Introduction: Purple sweet potatoes contain a lot of anthocyanins, which are the most direct, effective, and safe free radical scavengers discovered by the scientific community for preventing and treating diseases and maintaining human health. Therefore, there is a rumor that eating more purple sweet potatoes can have anti-cancer effects. What is the truth?
Purple sweet potatoes were once all the rage in the market. According to a certain online encyclopedia: "In addition to the nutritional components of ordinary sweet potatoes, it is also rich in selenium and anthocyanins. Anthocyanins have preventive and therapeutic effects on more than 100 diseases and are hailed as the seventh essential nutrient after water, protein, fat, sugar, vitamins, and minerals. Anthocyanins are the most direct, effective, and safe free radical scavengers discovered by the scientific community for preventing and treating diseases and maintaining human health." Therefore, there is a rumor that eating more purple sweet potatoes can have anti-cancer effects.
In fact, to date, there is still a lack of scientific evidence on whether anthocyanins have any resistance to tumors in the human body.
Purple sweet potatoes do contain a lot of anthocyanins. In fact, most higher plants contain anthocyanins, which are a product of plant metabolism. Besides purple sweet potatoes, vegetables and fruits that are blue or purple, such as eggplant, blueberries, red (purple) grapes, kale, purple corn, etc., also have high anthocyanin content. In environments with different acidity and metal ions, plants absorb different wavelengths of sunlight, causing the plants to appear red, blue, or purple.
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In chemical or cell experiments conducted in the laboratory, anthocyanins have also demonstrated powerful antioxidant functions. Many people have studied this, and many related scientific papers have been published, confirming that antioxidant damage to cells is related to the occurrence of many chronic diseases, such as cancer and aging; generally, anthocyanins have shown strong inhibitory effects on cultured cancer cells in vitro; for experimental animals such as mice, anthocyanins have also shown some resistance to artificially induced tumors.
However, there is still a lack of corresponding evidence on whether anthocyanins can inhibit tumors in the human body. Italian scientists once conducted some "case-control" studies, comparing the dietary status of thousands of cancer patients with "normal people" who had similar conditions but did not get sick, and found no correlation between "active ingredients" in blue and purple vegetables such as anthocyanins and the occurrence of cancer. Some scholars have also proposed that once anthocyanins are eaten into the human body, they may not necessarily exert their effects. At present, all kinds of claims about the anti-cancer effects of "anthocyanins" are actually derived from the "antioxidant" theory, and there are no direct clinical trial data.
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Cell and animal experiments can give scientists some research directions, but they still cannot provide effective evidence at present. In the United States, a company once hyped the "special effects" of a certain blue-purple fruit, and was severely warned and stopped by the Food and Drug Administration.
Of course, this does not mean that purple sweet potatoes are bad. Any vegetable or fruit, whether blue-purple, green, or yellow, is good for human health. But for modern urban people, the reason why vegetables and fruits cannot exert their due effects is mostly "insufficient consumption". Therefore, it is not important to choose what kind of vegetables to eat, but it is important that we should increase the amount of various vegetables and fruits in our diet.
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