"Is Sorghum a Healthy Grain?" Sorghum is “The Forgotten Grain.” The United States is actually
the #1 producer of sorghum, “but it is typically not used to
produce food for American consumers.” Instead it’s produced
mainly for feeding livestock, or as pet food, or
even building materials. But it’s actually eaten as a
staple in other parts of the world, such as Asia and Africa where
it’s been eaten for thousands of years, making it currently the
fifth most popular grain grown after wheat, corn, rice, and barley,
beating out oats and rye. Because sorghum is gluten-free,
because it can be definitively considered safe for
people with celiac disease, we’re starting to see it emerge
as actual human food in the US, so I decided to look into
just how healthy it might be.
Protein-wise it’s
comparable to other grains. But since when do we have to
worry about getting enough protein? Fiber is what Americans
are desperately deficient in, and sorghum does pull
towards the front of the pack. The micronutrient composition
is relatively unremarkable; here’s how it rates
on minerals, for example. Where sorghum shines is
on polyphenol content. Polyphenols are plant compounds
associated with reduced risk of a number of chronic
diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases,
neurodegenerative disorders, and even all-cause mortality.
And if you compare different grains, sorghum really does pull
ahead, helping to explain why its antioxidant
power is so much higher. Now, sorghum gets its
grainy little butt kicked when it comes to fruits and vegetables, but compared to other grains,
a sorghum-based breakfast cereal, for example,
might have like eight times the antioxidants than a
whole wheat-based cereal.
But, what we care about is not
antioxidant activity in a test-tube, but antioxidant activity within our body. If you measure the antioxidant
capacity of your blood after eating regular
pasta, it goes up a little. If you replace 30% of the wheat
flour with sorghum flour it doesn’t go up much more. But if you eat 30% red sorghum
flour pasta, the antioxidant capacity in your bloodstream
shoots up like 15-fold. See, there are multiple
types of sorghum. There’s black sorghum,
white sorghum, and red sorghum.
This is how they look in grain form (there’s evidently a yellow sorghum too). And red sorghum, and
especially black, have like legit fruit-and-vegetable-level
antioxidant activity. The problem is I can’t
find any of the colored ones. I can go online and buy red
or black rice, purple, blue, or red popping corn, and
purple or black barley, but I can’t find red or black
sorghum. Hopefully someday. But you can find white sorghum
for about four bucks a pound. Does it have any unique
health-promoting attributes? It’s promoted as “…
An Underutilized Cereal Whole Grain with the Potential to Assist in
the Prevention of Chronic Disease.” But, what is the effect of sorghum
consumption on health outcomes? An epidemiological study in China
found lower esophageal cancer mortality rates in areas that
ate more millet and sorghum, compared to corn and wheat,
but that may have been more due to avoiding a contaminating fungus than from benefit in the sorghum
itself.
Though, it’s possible. Just as “oats are the only
source of avenanthramides,” which give oats some
unique health benefits, sorghum, even white sorghum,
contain unique pigments known as 3-deoxyanthocyanins,
which are strong inducers of some of the detoxifying
enzymes in our liver and can inhibit the
growth of human cancer cells growing in a petri dish
compared to red cabbage, which has just regular
anthocyanin pigments. But, note that white sorghum didn’t
do much worse than red or black, which have way more of
the unique 3-deoxyanthocyanins; so, maybe it’s just
a general sorghum effect. You don’t know…until
you put it to the test. Sorghum was found to suppress
tumor growth and metastasis in human breast cancer xenografts.
What does that mean? The researchers conclude
that sorghum could be used as “an inexpensive natural cancer
therapy, without any side effects… strongly recommend[ing]
[the use of sorghum] as an edible therapeutic agent…possess[ing]
tumor suppression… and anti-metastatic effects
on human breast cancer.” But xenograft means human breast
cancer implanted in a mouse. Yes, the human tumors grew slower
in the mice fed sorghum extracts and blocked metastasis to the lung, and did the same for human colon
cancer, that again, was in mice; which can’t necessarily be
translated to how human cancers would grow in humans,
since, for example, not only do these mice not
have a human immune system, they hardly have any immune system.
They’re bred without a thymus gland, which is where cancer-fighting
immunity largely originates. I mean, how else could you
keep the mouse’s immune system from rejecting the
human tissue outright? But, this immunosuppression makes
these kinds of mouse models that much more artificial,
and that much more difficult to extrapolate to humans. And that’s a lot of what we
see in the sorghum literature— in vitro data like in test tubes
and petri dishes, and rats and mice.
There had just been this
critical missing piece of the puzzle needed to link laboratory
data to actual benefits in humans. Missing, that is, until…now. Thankfully we now have human
interventional studies which we’ll explore next..
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