Can eating sweet potatoes help you lose weight? Low GI food does not mean you won’t get fat

Sweet potato, a food that is "famous in Shanghai and famous in Xiagang", is the most popular food sold from northern to southern Taiwan; it is the most common ingredient in weight loss rankings; it is also one of the most popular health foods; and if you search for the word "sweet potato" on Google, you will find a lot of strings connected with "weight loss", "detoxification", etc. What is the charm of sweet potatoes? Is its nutritional value really that high? Can eating sweet potatoes really help you lose weight? Now let’s discuss this most popular food - sweet potato!

[Decoding] How much do you know about the nutritional value of sweet potatoes?

How nutritious is sweet potato? Why is it often associated with words like health, wellness and weight loss? To understand this, let’s first take a look at the nutritional value of sweet potatoes! According to the Department of Health, we can find that every 100 grams of sweet potato contains the following nutrients:

From a basic nutrient perspective, the biggest highlight of sweet potatoes is fiber! 2.4 grams per 100 grams

Fiber is very good among starchy foods. Eating a 200-gram sweet potato can provide 4.8 grams of fiber, which is about 1/6 of the daily recommended fiber intake.

From a vitamin perspective, sweet potatoes are an excellent source of vitamin A! It contains 1520RE of vitamin A per 100 grams, which is 18 times the amount of tomatoes. It is a good food choice for those who want to supplement vitamin A. Although it contains 13 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams, vitamin C is soluble in water and is very unstable to light and heat (temperature). Sweet potatoes must be cooked before they can be eaten, so sweet potatoes are not a good choice of vitamin C food.

From a mineral perspective, sweet potatoes are a good source of potassium! Every 100 grams contains 290 mg of potassium. Generally, one sweet potato weighs about 200 to 300 grams, so eating one sweet potato can provide 600 to 700 grams of potassium. Therefore, it can be said to be a very good source of potassium. People who want to supplement potassium can eat more sweet potatoes, but those who need to limit potassium should also pay attention to its intake.

To sum up, from a nutritional point of view, sweet potato is a non-refined starch food, rich in fiber, vitamin A and potassium. Compared with the starchy foods we usually eat in our daily life (rice, noodles, bread, etc.), sweet potato can be said to be a very nutritious and healthy starchy food!

[Decoding] Can eating sweet potatoes help you lose weight?

Since we are talking about weight loss, let’s first take a look at whether sweet potatoes are high in calories. 124 calories per 100 grams, what does this mean? If we switch to looking at it in terms of edible amounts, let me ask you a general question first: How big a sweet potato would you choose or how much would you eat? Taking the most popular baked sweet potato now as an example, a smaller one, about half the size of a palm (see the picture below), probably has more than 300 calories, which is higher than the calories in a bowl of rice.

The point is, eating a sweet potato like this will not make you full. The calories in eating two sweet potatoes are comparable to a bento or a meal. So from a calorie perspective, you can't lose weight by eating sweet potatoes. You will just feel wronged (it's roasted, and you only eat such a small piece, how can you not lose weight), and you may even gain weight because of it! Based on a normal 1,200-calorie calorie-controlled weight loss diet, that’s only enough to eat four sweet potatoes!

Q: But I heard that sweet potatoes have a very low glycemic index. Eating low-GI foods won’t make you fat, right?

A: Wrong. Low GI foods do not mean you won’t gain weight.

The glycemic index (GI) of sweet potatoes is about 55. The GI value is used to detect whether the food will cause a big fluctuation in blood sugar after entering the body. If a food causes blood sugar to rise rapidly, it will prompt the body to secrete more insulin to carry the excess sugar to the cells for storage. Therefore, there is a saying that the higher the GI value of a food, the easier it is to stimulate insulin, convert calories into fat and make you fat; the lower the GI value, the less likely you are to gain weight.

But in fact, whether you will gain weight or not is related to the amount of calories, and has no absolute relationship with the GI value. For example, the GI value of fat and meat is very low (because these foods are low in sugar, blood sugar will not rise quickly after eating, so the GI value is very low), but you will still gain weight after eating them; and if you eat too much starchy food with a low GI value, you will also gain weight. If we have to say that low GI foods help with weight loss, the most we can say is that they are less likely to cause blood sugar fluctuations and therefore less likely to stimulate appetite.

Q: So, can you eat sweet potatoes to lose weight?

A: Of course.

As we mentioned at the beginning, sweet potato is a starchy food with high nutritional value, low GI value, and rich in fiber. It is very suitable for inclusion in a weight loss diet, replacing the original staple foods such as rice, bread, and toast that have lower nutritional value. However, it is not advisable to eat sweet potatoes as a main meal in order to lose weight (because eating one will not make you full, and eating two will be too high in calories), or to eat sweet potatoes as a snack because you have heard that eating sweet potatoes can help you lose weight; or to only eat sweet potatoes in order to lose weight. Simply put, "Please look at sweet potatoes from the right perspective and don't make them into a myth!"

Nutritionist Stella's Weight Loss & Nutrition Blog