Another “healthy” cookie. This time from the Girl Scouts.
Have you heard about Mango Crèmes? According to ABC Bakers, the company who makes these cookies for the Girl Scouts, they are made with Nutrifusion. Whatever that is.
ABC Bakers thinks these cookies are the answer to the fact that:
- 75-80% of Americans do not eat an adequate amount and variety of fruits and vegetables. And
- 87% of American consumers are interested in learning more about beneficial products that can provide a host of health benefits.
Read what ABC Bakers has to say here.
I wrote about these cookies yesterday on Psychology Today.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Mango Crèmes are not any healthier than the other GS cookies. They also don’t contain any mango.
What they contain is a cocktail of concentrates: cranberry, pomegranate, orange, grape, strawberry and shitake mushrooms. Yes. Mushrooms! (Maybe they didn’t think calling these cookies Mushroom Crèmes would be as appealing?)
Read the rest of my Psychology Today post, The Girl Scouts Miss the Boat with Mango Crèmes.
Adding fruit and vegetable concentrates to cookies is not the way to increase fruit and vegetable consumption.
- Nutrients do not provide the same healthful kick when they don’t come in their original packaging.
- Adding fruit concentrate, a euphamism for added sugar, to cookies is like putting icing on a cake: it is adding sugar on top of sugar.
- Eating cookies teaches kids to eat cookies, not shitake mushrooms.
Give your kids these cookies if they like them. (I’m sure they’re delicious.) Just don’t buy them as a way to be healthy.
Give your kids cookies with added nutrients because you worry they aren’t getting the nutrition they need from “real” foods and you’ll train your kids’ taste buds away from “real” foods.
Then what will you do? Give your kids cookies with added nutrients to make sure they get the right nutrition? It’s a crazy vicious cycle.
For more on this topic, read Cookies and the Cycle of Guilty Eating.
~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~
