You may have heard the expression knowledge is power.
Well, today we’re going to give you more power
to control your diet and lifestyle by giving you the facts.
Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.
I’m your host, Dr. Michael Greger.
Today on the show, a little known grain, with a lot of personality.
Sorghum.
How does sorghum compare with other grains
in terms of protein, antioxidants, and micronutrients?
Let’s find out.
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.
(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.
Finally today, I share why sorghum is one of my favorite new grains.
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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