What gives? I thought they were same, but at store there is section for both and look slightly different. I end up buying yams, believing they are better nutritionally (well, glycemic index wise) so looking to clear the issue up for myself




which one has lower GI?

Sweet Potato / Yam (http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/hil-23-a.html)

hrmm, seems yams is in the 40s for GI and sweet potatoes up to the high 80s (77±12 and 78±6 GI ratings)

yah, i read that page too kino. read another which made a bit more sense.

but none distinguish them according to GI (of course). i think i answered my own question in finding a GI listing page, but it was kind of odd listing studies from all around the world. i couldnt find the standard GI page i remembered

Let's see if I rememebr this correctly.. Very specifically, sweet potatoes are the things in the supermarket and yams are a really large, different item that you don't really see in the US at all. There are a bunch of different varieties of sweet potatoes. Sometime early last century, some marketing types got together and stole the name yam, which was a nickname for the sweet potato in the south from the days of slavery, and applied it to their type of sweet potato. Ever since then you see a confusion of the two terms in stores.

Simply put, when you see a yam it's a mislabeled type of sweet potato. The two are in reality a different species altogether.



Further reading:
Sweet Potatoes (http://www.epicurious.com/cooking/how_to/food_dictionary/entry?id=4842).
Yams (http://www.epicurious.com/cooking/how_to/food_dictionary/search?query=yam&submit.x=&submit.y=&submit=submit").

Derm has it right- no matter what it says in store, it's very likely a variant of the sweet potato