Despite serving for generations as a staple of goodness and nutrition, the sweet potato wonders: Why the need to dress me up?

Many nutritionists say the sweet potato is a perfect vegetable - it offers as much vitamin C as orange juice and is rich with vitamin A, iron and thiamine.

And to top off its modern-day importance, this tuber is said to be an up-and-coming veggie in creating energy from biomass.

But cooks all over have decided they need to top the sweet potato with all sorts of doodads, making it even sweeter. From brown sugar and candied pecans to coconut and marshmallows, the sweet potato is drowned in sugar.

Brent Parrish, the chef at Yahoola Creek Grill in Dahlonega, said he thinks topping the sweet potato with even more sweets is "dreadful."

"The poor sweet potato," he said. "I mean, it's a sweet potato. You don't have to top it with anything."

Parrish serves Yahoola Chips as an appetizer at the restaurant. The chips are a mixture of sweet potato and Yukon chips with brown sugar and salt.

"When we send them out we put just a tiny amount of brown sugar on them and a little salt, just to accentuate the sweetness, but we don't do much else," Parrish said. "The whole concept of candied yams is just disgusting to me."

Parrish added that personally he isn't a huge fan of the sweet potato because of its texture. But he said he does love the chips.

"If you fry them they get nice and crispy, and you still get the sweetness of the potato. And if you finish it with a little salt to balance out the sweetness, it's pretty good," he said.

At Glenda's Restaurant in Cleveland, they bake their sweet potatoes and serve them as a side item with cups of optional toppings. The restaurant also occasionally makes sweet potato souffle.

"We just don't put marshmallows on ours, we use the candied pecan topping," said Lonna McDaniel, front line supervisor at Glenda's.

McDaniel also said when customers order the baked sweet potato, most top the item with "cinnamon, butter and brown sugar."

In Georgia, sweet potatoes do make up a large percentage of the state's annual crop production, according to the Georgia Agriculture Education Curriculum Office.

The office also added that there are two types of sweet potatoes: the pale yellow sweet potato with a dry flesh and the dark orange with the moist flesh - this is commonly identified as a yam.

"They are a wonderful product and they are a historical product," said Phillips Edwards, an agent with the Irwin County Cooperative Extension office. "They call it the perfect vegetable, as far as the nutrients that it has in it. It has vitamin C and it was sort of a food that is coming back into its own nowadays.

"A long time ago, it was a staple. And now is gaining more notoriety."

Georgia grows the red jewel, regular jewel and the Georgia jet sweet potato varieties.

And each year, Irwin County holds the Georgia Sweet Potato Festival. Edwards said there is a parade, arts and crafts and a cooking contest.

He added that he has two favorite ways of serving up sweet potatoes.

"I like to slice them and fry them and make like sweet potato fries; it's more like a chip," he said. "And just baked."