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There may not be anything on the Thanksgiving buffet that I look forward to more than sweet potato casserole. Piled into scooped-out orange halves and topped with mini-marshmallows or doused in butter and topped with praline, I don’t care how they are prepared so long as there is a big heap of them on my plate.
Unlike many people, Thanksgiving is far from the only time of year I eat sweet potatoes. I bake them and top them with a little cheese or peach salsa for lunch, or slice them into thick fries seasoned with cayenne pepper and sugar. I dice them into korma; I top them with black bean chili. I guess you could say I’m a big fan.
Even my husband, once wary of my favorite orange root, ordered sweet potato chips with his hummus wrap at lunch yesterday. In fact, he was the one who got my wheels turning about today’s post, asking about the difference between sweet potatoes and what most people call the ingredient in their Thanksgiving casserole, yams. I honestly didn’t know.
With a little internet mining, here’s what I discovered: everything we Southerners call yams and everything we call sweet potatoes are all, in fact, sweet potatoes. Yams aren’t a culinary Santa Clause, though; they do exist. Just not often in these parts.
Yams are tubers (like white potatoes) that were first cultivated in parts of Africa and
What, then, are sweet potatoes? They’re root vegetable (like carrots) in the morning glory family. They were first cultivated in Central and South America and the West Indies though their botanical name, Ipomoca batata, comes from the Native Americans who were cultivating sweet potatoes in
While they share a name with the much more prevalent white potato, sweet potatoes run nutritional laps around the white varieties. A 4 ounce serving of cooked sweet potato supplies 2 grams of protein, 3.4 grams of fiber, 24.6 mg of vitamin C, 28 mg of calcium, 22.6 mcg of folic acid, 20 mg of magnesium, 348 mg of potassium, and 21822 I.U. of vitamin A, all in a medium-sized potato with about 100 calories! But wait! There’s more!
One medium sweet potato has nearly 40% of the RDA (recommended daily allowance) of vitamin E. This fabulous little vitamin works to prevent the oxidation of LDL (bad) cholesterol – meaning, it is thought to help prevent heart disease, stroke and maybe even some types of cancer. What makes sweet potatoes an extraordinary source is that vitamin E is a fat-soluble vitamin which is most often found in high fat foods like nuts and oils. In sweet potatoes, you get a whopping dose with virtually no fat. A spritz of oil for cooking, sprinkle of pecans or dollop of low-fat sour cream provides enough fat for your body to absorb the E.
Perhaps you’ve heard recent buzz about the glycemic index foods. In a nutshell, the glycemic index measures the effect of carbohydrate rich foods on blood glucose levels as compared to glucose or white bread. According to www.Diabetes.ca, “After you eat, your blood glucose level rises; the speed at which the food is able to increase your blood glucose level is called the ‘glycemic response.’ This glycemic response is influenced by many factors, including how much food you eat, how much the food is processed or even how the food is prepared (for example, pasta that is cooked al dente – or firm – has a slower glycemic response than pasta that is overcooked).”
Low glycemic index foods have been associated with assisting in the prevention and treatment of diabetes, higher HDL (good) cholesterol and a decreased risk in developing heart disease, colon cancer and breast cancer. You know what I’m getting at: on top of the pile of nutrients sweet potatoes provide, they do it in a low glycemic index package. Some recent studies have even shown sweet potatoes to stabilize blood sugar levels and lower insulin resistance in animals. (Side note: I am most often opposed to doing experiments on animals but I also won’t ignore available data.)
There is also some interesting new research coming from a joint Austrian/Italian study where researchers have been giving human subjects a sweet potato extract called Caiapo. Subject with type 2 diabetes who took the extract daily for 3 months saw enough of a drop in their blood sugar that some were able to reduce or even quit their blood sugar-lowering medications. Some also saw a slight reduction in their cholesterol and triglycerides.
I eat sweet potatoes because they taste great… but I’m never opposed to feeling virtuous!
Feedback from an Expert:
That expert being my dad, an MD of the family practitioner variety:
Sarah –
I’m about in the 5th
year as a participant in the Physician’s Health Study II. In
addition to completing periodic detailed questionnaires about my
life and health, I take pills. They are either placebos or
Vitamins or beta-carotenes.
The
first PHS began about 15 years ago and the results are still coming in:
What has been learned to this point is that Beta carotene and Vit E
have no demonstrable benefit for heart or cancer risk.. Even though
they are anti-oxidants and, in theory, should reduce certain disease
risk, there is no proof that this happens.
We
eat so badly in our country that it must have great bearing on our
health, but it is much more complex than our current understanding.
Dad
Ironically, today I finally got around to reading the latest edition of the Nutrition Action Healthletter (which has been sitting on my desk for a good week), the cover story of which is “Antioxidants: Still Hazy After All These Years”.
The bottom-line of the article is that studies including as many as 81,000 people over a decade found that not only do antioxidants not seem to do anything to prevent caner or heart disease, high doses of beta carotene (33,000 to 50,000 IU a day, about twice that found in a medium sweet potato) were shown to be metabolized into carcinogenic compounds in smokers – that is, smokers in the study has a slightly higher risk of lung cancer!
Now, before you throw away all the sweet potatoes you bought yesterday (along with your carrots, red peppers and other orange and red veggies), to quote my dad, “it’s much more complex than our current understanding.”
It seems that the genetic factors that determine how nutrients are metabolized in an individual are based on so many complex genetic combinations that there will be years of research to sort it all out. Meanwhile, it’s still true that people who eat lots of fruit and vegetables tend to be healthier. Maybe it’s because of other nutrients scientists have yet to discover. Or maybe, as Tuft’s University’s Alice Lichtenstein said, it’s because when you’re eating fruits and veggies, “you’re not eating lots of brownies, candy or fat-free ice cream.”
Don’t give up on sweet potatoes. They’re still a guilt-free sweet treat with tons going for them!
Well, folks, with our powers combined we have moved salmon up the ranks of the most commonly eaten seafood to third place, knocking fish sticks down to fourth, trailing only shrimp and tuna. With salmon’s heart healthy omega 3 fatty acids this is good news – mostly. As salmon has become a household staple, so too has the debate about the advantages and disadvantages of farm-raised and wild salmon which has left a lot of people wondering what the truth is behind the controversy. Of course, the big problem in sorting through all of the info is that it’s hard to know who to trust. The Environmental Working Group raised such a huge stink about how awful farmed salmon is that I was scared to even look at it while Capitol Research Center called the EWG “peddlers of fear”. Who’s right? More importantly, should we eat salmon and does it matter where it’s from?
Let’s start with what we know. Farmed salmon, just like any industrial-farmed animal, are subjected to some unnatural conditions, like overcrowding. Any space packed with living, breathing animals, fish or mammal, is a beautiful breeding ground for parasites and bacteria. So now they’re overcrowded and one is infected – in no time flat, they’re all going to be sick and the farmer is out all his seed money. Of course, the farmer could vaccinate the baby fish and keep them doused with antibiotics their entire lives to keep them “healthy”… in fact, they do. Those medicines are then passed on to the consumer at dinnertime – yum. Just like this isn’t a problem for free-range chickens who are allowed to wander the farm, the same is true for wild salmon – no antibiotics.
As those antibiotic-free wild salmon are swimming around the ocean, they’re eating smaller fish and pink krill. The krill is important to our discussion because it is from these shrimp-like crustaceans that salmon gets its tell-tale pink hue. Not so for farmed salmon who are most often fed fishmeal and fish oil, but nary a krill. But would you buy a gray piece of salmon? Not likely but that’s exactly the color farmed salmon would be were it not for the synthetic pigment they are often fed. The experts are still debating whether the pigment has any effect on the human consumers, to which I can only say, eeewww! I don’t eat red velvet cake for its bottle of food dye; why would I feel any better about dyed fish?
So maybe antibiotics and food dye aren’t too worrisome to you so long as you get your dose of omega-3s. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), farmed salmon is 20% higher in fat than wild, which might seem like a good thing since omega-3s are fats. The problem, though, is that in farmed salmon the excess fat is more often in the form of omega-6s. I touched on this in The Facts on Fat, but when it comes to the omega fats, what is important is ratio. The proper ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s is 1:1 but the typical western diet has a ratio closer to 15:1. Never have I seen a more clear cut case of too-much-of-a-good-thing; this kind of excess omega-6 consumption has been implicated in actually promoting cardiovascular disease, cancer and a whole host of inflammation-related disease.
I know what you’re waiting for, though – the heavy-hitter of the great salmon debate: PCBs. Polychlorinated
biphenyls were originally produced to be additives in industrial
lubricants, pesticides, plastic and much much more. In the 1970s,
the
The answers are still unfortunately vague. While
the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental
Protection Agency and the International Agency for Research on Cancer
have concluded that it's reasonable to think that PCBs are carcinogenic
in humans, they haven't taken the leap to declare it definitively. PCBs have been found in both wild and farmed salmon though sources vary on how much and if there are more in farmed. The most damning evidence I have seen was provided by Dr. Ronald Hites of
There is so much still unknown. Meanwhile, our best bet is to go by Dr. Hites’ suggestion of limiting farmed salmon to once a month.
A
few wild salmon buying tips: My grocery store sells pre-portioned,
shrink-wrapped frozen wild Alaskan salmon which I buy in bulk when
available – believe it or not, wild salmon is seasonal. Defrost
your salmon overnight in the fridge – just like any meats, you never
want to defrost on the counter – the inevitable result is that the
outside is warm enough to growing bacteria while center is still frozen
solid. Though I’m not the biggest fan of canned fish, canned salmon is
usually wild and is pretty good as a croquette or burger. However
you get your wild salmon, don’t give up on it – despite all the
controversy, not one bit of it debates that it’s an amazingly
heart-healthy food.
A few months ago, my father, a physician, asked for some healthy cooking lessons. We got together on a Sunday afternoon, armed with loads of fresh vegetables and the impending arrival of the rest of our family. We
talked about knife skills and quick tips, different cooking techniques
and which ingredients should be measured and which can be eyeballed. “Always always always measure your fats,” I said as he reached for the olive oil. To which he said, "I didn’t think you had to measure good fats.”
At the risk of sounding like I'm bagging on my dad, I found this
exchange interesting because he's a smart guy whose profession is
health and yet the info circulating about fats is so convoluted that
even he misunderstood. To me, this points to a much bigger
problem than one man's relationship with his bottle of "healthy" olive
oil.
What I see is another strike by the mysterious “good” fats, sneaky like the wolf in grandma’s nightie. Much as we tend to think that low-fat cookies can be eaten by the boxful, we hear the buzz about “good” and “bad” fats and assume that we could drink olive and canola oils and be no worse for the wear. Let’s get into the facts about fats, shall we?
First off, while I advocate a low-fat diet, a non-fat diet would be detrimental to your health. Vitamins A, D, E and K are fat-soluble meaning that they need to be carried in fats to be absorbed into our bodies. A little bit of fat in your salad, like a hand-full of nuts or few ounces of fish, will help you absorb more of the wonderful nutrients the vegetables have to offer. Also essential are linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid keep our brains and nervous systems working well; our bodies don’t make these but they are provided in some fats. But before you grab that can of baco-s, there’s more to the story.
Now to the “good” and “bad” fats. All fats are made of a combination of three fatty-acids: saturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated. The differences in fats comes from different proportions of the three. For example, canola oil is 6% saturated, 32% polyunsaturated and 62% monounsaturated while butter is 63% saturated, 3% polyunsaturated and 31% monounsaturated. What does all that mean?
For the average person, only 25% of our blood cholesterol comes from food while a whopping 75% of is made in our livers; one of the major contributing factors to how much cholesterol our livers make is our saturated fats intake. As a rule, saturated fats are solid at room temperature as with butter, shortening, coconut oil and animal fats (even when it’s still in the meat). As cholesterol levels go up, so too does our chance of heart disease – not so good. Trans-fats, the demons of the day, work the same way.
First batting for the “good” team are the polyunsaturated fats which are made up of two main groups: the omega-6 fatty acids and the omega-3s. You’ve probably heard the omega-3s as the main reason why you should eat, drink and dream salmon. Omega-3s reduce the risk of blood clots and inflammation (which recent research has been implicating as a contributing factor for everything from arthritis to the desire to wear those jeans that are faded at the crotch – why does anyone wear those?). Omega-6s actually lower blood cholesterol levels. Because the 6s are found in vegetable oils, we get more than enough of these but we’re still lacking on the 3s, so seriously, go buy some wild Alaskan salmon (why wild is the only way to go is the topic for a future post). Flaxseed oil and meal, canola oil, nuts and seeds are also good sources of omega-3s.
I have saved the best for last: the monounsaturated fats. These beauties lower LDL cholesterol (the bad cholesterol) and raise the HDL (the good cholesterol). The best of these is olive oil which is rich in antioxidants and contains anti-inflammatory properties – not to mention its lip-smacking yumminess properties.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: if the “good” fats are so darn good, why can’t you drink them as an afternoon refresher? Replacing
your saturated and trans fats with mono- and poly-unsaturated fats will
do wonders for your health but at 120 calories per tablespoon,
overindulging won’t do much for your waist. A
drizzle of olive oil on your salad or a teaspoon or two of canola oil
for sautéing will provide you with as much of these protective fats as
you need in a day.
How does all of this work out in the day-to-day kitchen
happenings? I use canola and olive oils most of the time - they
are the oils I keep by the stove. I use lemon-scented grapeseed
oil (which also contains omega-3s) for a delicate and simple flavor
when I roast veggies (425 degree oven, toss one pound trimmed or
chopped veggies with one tablespoon of oil and a little salt and roast,
turning frequently until crisp-tender, about 10 minutes for asparagus,
20 for broccoli, 30 for green beans and onions, and finish with freshly
ground pepper) which brings out their natural sweetness while
preserving most of the nutrients. I occasionally use peanut oil
for Asian dishes which I sometimes finish with toasted sesame
oil. Truly, though, I believe healthy eating is about making
better choices more often, not perfection, so I do have butter in my
fridge. I'll use a teaspoon to finish veggies or fish and if I'm
going to go to the trouble to make a decadent dessert, it's going to be
made with butter for that melt-in-your mouth quality no other
ingredient can imitate.
Ultimately, healthy eating is about knowledge, not sacrifice. Enjoy!
Well,
maybe I wouldn’t go that far but eggplant, thanks to my mom’s
brilliant, thick sliced, baked eggplant parmesan, has long been one of
my favorite veggies. Clearly, I’m not alone. From the
The
eggplant belongs to the family of nightshade plants that also include
the potato, tomato, pepper, deadly nightshade (also known as
belladonna), petunia, and tobacco. Many historians place the earliest eggplants in
When shopping, look for eggplant that are heavy for their size and feel dense – avoid soft or puffy vegetables which could be a sign of age. Some recipes call for salting eggplant pieces for a half hour or so before cooking; this absorbs the bitter liquid within the eggplant which tends to intensify with age, so salting young eggplant is rarely necessary (long cooking times, such as with stews, also rids the eggplant of bitterness so no need to salt in those cases either). Be sure to wash away the salt, though, and taste before adding additional salt to the dish you’re cooking. An added benefit to salting eggplant is that you end up with a more dense vegetable which then absorbs less fat in cooking.
A quick internet search will bring up a whole host of eggplant recipes but I do have a couple of new-to-me ideas to share:
1) After buying a couple of gorgeous eggplants at the Greensboro curb market last Saturday, I sautéed peeled, ¼-inch slices in just a spray of canola oil (I use a fill-your-own pump-by-hand oil sprayer) until they were soft and golden, about 8 – 10 minutes per side then used in place of lasagna noodles in my favorite light cheese lasagna
2) A man at the farmer’s market suggested grilling Japanese eggplant, the long skinny ones, until charred, then pulling off the skin and seasoning with a little soy sauce. I’ll post the results once I try that one but if you beat me to it, please let me know how it goes!
There is a world of culinary delights, literally, waiting for you in the versatile flesh of the eggplant. Enjoy!
I have a new favorite ridiculous food claim: General Mills and their “more whole grain” cereals like Lucky Charms and Count Chocula.
Next time you’re in the cereal isle, or the bread isle for that matter, take a second to pick up a product that claims whole grains and look at the ingredients list. A product can claim to be made with whole grains even if it’s mostly nutritionally-void refined flour with a touch of whole grains. Look for an ingredient list that begins with “whole wheat flour” and pass on the ones that start with “enriched wheat flour” which is just a fancy way of saying refined flour, like the bag of all-purpose you pick up for making sugar cookies.
Let’s decode the jargon. “100% whole grain” is truly that, no refined flour and your best bet for a healthy choice. Labels that say “made with whole grain” or “multigrain” could be made with a lot or a little whole grain, but there is no minimum requirement for that claim. “Whole” grain foods can have as little as 51% whole grain flours. “Good source of whole grain” may be as little as 8 grams of whole grains per serving while “excellent source of whole grain” may be as little as 16 grams per serving. Considering an average serving of cereal weighs 30 to 55 grams per serving, you could be stuck with as much as 85% refined flour per serving!
While you have that box of Count Chocula in your hand, take a look at where sugar lands in the ingredient list. Whole grains or no, you’re still holding a box of breakfast candy!
*Much of this information came from a great little magazine, the Nutrition Action Heathletter which is published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI is funded entirely by magazine subscribers and foundation grants; for the purpose of objectivity, they accept no government funding or advertising. You can find them at: http://www.cspinet.org/nah/.