Nutritional scientists have determined that many of the more than 600,000 lives lost each year in developing countries through malnutrition and diet-caused disease could be saved by switching the color of the sweet potatoes eaten as a staple in many of these countries.
Those mostly endangered by the diet deficiency are young children or pregnant women says Betty Burri at USDA’s Western Human Nutrition Center at the United States Department of Agriculture.
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An orange sweet potato USDA photo/Iowa press
In an article in this month’s Comprehensive Reviews of Food Science and Food Safety, Burri writes that although all varieties of sweet potatoes are nutritious, those that are orange may be the best source for vitamin A. The value of this tuber in countries plagued by vitamin A deficiency is enormous.
We’re lucky in North America where most of our sweet potatoes are deep, vivid orange, but in developing countries sweet potatoes can also be white, cream, yellow and purple.
She says it would be ideal if it the food industry could find ways to increase the production and consumption of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. Food companies could help by developing improved varieties of prolific, hard, disease and drought-resistant orange-fleshed sweet potatoes while developing and testing different food products made from sweet potatoes.
For example, one of the sweet potato products that international programs are testing is sweet potato flour, which can be made into biscuits and buns.
There are many good sources of vitamin A and pro-vitamin A carotenoids in the American diet, as well as access to orange sweet potatoes. However, in some parts of Africa the custom is to feed orange sweet potatoes to livestock and white sweet potatoes (which have very little pro-vitamin A carotenoids) to people– but Burri adds that there are ongoing educational programs to help these populations make better use of the crops.
--By Food Watchdog staff
