Health Hack: Sweet potato wastewater may help weight loss
You may want to re-think throwing out your sweet potato wastewater.
We all love a good old sweet potato. Delicious and also exceptionally nutritious, it makes for a great healthy snack alternative (hello, sweet potato fries). Sweet potatoes are a rich source of vitamin A, have great antioxidant and anti-aging properties, and are also linked to cancer prevention. But scientists are exploring if there is more that this vegetable has to offer.
Sweet Potato: The new answer to weight loss?
New research, published in the journal Heliyon, suggests that the starchy water left over from cooking sweet potatoes may actually have slimming effects and could help digestion. This study was prompted by a team of researchers from Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organisation, who were seeking ways to reuse wastewater from industrial-scale processing of sweet potatoes, which incidentally, amounts to a lot of unused water. Approximately 105 million metric tons of the vegetable are grown every year to produce flour, noodles, bread, candy, liquor and other starch-based products. This has resulted in a large amount of wastewater usually discarded in rivers and oceans, which have grave environmental implications.
When tested on mice, researchers found that the mice who were fed sweet potato peptide protein (SPP) in higher concentrations had significantly lower body weight, liver mass, and cholesterol levels, suggesting that SPP suppresses appetite and controls lipid metabolism in mice. Although further research is needed to determine if the same effects would apply to humans, doctors have found the results promising so far. So the next time you boil some sweet potatoes – consider keeping the leftover water!
Sarah Khan
Photo: Getty Images
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