Vitamin A and B Content of Canned Sweet Potatoes

Abstract

Although sweet potatoes are an important constituent of American dietaries, information regarding their vitamin content is almost entirely lacking. With but the one exception, 1 dealing with vitamin C, no reference was found to any work on the vitamin content of this food.

The sweet potatoes used in these experiments were a yellow variety which were commercially canned in southern Louisiana, purchased on the open market. The rats used were young, vigorous, normally growing litter-mates of the uniform Wistar Institute strain.

The plan of experimentation was to feed the negative control groups the following diets:

For the test groups 25 grams of the starch was replaced by an equal weight of the canned sweet potatoes. No attempt was made to differentiate between the 3 components of vitamin B, or to ascertain the influence of the antirachitic factor apart from that of vitamin A. The results of such differentiation will be reported at a later date.

As shown by the average growth curves of the various groups, when canned yellow sweet potatoes constituted 25% of the weight of the total diet, the vitamins A D present were sufficient to induce a much more rapid and prolonged rate of growth in the rats than did the diets lacking these vitamins but otherwise adequate. The vitamin B present also produced a distinct prolonged rate of growth, but much less than occurred in the vitamin A experiments.

These findings indicate the presence of an abundance of vitamin A and a small amount of vitamin B in the canned sweet potatoes tested.