"The Health Benefits of Sorghum"
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.