Unfortunately they break me out.

Sweet potatoes are good things. I used to sort of be on a crusade to make sweet potatoes a common breakfast food. Way better than cereals and breads for those of us that like a somewhat sweet carby thing in the morning. Rather than the protein & fat we should have. I used to eat them for breakfast a lot but quit because I began to eat them so much for lunch & dinner.

We even had a very long thread devoted to the sweet potato with many people swearing they improved their acne.

Beta carotene may get converted to acne fighting retinoids in our skin via UVB exposure. One more reason we need to get outdoors into the light. And those of us with acne and other problem prone skin have found to have an impaired mechanism for producing these retinoids.

Help, please! I want to incorporate sweet potatoes into my diet. I read online that baking in the skin best preserves the vitamins, but then I stumbled upon this statement:

"A boiled sweet potato has a low GI of 44 and a medium GL of 11. But if baked for 45 minutes, the same sweet potato has a GI of 94 and a GL of 42, both extremely high. Baking has essentially turned the sweet potato into candy."

Is that for real? I try to keep very low glycemic load, so now I'm afraid!

How do you all prepare your sweet potatoes?

Boiled sweet potatoes are better, but you can also bake it provided that you don't have other high GI foods in your diet that day.

If this helps, when I was malnourished from digestive issues, I had a microwavable sweet potato almost every day and it helped a lot with my gut issues and nutrition. Microwaving it was definitely not the best way to eat it, but the fact that my health and skin improved shows that even microwaving a sweet potato does not kill all the nutrients in it.

Top them with some olive, coconut oil or butter to lower the glycemic impact. also eat the skin for the fiber to lower the impact.

How long & how you cook most starches does affect the sugars. I.e. longer cooked pasta has a higher GI than just done pasta. But what you said above seems backwards to me. The opposite of what I'd always understood about white potatoes. i.e. baked is better than boiled.

This study compares the impact of steamed, baked and microwaved sweet potato and finds the they aren't significantly different and still in the moderate range and that's not including the skin. http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/54010

I suspect how long you cook them is a bigger factor than how. And whether or not you include the skin, but the above study tested flesh & skin separately.

Pan fried in a little coconut oil is a great way to eat them. For thanksgiving my sister prepared sweet potatoes by cutting them in large chunks and starting them on the stove top in a cast iron for a while then finished in the oven and they were the best I'd ever had. Way better than baked/mashed. More cleanup though.

You can eat them raw, btw. like slice them and use them in place of crackers or chips with some spread. By themselves they will taste starchy.

you can also eat winter squashes like butternut for the beta carotene. They are less starchy. And can also be eaten raw.

Also, cooling after cooking lowers the glycemic impact. i.e. pasta eaten cold in a salad has a lower GI.

There are loads of ways preparation affects GI as this article explains: http://www.montignac.com/en/the-factors-that-modify-glycemic-indexes/

I boiled the sweet potato until it become soft. I didn't try to bake it but I like to try it also and see how it works. I also saw some recipes on Pinterest and want to try it at home. You can saw tips and recipes there and keep us updated when you try it.