Girl Scouts on Wrong Path to Healthy Living

little girl poses with box of Girl Scout cookies

Back in 2001, the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota surveyed 234 Girl Scouts and found that almost one-third of them were trying to lose weight. Most of these children were doing sensible things like shunning high-fat foods and engaging in more exercise. Here’s the scary part:

12 girls said they were already taking diet pills, inducing vomiting and/or using laxatives to shed unwanted pounds.

All the girls in the survey were approximately 10 years old! Ten years later, healthy living enthusiast Stephanie Hoaglund published her thoughts about seeing thousands of Girl Scouts converge on Washington for the organization’s 100th anniversary celebration. The sight of a great many overweight troop leaders left her saddened, disappointed, angered, and annoyed.

With no intention of criticizing the Girl Scouts as a whole, she was moved to write about the experience, suggesting programs that would help both the kids and the troop leaders get and stay in shape, as well as some serious re-engineering of the cookie recipes. Hoaglund wrote:

If the Girl Scouts as an organization is truly behind empowering girls and helping them succeed in LIFE, they owe them nothing less than going all in and really backing up their words about overall health and fitness goals.

An anonymous blogger known as Dances With Fat displayed a bit of attitude the following year. First, it upset DWF that the Girl Scouts adhered to an oft-disputed “persistent myth,” the energy balance theory of weight control. A proponent of simple observation and anecdotal evidence, the writer argued:

Almost everyone knows someone who eats tons of food never works out and stays thin. On the other side, almost everyone knows a fat person who eats healthy and exercises but doesn’t lose weight (although, curiously, the calories in /calories out proponents typically say that the former is perfectly normal and the latter is impossible).

DWF also noted that in the previous decade, hospitalization of children under 12 for eating disorders had risen by 119%. Worse, the Scouts had made what the writer characterized as a “massive misstep” by partnering with the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, which apparently charged the GSA $250,000 for some kind of weight control program. Despite having “foundation” in its name, this is not a nonprofit group. According to the writer,

These people are interested in promoting ‘energy balance’ because it takes [the] focus off the quality of the food…. They get to say that they are ‘doing something’ about childhood obesity… and they are doing [it] with … government money and, unbelievably, public donations….

There is plenty of evidence that suggests that teaching calorie counting to Brownies and Girl Scouts makes them more likely to develop eating disorders and an unhealthy relationship with food and exercise.

Was DWF correct to be suspicious of such a well-paid organization whose present and previous board members included the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, the CEO of the Hy-Vee retail chain, the CEO of Kellogg’s LINK, and — wait for it — a board president who was also on the board of the Girl Scouts? Could anyone be blamed for detecting in this arrangement a faint whiff of conflict of interest?

Then more recently, Dr. John Mandrola got all over the GSA’s case for “selling high-fat sugar-laden cookies to an increasing calorie-addicted populace.” He maintains that such a practice certainly does not build character. He calls the cookie sales “profiteering at the expense of public health” and concludes: “It’s simply not right.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Preteen Girls Hop On Dieting Bandwagon,” ChicagoTribune.com, 03/14/01
Source: “Girl Scouts vs. Health and Fitness,” LiveFitandSore.com, 2011
Source: “Girl Scouts – Cookie Sales and Calorie Counting?” danceswithfat.wordpress.com, 05/23/12
Source: “Dear Girl Scouts: It’s time to cut out the cookies,” DrJohnM.org, 03/16/14
Image by North Charleston

2 Responses

  1. DWF is an interesting character. Personally, I would take her opinion with a grain of salt at best. This is a woman who bills herself as a three-time national champion in dance, but when you look up what contests she actually won it was the intermediate level of a local LGBT ho-down. She bills herself as a former CEO of a multi-million dollar company when in reality it was a start-up office-organization consulting company she created herself after joining one of those self-employed pyramid schemes. She bills herself as an *elite athlete* who has run a marathon when in reality she barely walked a marathon in over 13 hours. And I’ve barely begun to touch on the bulk of her lies.

    She then uses all of these exaggerated and fluffed up accomplishments to mislead and trick desperate people into believing (among many other ridiculous things) that weight loss is impossible, obesity is perfectly healthy, that you should ignore the advice of your doctor if they dare suggest ANY condition is related to excess adiapose tissue… and that anyone who tries to fight against obesity or diminish obesity is literally participating in genocide against fat people (she takes the “war on obesity” to be a literal thing).

    She is actively endangering the lives of the gullible people who read her blog under the guise of promoting self-love. And worse than that, she profits from it – every single blog post plugs her books, CDs, DVDs, classes, doctor-survival-kits (how absurd is that?), T-shirts, etc.

    If she is opposed to it, odds are it’s something worth supporting.

    1. Thank you for taking the time to comment. The issue of childhood obesity is serious and complex. We include numerous voices and differing opinions on the topic, some of which, like the idea of food addiction, are controversial.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

FAQs and Media Requests: Click here…

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Obesity top bottom

The Book

OVERWEIGHT: What Kids Say explores the obesity problem from the often-overlooked perspective of children struggling with being overweight.

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Dr. Robert A. Pretlow is a pediatrician and childhood obesity specialist. He has been researching and spreading awareness on the childhood obesity epidemic in the US for more than a decade.
You can contact Dr. Pretlow at:

Presentations

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the American Society of Animal Science 2020 Conference
What’s Causing Obesity in Companion Animals and What Can We Do About It

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the World Obesity Federation 2019 Conference:
Food/Eating Addiction and the Displacement Mechanism

Dr. Pretlow’s Multi-Center Clinical Trial Kick-off Speech 2018:
Obesity: Tackling the Root Cause

Dr. Pretlow’s 2017 Workshop on
Treatment of Obesity Using the Addiction Model

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation for
TEC and UNC 2016

Dr. Pretlow’s invited presentation at the 2015 Obesity Summit in London, UK.

Dr. Pretlow’s invited keynote at the 2014 European Childhood Obesity Group Congress in Salzburg, Austria.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2013 European Congress on Obesity in Liverpool, UK.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2011 International Conference on Childhood Obesity in Lisbon, Portugal.

Dr. Pretlow’s presentation at the 2010 Uniting Against Childhood Obesity Conference in Houston, TX.

Food & Health Resources