About a year ago, marketers at General Mills started noticing that food made with so-called “ancient grains”—quinoa, millet, spelt, and so on—was selling really well. “We had heard the term,” Alan Cunningham, a marketing manager in the cereal division, told me, but they hadn’t spent a lot of time researching the ingredients. They set out to learn more.
“Ancient grains” is not a scientific term. It refers to certain crops that we have been eating for a very long time, though whether the word “ancient” is appropriate depends on how you define the term: people tended not to eat grains at all until the advent of farming, several thousand years ago. The rise of ancient grains is, above all, a feat of marketing. Whole grains are generally healthier than refined ones, and are recommended as a replacement for them by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because they take longer to digest, which means that blood sugar rises and falls less rapidly as your body processes them. Still, they’re not all that nutritional compared with, for instance, fruits, nuts, and legumes, according to David Ludwig, the director of the Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard University who has studied grains. What’s more, while some of the grains that are described as ancient may have health benefits over more common grains like wheat and barley—for instance, a higher ratio of protein to carbohydrates—others do not. Also, processing whole grains tends to disrupt the structure of the food, causing the carbohydrates to be digested more quickly. That causes blood sugar to rise and fall at faster rates, which is in turn associated with higher risk for diabetes and heart disease.
That hasn’t stopped food companies from marketing ancient grains as wholesome additions to a healthy diet. According to the Whole Grains Council, which lobbies for more whole-grain consumption, sales of Kamut-brand khorasan wheat rose more than six hundred per cent across the year ending in mid-July, while sales of spelt increased nearly four hundred per cent and amaranth sales rose more than a hundred per cent. (Sales of barley and wheat fell during the same period.) At General Mills, market research and taste tests conducted by Cunningham and his colleagues showed that consumers were taken with the concept of ancient grains, and were willing to pay a premium for products containing them. Even though people often couldn’t quite define ancient grains, Cunningham said, they associated them with “simplicity” and “health.” That was enough to persuade General Mills to put ancient grains in Cheerios, its most iconic cereal. Starting in January, Cheerios + Ancient Grains will be the latest addition to a line of about a dozen types of Cheerios. They’ll be on the pricier side because of the premium ingredients, with a suggested retail price of $4.39 for a box of about twelve ounces, compared with $3.99 for a fourteen-ounce box of regular Cheerios.
In crafting the version of Cheerios with ancient grains, executives at General Mills were especially concerned with flavor. Consumers, Cunningham said, had “a little worry that they would be bland.” So the company identified about eight ancient grains and started taste-testing them. “We tried to choose the ones that we heard back from consumers really tasted the best,” he said. In the end, along with quinoa—which they knew would be most recognizable—they went with spelt (which tastes like hazelnut) and Kamut wheat (which is rich and buttery). The grains were puffed, baked, and treated with a generous serving of sugar.
Ludwig, the Harvard professor, is skeptical of processed foods containing ancient grains. Puffing the ancient grains in Cheerios appears to represent “extensive processing,” he said, though it’s not as bad as some other types of processing, like pushing ingredients through an extruder to force them into a certain shape and size.
The nutritional panels for regular Cheerios—which itself is regarded as healthier than many other cereals—and the ancient-grains version look quite similar by some measures. A serving of each contains the same amount of iron, zinc, and other vitamins (which are added to the cereal to enrich it, rather than coming from the grains themselves). To the extent that the cereals’ nutritional values are different, the version with ancient grains looks worse: it has slightly more calories, carbohydrates, and saturated fat—though less sodium. Most important, the ancient-grains Cheerios contains five times as much sugar as traditional Cheerios—which, for Ludwig, is the biggest problem. When advocates for children’s health publish reports on the nutritional value of children’s cereals, they tend to focus on the sugar content, which has risen considerably since the early days of cereal. The five grams of sugar per serving in Cheerios + Ancient Grains is less than some other cereals—a serving of Frosted Cheerios has nine grams, and a serving of Froot Loops has twelve—but it nevertheless contains much more sugar than the original, already healthy version. The extra teaspoon, Ludwig says, “undermines any theoretical and unproven benefits of these ‘ancient grains.’”
But Cunningham pointed out that “there isn’t some sort of extra claim on the front that says this is healthier than any other cereal in the world,” nor has General Mills said as much to the press. He explained that the company simply wanted to capitalize on the ancient-grains trend while also making the cereal taste good—hence the sugar. “This is about their simplicity,” he said, “versus any one specific nutritional fact.”
