Girl Scout Cookies are Decadent and Depraved, Thank God.
10 Zen Monkeys has the drop on Girl Scout cookies. It turns out that the delectable treats are not only still packed with calories but with trans fat and saturated fats:
Those cute little girls selling cookies around your neighbor are delivering junk-food snacks that are astonishingly unhealthy. ( Just four Samoas have 50% of your recommended saturated fat intake for the day…)
How bad are the cookies in terms of cranking up the fat? Check it out:
This information comes from the official FAQ for Girl Scout Cookies, which helpfully points out that you can even buy ice cream with Girl Scout cookies in it. And surprisingly, it's actually more healthy than the cookies themselves. An entire half cup of ice cream—even the "Girl Scout Cookies Samoas" flavor from Breyers—contains less fat and less sugar than four actual Samoa cookies! It's even got less sodium and fewer carbohydrates—so the message is clear. If you want to fight childhood obesity, feed your children Girl Scout Cookie ice cream instead of actual Girl Scout cookies.
It gets better: Despite taking an oath to stop selling cookies with trans fat, Girl Scout cookies still contain the offending man-made lipid. But they've reduced the serving size of cookies so that a serving has less than half a gram. According to FDA labeling regs, that means the Girl Scouts can say it doesn't contain any trans fats.
You're not gonna learn that sort of marketing ingenuity at home or at school.
If you're wondering what percentage of your recommended daily saturated fat content is contained in just four Girl Scout cookies, here you go:
The next time you go hiking in Antarctica, make sure to pack some Tagalongs or Samoas, just in case.
And more power to the Girl Scouts. Everyone—even Sesame Street's Cookie Monster!—knows that cookies are a sometimes food. So if you eat two boxes worth of Peanut Butter Patties and feel like a fat shit, well, it's your own damn fault. The Girl Scouts, bless their pointed little heads, are just giving us what we ask for. It's up to us to consume cookies wisely.