Keep the bran on millets to retain health benefits: study
Removing the brain from millets -- dehusking -- could squander away the benefits of eating them, say the authors who studied five small Indian millets: foxtail, little, kodo, barnyard, and proso
Removing the bran from millets results in decreasing the protein, dietary fibre, fat, mineral and phytate content in them, while increasing the carbohydrates and amylose content, a recent paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Springer has shown. This removal could squander away the benefits of eating millets.

The article, ‘Impact of debranning on the nutritional, cooking, microstructural characteristics of five Indian small millets’, by Shanmugam Shobana et al makes a case for consuming millets as whole grains without de-branning. “Dehusked millets are nutritious and should be promoted in Indian diets to improve diet quality, debranned millets are nutritionally inferior, can increase the glycemic load of Indian diets”, the authors say. The study was conducted by the department of Madras Diabetes Research Foundation (MDRF), Chennai, and the Indian Institute of Millet Research, Hyderabad.