circulatory system. Nature certainly planted enough poetic visual clues there for us: its juice looks like blood, and it does resemble a multi-chambered heart, at least when you consider its appearance in comparison to most other fruits.

Published in Clinical Nutrition in 2004 and titled, "Pomegranate juice consumption for 3 years by patients with carotid artery stenosis reduces common carotid intima-media thickness, blood pressure and LDL oxidation," Israeli researchers discovered pomegranate, administered in juice form over the course of a year, reversed plaque accumulation in the carotid arteries of patients with severe, though symptomless, carotid artery stenosis (defined as 70--90% blockage in the internal carotid arteries).

The study consisted of nineteen patients, 5 women and 14 men, aged 65-75, non-smokers. They were randomized to receive either pomegranate juice or placebo. Ten patients were in the pomegranate juice treatment group and 9 patients that did not consume pomegranate juice were in the control group. Both groups were matched with similar blood lipid and glucose concentrations, blood pressure, and with similar medication regimens which consisted of blood-pressure lowering (e.g. ACE inhibitors, β-blockers, or calcium channel blockers) and lipid lowering drugs (e.g. statins).

The ten patients in the treatment group group received 8.11 ounces (240 ml) of pomegranate juice per day, for a period of 1 year, and five out of them agreed to continue for up to 3 years.

You can only imagine what would happen if a pharmaceutical drug was shown to reverse plaque build up in the carotid arteries by 13% in just 3 months! This drug would be lauded the life-saving miracle drug, and not only would be promoted and sold successfully as a multibillion dollar blockbuster, but discussion would inevitably follow as to why it should be mandated.

While these results are impressive, if not altogether groundbreaking for the field of cardiology, they may be even better than revealed in the stated therapeutic outcomes above. When one factors in that the carotid artery stenosis increased 9% within 1 year in the control group, the pomegranate intervention group may have seen even better results than indicated by the measured regression in intima media thickness alone. That is, if we assume that the pomegranate group had received no treatment, the thickening of their carotid arteries would have continued to progress like the control group at a rate of 9% a year, i.e. 18% within 2 years, 27% within 3 years. This could be interpreted to mean that after 3 years of pomegranate treatment, for instance, the thickening of the arteries would have been reduced over 60% beyond what would have occurred had the natural progression of the disease been allowed to continue unabated.