 How does millet come to the help of diabetics? A substantial portion of the starch in millet is resistant starch, meaning resistant to digestion in our small intestine, so providing a bounty for the good bugs in our colon. Here's how the various millets do, all way more than more common grains like rice or wheat, but proso and codo millet lead the pack. What's going on? The protein matrix in millet not only acts as a physical barrier, but actually also partially sequesters your starch-munching enzyme, and the millet polyphenols can also act as starch blockers in and of themselves. Millet also has a markedly slower stomach emptying times than other starchy foods, and if you eat white rice, boiled potatoes, or pasta, your stomach takes about an hour to digest it before starting to slowly dump it into your intestines, and two or three hours to empty about halfway, whereas you eat sorghum or millet, and stomach emptying doesn't even start until two or three hours. That may take five hours to empty even halfway. Note this was for both a thick millet porridge or for just like millet couscous, so since the non-viscous millet couscous meal was also equally slow in emptying, this suggests there may just be something about millet itself that helps slow stomach emptying, which should blunt the blood sugar spike, but you don't know until you put it to the test. And indeed, millet caused about a 20% lower surge in blood sugar than the same amount of carbs in the form of rice. Remember how excited I was to show you how it only took the body half the insulin to handle sorghum compared to a grain like corn? Well, millet did even better. Give a group of pre-diabetics only about three quarters of a cup of millet a day, and within six weeks their insulin resistance dropped so much their pre-diabetic fasting blood sugars turned into non-pre-diabetic blood sugars. This so-called self-controlled clinical trial, the same subject before and after, that's just a sneaky way of saying an uncontrolled trial. There was no control group that didn't add the millet or added something else, and we know just being in a study under scrutiny can cause people to eat better in other ways, so we don't know what role, if any, the millet itself played. What we need is a randomized controlled crossover trial where the same people eat both a millet-containing and non-milit-containing diet and see which works better. And here we go, a randomized crossover study having hundreds of patients, both doing American Diabetes Association type diet, with or without about one and a third cup of millet every day. And the millet-based diet lowered the hemoglobin A1C levels, meaning an improvement in long-term blood sugar control, along with some side benefits like lowering cholesterol. The target for good blood sugar control recommended by the American Diabetes Association is an A1C less than 7. They started out at an 8.37, but after a few months on millet, dropped to an average of 6.77. Is it just because they lost weight or something? No. Suggesting that was in effect specific to the millet, but they didn't just give millet. They mixed the millet with split black lentils and spices, and we know from dozens of randomized controlled experimental trials in people with and without diabetes that the consumption of pulses, meaning beans, split peas, chickpeas, or lentils, can improve long-term measures of blood sugar control like A1C levels. So, while the researchers conclude that millets have the potential for a protective role in the management of diabetes, a more accurate conclusion might be a mix of millet and lentils, can be protective, though, hey, maybe the spices help too. They didn't say which ones they used, and I couldn't get hold of the authors, but a similar study done by one of the same researchers included about a tablespoon a day of a mixture of fenugreek, coriander, cumin, and black pepper with a fifth spice, perhaps cinnamon or turmeric.