We faced a parental quandary recently. One of our daughters joined a Girl Scout troop, and Girl Scouts are expected to sell cookies. “How many boxes of cookies would we like to sell?”
Our answer: zero. I joked to friends that I did not want the kids selling cigarettes either.
Of course, eating Girl Scout cookies is much more wholesome than smoking. So when the girls in the troop set up a stand to sell cookies in front of a local grocery store, our daughter took a shift. She sharpened her sales pitch, had a great time with her friends, and we felt grateful for the parents that took on the burden of warehousing a bunch of ultra-processed food that they might not so easily offload. But we stopped short of putting ourselves in that situation, and with good reason.
This is not to shun the Girl Scouts. It is a wonderful program that gives girls the opportunity to develop important skills and explore nature. Many former scouts credit their professional success in part to the cookie sale, which Girl Scouts USA touts as an opportunity for girls “to practice and develop their entrepreneurial skills.” The cookies also generate an estimated $800 million a year, most of which funds local Girl Scout activities like summer camps and scholarships.
Nevertheless, I would like to offer some validation to the parents that share my concerns, and maybe wonder if they couldn’t just make a donation to the troop.
Because there is cause for some serious concern. Below is a graph from CDC of child obesity. There is some good news with respect to the youngest kids, which reflects in part the success of reforms to strengthen the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).
But in general, the outlook is grim. More U.S. kids are suffering from obesity every year (currently 19.3% of the population ages 2-19), and more adults (currently 42.4% of the population over age 20). When you throw in “overweight,” 73.6% of us are affected. In other words, maintaining a healthy weight in the United States has become a rarity, and more Americans succumb to our obesogenic food environment every year.
Selling Girl Scout cookies, or serving them at a party, or giving them away, or even giving them to the troops, contributes to the obesogenic food environment problem, if even in just a small way.
To their credit, the Girl Scouts and their bakers have avoided some of the most egregious hazards of ultra-processed foods, like partially hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup. But they are still a long way from their home baked roots. What is touted as the “original Girl Scout cookie” recipe, published in 1922 for use by Girl Scouts (and presumably a lot of their mothers), had seven ingredients: butter, sugar, milk, eggs, vanilla, flour, and baking powder. Today’s Trefoil cookies contain 17 ingredients (11 if you count “enriched flour” and “leavening” as single ingredients).
Some of today’s ingredients are “characteristic” of what researchers have defined as the “ultra-processed food group.” They are “either food substances never or rarely used in kitchens (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified oils, and hydrolysed proteins), or classes of additives designed to make the final product palatable or more appealing (such as flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents).” Ultra-processed foods now make up over two-thirds of the calories in American kids’ diets, but an increasing body of research suggests we should eat less of them.
Why are today’s commercially baked Girl Scout cookies worse for us than their sugary antecedents? That question is subject to vigorous debate, with some researchers arguing that the evidence in support of UPF consumption causing disease, rather than simply correlating with it, does not justify dietary recommendations to avoid them. But the classification scheme’s proponents counter that “various attributes of ultra-processed foods acting through known, plausible, or suggested physiologic and behavioral mechanisms relate them to ill health.”
Particularly compelling evidence indicates that UPFs, independent of their nutrient attributes, lead consumers to overeat. In a headline grabbing 2019 study by NIH researcher Kevin Hall, two groups of participants ate a UPF diet or an “unprocessed” food diet for 2 weeks, immediately followed by the alternate diet for 2 weeks. The diets were matched for macronutrients, but the subjects eating the UPF diet ate over 500 calories more per day, on average, and gained an average 2 pounds during the two-week UPF diet phase.
Why did the subjects overeat on the UPF diet? Theories abound. UPFs tend to have less fiber, allowing a person to eat more calories more quickly, without feeling full as soon. More ominously, researchers have posited that additives in UPFs may disrupt the gut microbiome and interfere with the absorption of nutrients, and that they hijack the brain’s reward circuitry. As we pointed out in a recent CFA petition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, emerging evidence suggests that added flavors, including “natural” flavors, may contribute to obesity by inhibiting “flavor-nutrient learning,” the process by which we come to associate foods with vital nutrients. Other research suggests that non-nutritive sweeteners may activate metabolic pathways that stimulate hunger and excess calorie consumption.
As the research into UPFs continues, which ingredients and characteristics matter most will become clearer, but for now, we know enough to know that most kids in the U.S. should be eating less of these foods. Less, not zero: protein, in particular, can be hard to come by in non-ultra processed form, especially for vegans and vegetarians, and in some cases, the benefits of consuming a given UPF may outweigh the risks. But we should not delude ourselves about the toll these foods are having on our health, and the drudgery of trying to instill healthy eating habits in kids amidst a constant barrage of junk food offerings.
And yes, it is drudgery. Before reading Priya Fielding-Singh’s How the Other Half Eats, I thought my family had feeding the kids pretty well figured out. However, learning about other parents’ choices about what their kids eat—when to cook at home, when to eat out, when to push the veggies, when to give in to demands for a snack or for something they’ve snatched off the shelf at the grocery store, when to stop the ice cream truck, etc., etc.—those stories brought home the reality of the balancing act we have to engage in.
Public policy should make some of this easier. Most of us don’t want our kid to seem like the weird one at the birthday party that can’t eat a cupcake, but we are also not so thrilled with the idea of them ingesting artificial dyes that carry a warning label in other industrialized countries. Most parents support healthier school meals. Vast majorities support mandatory front-of-pack labeling requirements to help identify foods high in salt, sugar and fat, which also tend to be UPFs. There are many, many commonsense policy reforms that could relieve some of the burden for parents.
But the food industry has an important role to play too. Until recently, Girl Scout cookies were criticized for containing high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils. Now they don’t. But they still feature troublesome ingredients like caramel coloring, low-calorie sweeteners like sorbitol, and added flavors—both “natural” and “artificial,” two categories which are not meaningfully different. The Girl Scouts bakeries could get rid of these ingredients, but it would increase costs, and consumer pressure has yet to persuade them to change.
In the meantime, the struggle continues. One recent commentary condemns Thin Mints as “poison we don’t need.” Another warns us to censor any jokes we might be tempted to make about “body image concerns” when talking with the girls selling their wares, lest we “create feelings of shame around eating” that lead to eating disorders. If you want to pass on the Girl Scout cookies, I understand.