There’s a New Superfood That’s Probably Already in Your Pantry

We make sweet potatoes all the time in my house — they’re a staple, a few times a week. The easiest way is to just dice them up and roast them: throw them on a sheet pan, put a little foil down so there’s nothing to clean, a little olive oil, salt, pepper, maybe a bit of thyme or a shake of paprika. After about thirty, thirty-five minutes at 425°F, you’ve got them crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and they’re just perfect. So I’ll admit I raised an eyebrow when the humble sweet potato — something already sitting in most pantries — started getting called a superfood. But according to a wave of recent nutrition research, the title upgrade might actually be earned.

Sweet potatoes — long underestimated as just a holiday side dish — are quietly becoming one of the most studied vegetables in nutritional science, with a steady stream of recent peer-reviewed reviews cataloguing the bioactive compounds packed into Ipomoea batatas, from beta-carotene to anthocyanins. Registered dietitians put it more plainly. “Sweet potatoes can curb cravings and help you feel fuller longer,” says Natalie Crtalic-Lowther, RD, LD, a registered dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic. “It’s a versatile root veggie you can use in all kinds of meals.”

Here’s everything you need to know about why sweet potatoes earned the label — and how to actually use that to your advantage.

What Actually Qualifies as a Superfood?

My own take: “superfood” is a combination of something real and a marketing term. Since it’s not an actual FDA-approved designation, it’s more of a cultural and social-media label. But it’s a great way to rethink the power of food — it’s genuinely helpful to think about which foods pack in more nutrients, vitamins, and minerals than others typically do. When the goal is being efficient about cramming in as much healthy stuff as possible, “superfood” is a fun, useful category to think in. But there isn’t a certain threshold that a food hits to be deemed a superfood.

So here’s the practical version. “Superfood” isn’t a regulated term — it’s not an FDA designation or a scientific classification. What it means in practice: A superfood is a whole food with an unusually high concentration of nutrients relative to its calorie count, documented benefits across multiple body systems, and a strong evidence base from peer-reviewed research. By those criteria, sweet potatoes clear the bar easily.

One medium baked sweet potato (about 114g) delivers the following without any added fat or sodium:

What’s Actually in a Sweet Potato

The Beta-Carotene Story Is Bigger Than You Think

“Sweet potatoes have so much vitamin A that they often exceed how much you need in a single day,” says Crtalic-Lowther. One cup of baked orange sweet potato provides more than double the average adult’s daily requirement of vitamin A — all of it coming from beta-carotene, which your body converts as needed. That “as needed” part is important. Unlike preformed vitamin A (retinol), beta-carotene from food doesn’t accumulate to toxic levels. Your body converts exactly as much as it requires and leaves the rest as an antioxidant.

But! Something very important to keep in mind is that the Vitamin A in a sweet potato is absorbed almost 15 times more when you eat it with a fat (olive oil, butter etc.) than when you just have it dry. So make sure you add some flavor to it. Not that a lot of people are out there gnawing on dry sweet potatoes. But just something to know. And that stat is also fun to drop during conversations at parties. And Vitamin A helps with vision, skin and immune functions (those are probably less fun stats to drop at parties.

Beta-carotene is what gives orange sweet potatoes their color. It’s also one of the most potent free radical scavengers in the food supply. Free radicals drive oxidative stress — the underlying mechanism behind chronic inflammation, accelerated aging, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. Eating foods rich in beta-carotene is one of the most consistent dietary correlates of reduced chronic disease risk in large epidemiological studies.

What Sweet Potatoes Do for Your Gut

Without getting too technical, just know that sweet potatoes have two kinds of fiber — soluble and insoluble — and both of them are great. We don’t need to get into everything they’re doing down in your colon; you just need to know it’s really good for you. And a lot of that fiber sits in the part most people throw away: “Half of the fiber from a potato or a sweet potato is in the skin,” notes Beth Czerwony, RD, LD, a registered dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic — so leave the skin on.

The purple ones are the real gut all-stars. The same pigments that turn them purple — anthocyanins — have been shown in research to feed good bacteria like Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus, so they do a little extra for your microbiome on top of the fiber. If you spot them, grab them.

And the long-game payoff is real: getting your fiber from whole foods like this, instead of a supplement, is one of the things that tracks with lower colorectal cancer risk in the big studies. It’s the fiber, the antioxidants, and the gut-feeding compounds all pulling in the same direction.

The Blood Sugar Surprise (They’re Not What You Think)

Sweet potatoes might honestly need a different name. They’ve got the word “sweet” right in them, so people assume they spike your blood sugar — but they actually don’t, at least not nearly as much as you’d think. Boil them and the glycemic index comes in really low, around 44. It starts to climb when they’re baked, up to around 94, which is closer to a white potato. So if blood sugar is a real concern for you, boil or steam them instead of baking, and always eat them with a little protein or fat — which honestly isn’t that hard to do.

One honest caveat so I’m not overselling it: baked sweet potatoes really do land high on the glycemic scale — Harvard’s Nutrition Source notes they can be “almost as high as that of a white potato” when baked. But the fiber blunts the response, and how you cook them is the lever you actually control.

Orange vs. Purple vs. White: Which One Should You Buy?

Honestly, each one has its own merits, and there’s a little taste difference here and there — but at the end of the day, I usually just grab whatever’s available, and I probably lean toward orange. If you can only buy one, orange is also the most nutritionally dense per dollar. If you see purple at a farmers market or Asian grocery, they’re worth the premium for their unique anthocyanin content. Japanese (white) sweet potatoes have a following for their dryer, less sweet flesh — they hold up better in savory applications and have a lower sugar content than orange varieties.

How You Cook Them Changes Everything

When I was growing up, we really only ate sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving — and it was mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, roasted in the oven so the marshmallows got crispy and a little blackened. It was almost like the indulgent sister to the regular mashed potatoes. I don’t think there was anything healthy about roasted sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top — maybe a little, but those marshmallows are doing a lot of work to counteract anything good underneath. The point is that how you cook them changes the math entirely. Not all cooking methods are created equal when it comes to nutrient retention — and what you cook them in matters as much as how. “Use extra virgin olive oil or avocado oil instead of butter because they’re anti-inflammatory and have a healthier balance of fats,” advises Crtalic-Lowther. “I also recommend adding other spices like cinnamon, clove and nutmeg to elevate the flavor for people who are trying to be mindful of how much sodium they consume.”

The Anti-Inflammatory Angle

Here’s a fun game to play. The pigments in sweet potatoes are actually telling you what their medicine is. Orange is beta-carotene which is an antioxidant. Purple is anthocyanins which is the same compound that makes blueberries a superfood. And while no “superfood” fixes inflammation, if you have a lot of different colors on your plate, there’s a good chance they are all working together to start helping your inflammation markers. One thing that’s for sure, you do not want one plate of just browns. Get some colors in there and orange and purple are to fantastic ones to make sure are there.

Chronic low-grade inflammation is the common thread running through heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, and several cancers. Sweet potatoes address inflammation through multiple pathways simultaneously — which is part of what makes them stand out from single-nutrient supplements.

That blood-pressure angle is one dietitians point to directly. “Sweet potatoes are a good source of potassium, which can also help regulate and manage your blood pressure,” says Crtalic-Lowther. No single food eliminates inflammation. But sweet potatoes address more of the mechanisms behind it than almost anything else in the produce aisle, calorie for calorie.

What to Look for at the Store

Not all sweet potatoes on store shelves are the same quality. A few things worth knowing:

• Look for firm, unblemished skin with no soft spots, cracks, or shriveling. Soft spots indicate cell breakdown and accelerated nutrient loss.
• Deeper color = more beta-carotene. Among orange varieties, a deeper, more saturated orange flesh signals higher carotenoid content. Pale orange flesh has less.
• Organic matters more here than for many vegetables. Sweet potatoes consistently appear on the EWG’s “Clean Fifteen” list, meaning conventionally grown ones tend to have low pesticide residue. That said, if eating the skin (which you should), organic removes one variable.
• Don’t refrigerate before cooking. Cold temperatures convert the starch to sugar and change the texture. Store at room temperature in a cool, dark place — not in the fridge.
• Canned sweet potato (not yam) is a legitimate option. It retains beta-carotene well. Avoid varieties packed in syrup — the added sugar negates the glycemic benefit.

Kaelyn Johnson, MPH, R.D.

Kaelyn Johnson is a Registered Dietitian from Southern California who has worked as a clinical dietitian and is now a freelance writer. She has written for WebMD, produced an e-book, and written case studies for healthcare practitioners.