Most milk tea contains no milk, no tea leaves and no additives.
With the plasticizer storm, the question of whether drinking milk tea is healthy has once again attracted everyone's attention. What is the milk tea in the street and lane drink shop made of? How are those colorful seasonings mixed?
It is understood that a cup of authentic bubble tea should consist of sugar, milk and tea. The milk used in tea shops in the market is hardly fresh milk or powdered milk, but creamer. Cream essence is much cheaper than fresh milk and milk powder, with good taste and rich milk flavor. Cream is also divided into high and low grades, and the quality is also good or bad. A good creamer has a strong milk fragrance, while a poor creamer has basically no milk fragrance. Followed by sugar, usually white sugar, better shops will use fruit syrup, and some small shops use protein sugar, which is saccharin. Throw a little into it, the sweetness is ten times that of white sugar. Tea leaves are divided into teabags and tea powder. Cheap tea bags cost less than a dime and have no tea flavor.
The so-called "pearl" is mainly cassava starch. In order to make the "pearl" full of elasticity and chewy, most bubble teas also add wheat protein and synthetic polymer materials, that is, plastics. Colorful is made of fruit powder, with more than 20 flavors, most of which are food flavors and pigments.
Inferior creamer can lead to cardiovascular diseases.
Experts pointed out that the so-called milk tea lacks calcium and a lot of vitamins compared with milk, and its protein content is very low. There are few useful nutrients in milk. However, milk tea contains a lot of fat and calories, and drinking more is not good for your health. In addition, regular production of food additives such as creamer and saccharin is not terrible. However, in order to reduce costs, many tea shops use inferior creamer and saccharin, which are illegal additives and do great harm to health.
Cream essence, also known as non-dairy creamer, powder oil, fat powder, etc. , which mainly contains edible vegetable oil, maltodextrin and sodium caseinate, is a legal additive allowed by the state, but the dosage needs to be strictly controlled.
According to experts, the real creamer is extracted from cream, and the cost is very high. The creamer used in tea shops and cake shops in daily life can be said that there is not a drop of milk or cream in the production process. It is a milk-like thing made of vegetable oil with water and additives. Among them, vegetable oil, more precisely hydrogenated vegetable oil contains "trans fatty acids". Trans fatty acids can cause abnormal blood lipid metabolism and increase the incidence of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. In addition, there are arsenic, lead, copper and other harmful substances in creamer, and long-term intake can increase the incidence of coronary heart disease, tumor and asthma. Children who eat it will affect their physical development, especially their nervous system, memory and thinking ability.
Some experts have done experiments and found that the average trans fatty acid content of creamer samples is not less than 3.5%. Then it takes about 30 grams of creamer to make a cup of 250 ml milk tea. According to this standard, a cup of milk tea contains about 1 g of trans fatty acids. According to international standards, the maximum daily intake of trans fatty acids is 2g, but if you drink two cups of milk tea, it may exceed the standard and bring harm to human health. Trans fatty acids are not easily digested by the human body, and easily accumulate in the abdomen, leading to obesity, so drinking more milk tea will also lead to obesity.