When people mention sweet potatoes, they think of the time when there was limited supply of rice. At that time, people braised several sweet potatoes to satisfy their hunger. And thus, they take it as crops for granted. However, sweet potato is out-and-out vegetable. 

As a matter of fact, sweet potato was named as the champion of vegetables by a health organization. It is also called batata, Chinese potato. It seems very hard but actually contains over 70% water. It is rich in vitamin C. Besides, it contains many minerals, especially the calcium. From the above, we can see it has obvious characteristics of vegetables. And therefore, it is classified as a vegetable. In addition, it belongs to rhizoma food and generally speaking, rhizoma food is vegetable.

From the perspective of Chinese medicine, sweet potato is also classified as a vegetable. For a long time, it has been taken as staple food. Actually in Chinese Herb Manual (Ben Cao Gang Mu), sweet potato was categorized into vegetables. It has much health promotion effectiveness. For example, it can make people energetic and strong. Besides, it helps digestion as it has rich crude fiber. What’s more, it does good to the kidney. People can take it as daily food, eating every day with the staple food.

Since sweet potato is a vegetable, why so many people took it as staple food before? And people who ate sweet potatoes every day and did a lot of physical labor seemed stronger than us who eat rice now. Then can it be staple food?

Though sweet potato is classified as a vegetable, it can be staple food from the perspective of diet structure. It can even replace rice partly to improve the diet structure. Compared with rice, it has effectiveness of health promotion. It is rich in starch, dietary fiber, carotene, vitamin A, B, C, E, and linoleic acid and over 10 kinds of trace elements, such as potassium, iron, copper, selenium and calcium. Because of its high nutritional value, it is called the most nutrition-balanced health food by nutritionists. Unfortunately, most people don’t dare to eat them because they think eating them makes people fat. On the contrary, eating sweet potatoes can let people achieve the goal of losing weight, make them strong and handsome and prevent sub-health problems.