the buzz log
Samoas, Peanut Butter Patties, and those oh-so-addictive Thin Mints. Girl Scout cookies never met an artery they couldn't clog.
Until now. The pushers in khakis and polos are taking the cookie market hostage once again as they move their product into the top 7,000 searches. But for the first time in 90 years of sales, the girl scouts have squeezed the trans fat out of their addictive confections.
Trans fat has replaced smoking as the whipping boy among health watchdogs, and a spate of lawsuits and food labeling changes have spurred a clean-up at food companies and restaurant chains.
Naturally, with the Big Apple's restaurant ban (effective in July), New Yorkers lead queries on the nasty unsaturated fat, followed by California, home to the first trans fat-free city and theme park. But interest in partial hydrogenation has peaked across the nation, including Ohio (where jailbirds have been cut off from eating doughnuts—nope, no cop jokes here), Massachusetts (considering its own ban) and Georgia (as a southwest chain aims for zero trans).
With the trans sucked out of their fat, are the Girl Scouts' offerings more appealing? Maybe—searches are 23% higher than this same time last year, with Ohio the first in line for boxes of those tasty treats.
Filed under: Cookies, Girl Scouts, Trans Fats
the buzz log
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comments
Posted by lisashock | Thu, March 01, 2007, 2:02 pm PST
The cookies still have transfats in them, that's why they are not labelled transfat free. What they've done is reduced the portion size (2 cookies per serving) to comply with federal law that states that if a serving of a food contains less than .5 of a gram of transfat, the nutrition label can show the amount as 0.
However, this means there could be as much as .499 grams of transfat per serving. And honestly, how many people just eat two of these cookies and never eat another?
Take a good look at the ingredient labels, partially hydrogenated oils are still listed as prominent ingredients. The box I have in front of me shows the partially hydrogenated oils above the flour, meaning the cookie has more transfat than flour -and this is well above the ingredients representing less than 2% of the total mass.
The girls are being instructed to tell consumers that the cookies are "transfat free", when in fact, they should be sticking to the strict legal definition, which is just that there are '0' grams per serving. And, informing people that one of the ingredients IS partially hydrogenated oil.
This legal dodge in the labelling standards, brought to us by lobbyists for the industry manufacturing transfats, is deceptive and potentially dangerous to the public. A person's daily consumption of various food-like products may include many of these '0' grams per serving items, and all that transfat will add up. It's not 0+0 like people think, it's .499 times 5 or 6 items per day in many households.
At any rate, it's pretty sad that girls of various ages are working to get merit badges by working as shills for manufacturers of products which have been show to be actively harmful to ones health -even in very small doses. I am offended that corporate executives for the bakeries and the GSA are teaching the girls to deceive the public and calling this 'educational'. Too bad they can't earn merit badges for actually studying nutrition.
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