'Healthiest food on your table' keeps blood sugar steady and can even reduce cancer risk

Eating a healthy diet is essential for controlling blood sugar levels and can even help reduce the risk of deadly diseases like cancer.

The UK has many delicious seasonal fruits and vegetables, including potatoes, that can be incorporated into any meal or snack, but one kind stands out.

Sweet potatoes are in season from October to March and are a staple for many Britons during the cold months. More so for those in the US who regard sweet potatoes as a mainstay of their Thanksgiving dinner, these orange-toned spuds have been hailed as “one of the healthiest foods on your table”, claims the New York Times.

It’s not just because they hold the title of a seasonal root vegetable. Naturally sweet and full of nourishing nutrients, sweet potatoes - not to be confused with yams - are a great source of electrolytes, including potassium.

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This electrolyte is sweated out when you exercise, so it’s essential to replenish it often. Potassium helps keep your nerves firing, your heart beating, and your muscles contracting.

One medium sweet potato contains around 350mg of potassium—about 12 percent of the recommended daily amount for an average adult and more than six times what you get in a 12-ounce bottle of Gatorade.

In addition to contributing to healthy blood pressure by balancing sodium levels, sweet potatoes have a low glycemic index, so they are digested slowly, gradually increasing blood sugar. Eat To Beat Cancer: The Universal Health Atlas reported that an oral extract of the white sweet potato decreased fasting blood glucose by 11 percent in human subjects with Type 2 diabetes.

It may be hard to believe considering their sweet flavour, but blood sugar benefits from these potatoes because they contain naturally occurring sugars, around nine grams per medium sweet potato. Dave Bridges, a biochemist and associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan, noted: “For some context, that’s about a quarter of what you would find in a regular soda,” Dr. Bridges said.”

Consuming that amount of sugar from a single vegetable seems unhealthy. Still, the additional nutrition of sweet potatoes trumps that of a regular fizzy drink (which contains 36g of sugar on average). Unlike sugary beverages, sweet potatoes are relatively high in dietary fibre (about four grams per potato.

Fibre requires some work for the body to digest, which slows down the breakdown of sugar. Couple this with their low glycemic index, and sweet potatoes are somewhat of a superfood for controlling blood sugar levels - the same can’t be said for other sugary foods.

The benefits of eating sweet potatoes don’t stop there. They’re also incredibly rich in vitamins and minerals, in fact, one medium sweet potato contains more than 100 percent of the recommended daily dose of vitamin A.

This vitamin is mostly present in beta-carotene, which gives the vegetable its vibrant orange colour. It is essential to support healthy vision, growth, cell division, reproduction, and immunity.

As for vitamin C, eating one sweet spud will help you boost your daily vitamin C intake by 20 percent more than the suggested amount. Both vitamins are powerful antioxidants that neutralise free radicals — unstable oxygen molecules that can damage cells and DNA, increasing the risk of cancer and other diseases.

It should be noted that the evidence is inconclusive for vitamin C being used as a cure for cancer, as established by Cancer Research. However, they agree that “eating a healthy diet can lower your risk of cancer,” including vitamin-rich vegetables like sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes aren’t just for Thanksgiving - or winter. Adding them to your weekly meals is easy in any instance where you’d use white potatoes. Bake them until soft and fluffy, like a jacket potato or cut them into rectangular cubes and air fry them for homemade chips. Alternatively, mash them up until creamy or puree to make the filling for a sweet pie.