Calories in Sweet Potato

103 calories. That is one medium sweet potato baked in its skin, 114 g of flesh, and it is the figure behind almost every search for calories in sweet potato. Grab a small one instead and you are at 54. Grab a large one and you are at 162. Per 100 g, baked sweet potato runs 90 calories.

You'd need to walk about 21 minutes to burn the 103 calories in a medium baked sweet potato.

On this page

• One potato, three answers
• Nutrition facts for one medium sweet potato
• Cups, halves and ounces
• Baked, boiled, raw and canned
• Sweet potato fries are three different foods
• Canned yams, casserole and pie
• White, purple and Japanese sweet potatoes
• Sweet potato against a russet, corn and rice
• Most popular sweet potato fries brands
• FAQ

One potato, three answers

The question has no single answer because the vegetable has no single size. USDA pins "1 medium" to a tuber about 2 inches across and 5 inches long, which comes out at 114 g of baked flesh. Small is 60 g. Large is 180 g.

Three times the calories from the same shelf, same bin, same price per pound. That spread of 54 to 162 is why calorie charts disagree with each other so loudly, and it is worth one weigh on a kitchen scale to learn which end your grocery store sells.

One detail explains why this page reads lower than charts you may have seen: USDA measures the baked flesh alone, at 90 calories per 100 g (SR Legacy 168483), and calls 114 g a medium, while charts built on skin-and-all figures with a 180 g potato land near 200.

Nutrition facts for one medium sweet potato

% Daily Value is based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

Read that table from the bottom and the story changes. Calories are a rounding error in anyone's day at 5%, fiber is respectable at 13%, and then vitamin A arrives at 122% of the Daily Value from a single medium potato. One vegetable, 103 calories, and the day's requirement is finished. The FDA sets the adult Daily Value at 900 µg RAE, and the NIH fact sheet on vitamin A explains why orange-fleshed vegetables carry so much of it: beta-carotene, which the body converts as needed.

Sodium is the other line worth a glance, because it is not really a property of the potato. The unsalted baked figure is 36 mg per 100 g. USDA's salted version of the identical food (SR 170134) reads 246 mg — that pinch during roasting takes one medium potato from 41 mg to 280 mg, from 2% of the Daily Value to 12%. The vegetable is not salty. The cook is.

Cups, halves and ounces

American recipes measure in cups, and this is where sweet potato logging goes wrong, because a cup of sweet potato weighs anything from 133 g to 328 g depending on what happened to it first.

Mash is the trap. Crushing the flesh drives the air out, so a measuring cup holds two and a half times as much food as it does when the same potato is sitting in raw cubes — 328 g against 133 g. Nothing was added, nothing was cooked in fat, and the cup went from 114 calories to 249 anyway.

The half-potato answer is the easy one: 51 calories, because half of 103 is half of 103. Sweet potato is one of the few foods where cutting the portion in two really does cut the number in two, since there is no dressing, no skin-to-flesh ratio to argue about and no crust doing anything.

Baked, boiled, raw and canned

Boiling gives the lowest number on this list at 76 calories per 100 g, and the reason is water rather than virtue: the flesh absorbs it, so every gram carries less potato. Baking pushes water off and concentrates what remains, which is how a food can gain calories per 100 g while losing them per potato.

Roasting and baking are the same row here. If a recipe says roasted at 400°F with nothing but the skin on, use 90 calories per 100 g and stop looking for a separate figure — the difference is browning, not energy.

Raw deserves a footnote. SR Legacy puts it at 86 calories per 100 g, while USDA's newer Foundation Foods analysis of orange-fleshed raw sweet potato (fdc 2346404) calculates 79. Both are real measurements of real potatoes from different harvests, and the honest reading is that raw sweet potato sits in the high 70s to mid 80s. Nobody eats it raw by the pound anyway; the number matters mainly for weighing before the oven.

Sweet potato fries are three different foods

Here is the fact that reframes the whole search: the sweet potato is not what makes sweet potato fries caloric. The fryer is. USDA's survey database keeps three separate rows, and they are 149 calories per 100 g apart.

Note what USDA calls a cup: 60 g of fries. That is roughly a dozen. The basket that arrives next to a restaurant burger is two to three of those cups, so the realistic order is 274 calories and up, not 183.

Saturated fat is where the gap really opens. A cup of frozen fries baked at home carries 4% of the Daily Value; 90 g of the restaurant version carries 28%, along with 10% of the day's sodium. Same vegetable, seven times the saturated fat.

Two more shapes off the same shelf. Sweet potato tots run 15 calories per piece and 248 for a full cup (130 g), which makes them denser than they look. Sweet potato chips are a different category entirely at 532 calories per 100 g — a 1 oz snack bag is 151 calories, because thin slices in hot oil absorb far more of it per gram than a thick-cut fry ever does.

Canned yams, casserole and pie

Nothing labeled "yam" in an American supermarket is a yam. True yams are a different genus, rarely stocked outside specialty markets, and the cans stacked up every November hold sweet potatoes under a name that stuck in the 1930s.

The vegetable arrives at the table at 90 calories per 100 g and leaves it at 164 once it has been candied (SR 170088) — an 82% increase with no change to the potato itself. Sugar does most of that work: raw sweet potato holds 4.2 g of sugar per 100 g and zero added sugar, while one candied-yam label in USDA's Branded database lists 26.3 g of added sugar per 100 g, which is 35 g in a 133 g serving, or 70% of the Daily Value in one side dish.

A cup of casserole at 248 calories is not a disaster on a holiday plate. It carries 21% of the day's fiber and 17% of its saturated fat, and it is a smaller number than most people fear. The pie is the honest splurge at 404 calories a slice, and it is a dessert wearing a vegetable's name.

If you want the MyPlate vegetable serving rather than the dessert, a plain baked medium at 103 calories does the job and keeps the vitamin A.

White, purple and Japanese sweet potatoes

USDA does not break sweet potato down by variety. There is no Foundation, SR Legacy or survey row for Japanese, Murasaki, Okinawan or Beauregard, so anyone quoting a precise figure for one of them is quoting a guess. What does exist is grower label data in USDA's Branded database, measured on real produce:

Two independent white-fleshed labels land on 90 and 91 calories per 100 g, within a rounding error of the generic orange figure. Purple comes in slightly lower at 85 with less sugar, 3.85 g against 6.48 g. The practical conclusion is dull and useful: color changes the pigment, not the calorie count, so use 90 per 100 g for any of them and spend the attention on size instead.

Sweet potato against a russet, corn and rice

Look at the first two rows twice, because they say opposite things. Per 100 g the russet is the heavier food, 95 against 90. Per potato it is not close: 164 calories against 103, because a medium russet weighs 173 g and a medium sweet potato weighs 114 g. Grocery stores sell potatoes, not grams.

Our call: for a starchy side with the smallest number attached, butternut squash wins outright at 82 calories a cup and nothing else here comes near it. For a whole-food dinner base, the sweet potato takes it — 103 calories, 3.8 g of fiber and a full day of vitamin A, against 164 calories and essentially no vitamin A from the russet, which carries 1 µg RAE per 100 g. Brown rice is the one to watch: it looks modest per 100 g and lands at 248 calories a cup, more than two medium sweet potatoes.

Most popular sweet potato fries brands in the United States

Ranked by how widely each product appears among foods sold in the United States, from the BodyPal food database of over 3.3 million products. Calories are the figures printed on each Nutrition Facts label, checked against USDA FoodData Central.

Brand popularity: BodyPal food database. Nutrition: manufacturer labels / USDA FoodData Central.

Sweet potato FAQs

Similar foods

• Papaya salad — 190 cal per plate
• Ear of Corn — 99 cal per medium ear
• Carrot — 53 cal per cup chopped
• Onion — 46 cal per cup sliced
• Broccoli — 55 cal per cup chopped
• Bamboo Shoots — 41 cal per cup sliced

Skip the measuring cups

Point the camera at the plate and BodyPal reads the size of the potato for you, fries and casserole included.