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.

Protein-wise, it’s comparable to other grains.

Fiber is what Americans are desperately deficient in, and sorghum does pull towards the front of the pack.

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.

If you measure the antioxidant capacity of your blood after eating regular pasta, it goes up a little. If you replace 30 percent of the wheat flour with sorghum flour, it doesn’t go up much more. But if you eat 30 percent 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.

Does it have any unique health-promoting attributes?

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, …

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 percent 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.