Abstract: Coarse cereals are more and more important in people’s daily diet due to their rich nutrition. In recent years, the occurrence of a series of chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, has increased and threatened people’s health, which is attributed to an unhealthy diet structure and life style to a great extent. Reasonable diet is the basis of health, diversification of a reasonable diet has become a prerequisite for people’s health. Coarse cereals have been paid more attention to because of their nutritional function, so the coarse cereals industry has an open market prospect. Coarse cereals contain many kinds of active ingredients and have positive effects on many kinds of chronic diseases. However, coarse cereals also contain many kinds of anti-nutritional factors, which cause adverse effects on the absorption of nutrients by the human body and even lead to poisoning. In the processing of coarse cereals, many processing methods can be used to modify the anti-nutritional factors in the coarse cereals, which are important in the food industry. In this review, the active components, anti-nutritional factors, health benefits and processing methods of coarse cereals were summarized to provide a reference for further development of the coarse cereals industry.