Sweet potato confuses me

vingogly

This site shows 116 cal for 100g of boiled yam, and 76 cal for 100g of boiled sweet potato:

http://nutritiondata.self.com

If you're concerned, I'd use the higher amount. Or split it down the middle and count 96 cal/100g. This isn't an exact science; your food scale and your bathroom scale are not laboratory-grade instruments, and as the reply from ASDA indicates there can be different results based on what database they're using. I'd guess the results would be somewhat different depending on the age of the sweet potatoes, and even what farm they were grown on. Ditto for everything else you eat.

I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the small stuff.

badnoodle

Ah, the rep's reply makes sense.
Some food suppliers don't add the calories from insoluble fiber to the overall calorie values. The reasoning is that if you can't digest it, it doesn't supply energy, and shouldn't count towards your daily calorie consumption.
The big potatoes use this nethod, the small ones include the fiber calories.

Francl27

Yeah it's what I was going to say, they probably don't count the calories for fiber.

I'd just use a USDA entry.

brb_2013

Pinkylee77 wrote: »

different breeds of sweet potato may have different values, often what one calls a sweet potato may be a yam.

This is a good point!

lemurcat12

Yams aren't really commonly sold in the US -- more likely a "yam" is really a sweet potato.

Pinkylee77

CurlyCockney wrote: »

So, I've finally received a response from Asda:

show previous quotes

Sweet potato nutrition data
Response By Email (Claire Brant) (23/03/2016 08.22 AM)
Hello

Thanks for your patience whilst I have been speaking with our Technical Team about the Sweet Potatoes.

I am sorry for the confusion caused with the nutritional data. I can appreciate how you feel about this.

Our Technical Team have advised that we have two different suppliers packing both of these lines.
We have 2 different calorific values is that one supplier, packing the mini sweet potatoes, used a reference databank of nutritional data that was first published in 2002 (version 6). The other supplier of the 1kg sweet potato pack used information from a more recent version of this document that was republished in 2015 (version 7).

The 1kg sweet potato pack had ASDA packaging created last year, whereas the mini sweet potato packaging was created before the newer version of the nutritional data was published. This hopefully explains as to why we have 2 differing calorific values. As to why the calorific values in version 7 of the data bank differ to those of version 6 I believe is down to how the authors of this document have derived their data. Specifically in version 6 fibre was not included in the contribution to calorific values but in version 7 it was.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) maintains the UK Nutrient Databank, which contains extensive information on the nutrient content of foods commonly consumed in the UK. The McCance and Widdowson's The Composition of Foods (CoF) book series, contains nutrient composition data based on information from this databank. This is the same data bank that we use for sweet potatoes.

Once again, thanks for contacting me and I hope the above makes sense to you. If I can be of further help, please let me know.

I'm still not really sure what it means, but I'm hoping someone here will put it into basic English for me

The fiber is not asorbed so because it is high in fiber it is lower in calories.