"What Are the Health
Benefits of Sorghum?" 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.
Despite playing a significant role in
Africa and Asia as a staple grain, sorghum has only recently emerged
as a potential food source in the US. And it's not just a principal grain
in many parts of the world, but evidently used in
folk medicine traditions. What might its health benefits be? There has been some in vitro data
from test tubes and Petri dishes, and "in vivo" data, meaning "within
the living" in laboratory animals, but only recently have we
started seeing human trials. In one study, subjects were asked to eat
sorghum pancakes versus corn pancakes for supper for three weeks, and both
groups saw huge 20 to 30% drops in their cholesterol, but they were
also all told to not eat eggs and other cholesterol-boosting foods, so that
may very well have been playing a role. Another study tried biscuits.
Those eating sorghum biscuits said they felt more satiated
than eating wheat biscuits, but this didn't translate to differences
in intake at the subsequent all-you-can-eat meal, so who cares
what they subjectively felt, if it didn't cause them to eat any less.
It's no wonder then
when you put it to the test, those eating sorghum versus wheat
biscuits didn't lose any weight, though the data s a bit mixed.
A recent study concluded that sorghum can be an
important strategy for weight loss in humans, though the sorghum group
didn't actually lose more weight. But they appeared to be eating
hundreds more calories a day, yet lost more body fat, perhaps because of their greater
fiber consumption or other goodies like resistant starch in the sorghum.
The vehicle they used though, an artificially flavored, colored,
and sweetened mixture of water, powdered milk, and either sorghum
or wheat may be good research-wise so you can make a blinded control,
but it leaves you wondering what would happen if you
actually ate the whole food? The resistant starch is exciting though.
Most of the starch in sorghum is either slow-starch or
fully resistant to digestion in the small intestine, which offers
a banquet bounty of prebiotics for your good gut flora
down in your colon. It's not evidently the sorghum starch
itself, but interactions with the proteins and other compounds
that effectively act as starch blockers, inhibiting your starch-munching enzymes.
Sorghum, then, ends up with the lowest
starch digestibility among grains, which is why traditionally it was
considered an inferior grain, but inferior in the sense of
not providing as many calories. But not providing as many calories is a
good thing in the age of epidemic obesity. Give someone a whole wheat muffin,
compared to a sorghum muffin containing the same amount of starch,
and see significantly higher blood sugars 45 minutes to two hours later,
and a higher insulin spike starting almost immediately. Overall,
a 25% lower blood sugar response, and the body only had to release
a fraction of insulin to deal with it less than half! Same thing with diabetics: lower blood
sugar spike with a sorghum porridge compared to grits that the body can
deal with, with a fraction of the insulin. So we need to educate people
how healthy sorghum is and develop convenient
tasty products? No, it's already convenient
and tasty just the way it is. One button press on my electric
pressure cooker with two parts water, one part sorghum, and
it's done in 20 minutes.
You can make one big batch and use
it all week just like you would rice. But where's the money in people eating
the intact, whole grain? Instead the industry is looking at sorghum for its
enormous potential for exploitation into so-called functional foods and food
additives or— I mean, did you know adding sorghum to pork or turkey patties
can decrease their cardboardy flavor? And hey, why just eat it when you can
instead use it to make gluten-free beer? It s funny: in HOW NOT TO DIET, when
I was talking about taxpayer subsidies to the sugar or corn syrup, oil,
and livestock industries, subsidizing cheap animal feed
to help make Dollar Menu meat, I jokingly asked, When's the last time
you sat down to some sorghum? But hey, now that I know how good it is for
you, maybe we should be taking advantage of the quarter billion we're
spending to prop up the industry and sit down to some
sorghum after all.
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