Unlikely kitchen staple praised for giving us 400% of the nutrients needed for healthy skin and eyes

An unlikely kitchen staple has been praised for giving us 400% of the nutrients needed for healthy skin and eyes.

It’s a food we cook with all the time and works in plenty of different dishes but its nutritional value is often overlooked.

The food item in question is the sweet potato, which is often used as a healthier alternative to potatoes.

However, something you might not know about the versatile root vegetable is that it contains a whopping 1,403 mcg of vitamin A.

This is shocking 561% of your daily requirement of the vitamin.

Sweet potatoes are so good for you that they’ve become known as the ‘single most successful example of micronutrient and vitamin biofortification’.

Sweet potatoes are a superfood (Hanna Jannah/Getty Images)

In fact, a study from back in 2001 estimated that just by simply swapping normal potatoes for sweet potatoes was able to significantly reduce the deficiency in vitamin A in around 50 million children in Africa.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a vitamin A deficiency is the result of a dietary intake of vitamin A that is inadequate to satisfy physiological needs.

On the website, it explains: “It may be exacerbated by high rates of infection, especially diarrhoea and measles. It is common in developing countries, but rarely seen in developed countries.

“Vitamin A deficiency is a public health problem in more than half of all countries, especially those in Africa and South-East Asia. The most severe effects of this deficiency are seen in young children and pregnant women in low-income countries.”

More serious side effects can include temporary and permanent damage to your eyes and can even lead to blindness.

However, it seems that something as common as a sweet potato can help you to protect your eyesight as well as boost your immune system.

And there are other benefits too, including glowing skin due to the beta-carotene found in the vegetable.

Sweet potatoes are good for your skin (Flashpop/Getty Images)

Beta-carotene acts as an antioxidant to protect skin cells from damage caused by free radicals and environmental factors, which reduces the effects of UV radiation, improves skin elasticity, and reduces the appearance of wrinkles.

Who knew that sweet potatoes could have so many different health benefits? But it turns out that the root vegetable is a superfood with over 400% of your vitamin A requirements for the day.

So, the next time you find yourself in a grocery store browsing all the so-called miracle skincare products, it might be worth looking at the produce for the potato section.