A sweet potato is a root vegetable with orange flesh and a naturally sweet taste. When you bite into a cooked sweet potato, it's soft, smooth, and much sweeter than a regular potato. The sweetness comes from natural sugars in the vegetable itself, not from anything added to it.

Sweet potatoes grow underground, and farmers harvest them by digging them up from the soil. Despite the name, sweet potatoes aren't closely related to regular potatoes at all: they come from a completely different plant family. The confusion comes from the fact that both vegetables grow underground and both became staples in cooking around the world.

You can prepare sweet potatoes in many ways: baked until soft, cut into fries, mashed, or even used in pies. They're packed with nutrients, especially vitamin A, which helps your eyes and immune system work well. The orange color comes from beta-carotene, the same substance that makes carrots orange.

In some parts of the United States, people call sweet potatoes yams, but true yams are a different vegetable entirely, native to Africa and Asia. If you see “yams” in an American grocery store, you're almost certainly looking at sweet potatoes.