LAUSR

Abstract Background Sorghum belongs to the Poaceae family and is a popular grain worldwide especially in Africa. Sorghum grains (SGs) have a long history of usage as a traditional food in African countries. SGs and their products have high nutritional value and showed antioxidant, anti-obesity, anti-diabetic, anti-cardiovascular, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and anticancer activity. However, SGs have some limitations due to the presence of some antinutritional factors such as tannins, phytates, trypsin inhibitors, and protein crosslinker. Scope and approach This review explains the nutritional importance of SGs, and comprehensively explores the potential processing techniques that can improve SGs characteristics. This review further discusses the application of SGs for developing commercial food products. Lastly, the health benefits of SGs and SGs-based food products were summarized. Key findings and conclusions Technological processing such as soaking, germination, fermentation, thermal processes, irradiation, and others are suitable ways for removing or reducing anti-nutritional factors, improving sorghum quality, and producing foods with high nutritional value. Furthermore, fermentation is considered the best treatment followed by the combination of other treatments such as soaking, germination, and nixtamalization. Therefore, sorghum could be used in many food types such as bakery products, extruded products, beverages, and porridge. Sorghum-ogi, SGs beverages, and SGs ingredients (as food additives) are the best of them. Sorghum-ogi is considered as one of the probiotic foods, which is produced from wet-milled fermented sorghum. It is a smooth, creamy, free-flowing thin porridge. Apart from all, sorghum-based products can be consumed worldwide as a functional food for human health.