“You’d have to eat 76 white potatoes to get the same amount of Vitamin E as in a single sweet potato. (Vitamin E is one of the antioxidants that protects cells and may help heart disease.) Although many foods contain small amounts of Vitamin E, a sweet potato provides about a half of your daily requirement, along with lots of Vitamin A. But even though sweets win the award for E and A, both kinds are good sources of complex carbohydrates, fiber and Vitamin C.”

(American Health Magazine – March 1994 – page 26)

The "sweet" part of the sweet potato is fascinating from a health perspective. Without a doubt, cooked sweet potatoes taste sweeter than cooked "white" potatoes. Usually when one food tastes sweeter than another, it's because it contains more sugar, which also gives it the potential to make our blood sugar less stable. With sweet versus regular potatoes, it's exactly the opposite. Sweet potatoes, despite their sweetness, appear to act almost like an "anti-diabetic" food in some respects, and do not appear to place our blood sugar at risk as much as their more common counterpart.

This "blood sugar friendly" character of sweet potato seems related to two aspects of its composition. First, sweet potatoes are about twice as high in dietary fiber as ordinary Russet Burbank white baking potatoes, and this doubled fiber slows down digestion and the release of sugar. Second, sweet potato has actually been examined in the lab for its specific "antidiabetic" effects. In an animal study, sweet potato has been shown to be comparable to a prescription drug in enhancing the effectiveness of insulin under certain circumstances.