Health Benefits of Yacon Syrup

The health benefits of Yacon Syrup are many, being sweet at the same time!

First up, Yacon provides our gut flora, or the friendly bacteria that live in our gut, just the right kind of food that they like to thrive.

I had never heard of it before but I was in our local organic/wholesale store and some how it come up.  They gave me a little bit to taste and yum, I loved it! 

Now I’m not fully confident that just because I love it that you will too. The reason being, that I often tell my sister of something that I believe tastes really nice, she responds with “yuk!”

Hmm… apparently our taste buds are very different.

I find that Yacon Syrup has a malty type flavour which I’m partial to anyway, but it’s got nothing to do with barley.

Yacon is an ancient perennial plant from Peru that forms tubers similar to sweet potato, or maybe a fairly large dahlia bulb. It’s related to the sunflower (which the plant tends to look like) and it is distantly related to dahlias and Jerusalem artichokes.

It grows quite high, well, at least as high as a person, and has a cute yellow flower. The tubers come in many colours including orange, pink, purple, and yellow.

All the parts of the plant can be used.  The tubers can be eaten cooked virtually any way for a great tasting vegetable, or eaten raw in salads.  Even the leaves can be made up into a herb tea.  And… the syrup is a good sugar substitute.

So what’s so special about this strange sounding plant/tuber?

Health Benefits of Yacon Syrup

You can receive quite a few health benefits from consuming Yacon, either as a vegetable, drinking it as a tea, or from it’s syrup.  It potentially helps with

• Liver function
• Blood sugar
• Cancer prevention
• I’ve also read where it can help to lower cholesterol if this is necessary.
• It can improve your immune system
• Aid to digestion
• increase your bone density levels
• Potentially good for weight loss
• Increases Testosterone and aids male infertility

As you can see, this lovely sweet syrup can be beneficial for a lot of things.

My main reason for consuming one teaspoon every morning, is because it’s a known prebiotic and I just want to make sure my “little bugs” are being well looked after. 🙂  Got to make them strong so they can fight off all the bad bugs, so anything I can do to help them has to be good. 

You see, Yacon Syrup is full of natural fibre (inulin) and it’s the fibre that the “little bugs” like to eat.  Strange really, as you wouldn’t expect a syrup to be full of fibre would you?

Gut microflora use it for food

And another really cool thing is that it is almost half made up of fructooligosaccharides! 

How’s that for an amazing word? 

So what’s so wonderful about fructooligosaccharides?  (Just had to throw that in there again!) 

You see, basically you can’t digest it, I mean, literally.  It simply passes through the upper digestive tract much the same way as it entered. Upon reaching the colon, the gut microflora ferment it and use it for food. This keeps them strong and healthy.

It also increases the mass in your bowel which therefore helps with relief from constipation. It will also help with traveller’s diarrhoea.

At the same time, it tastes sweet (like a syrup should) so it can also be used as a sweetener at times.

Where Do You Buy Yacon Syrup?

I buy mine from my local health/organic/wholesale store so you could always try somewhere like that.

We have looked briefly at the health benefits of Yacon Syrup. For me, it only took one little taste for me to say to myself… I want that! 

That’s my bottle you can see in the picture and as you can see I’m only part way through it.  If you get some, don’t forget to come back and let me know what you think.

Have you experienced the benefits of Yacon Syrup yet? What happened? Would you like to share with us? Please do.