The Girl Scouts have been sued by consumers over the alleged presence of “heavy metals” and pesticides in its popular Thin Mints and other cookies.
A proposed class action lawsuit was filed on Monday night in federal court in the New York City borough of Brooklyn against the 113-year-old nonprofit and the cookies’ licensed producers, ABC Bakers and Ferrero USA’s Little Brownie Bakers.
It cited a December 2024 study commissioned by GMO Science and Moms Across America that tested samples of 25 cookies from three U.S. states.
The study said Girl Scout cookies contained at least four of five heavy metals - aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury - that can harm people’s health or the environment, often at levels exceeding regulators’ recommended limits.
It also said all samples contained glyphosate, a pesticide used in some weed killers, with Thin Mints containing the highest levels.
The testing and warnings have been called into question by other scientists and Snopes, but the article is primarily about the lawsuit, so I will leave it up.
This is shit, I looked at the EU limits on cadmium/lead per the lab reports https://gmoscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/GSC-HeavyMetalsReports.pdf and EU limits https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32023R0915 (mg/kg == ppm, ug/kg == ppb) and their heavy metal amounts are very low.
For the aluminum the EU recommends 1 mg/kg per week on avg - but this EU report makes clear that ~10 mg/kg in baked goods is the norm https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/j.efsa.2008.754 . So that’s even fine.
I don’t care to go into the pesticides but since the metal levels are good to fine but presented as horrendous, I would suspect the pesticide levels are overinflated as well.