While walking through Chinatown I noticed a bunch of young Asian Americans lining up outside a small establishment, Curious, I crossed the street to see what was drawing the crowd. It turns out the big attraction was a shop selling bubble tea, AKA boba. Of course.
In the last few years, different flavors of tea with small tapioca balls has grown in popularity, particularly among young Asian Americans. I've never seen the attraction of the drink. I've had an unfounded fear of choking on the little pearls of tapioca.
The beverage is a combination of sweetened tea, natural or artificial flavors, and a layer of tapioca “pearls” that bob around at the bottom of the cup. The tapioca look like bubbles as they come up through the straw, thus the derivation “boba.”
Black, jasmine, and green teas are commonly used as a base. Many fruit flavors are popular, including mango, kiwi, strawberry, honeydew, and passion fruit.
If there are any health benefits, its all in the tea, so why not just drink the tea?
As a source of nutrition, tapioca is a nonstarter, according to Healthline. Though it is a staple in some native subsistence diets, its only contribution is as a carbohydrate for quick energy. The vitamin and mineral content is very low, and the lack of fiber is so notable that even if you could consume enough tapioca to get some small nutritional benefit, you’d likely become very constipated.
And that's where our story starts. The story out of China should serve as a warning to boba fans.
A 14-year-old girl in China’s Zhejiang province went to the hospital with an abdominal blockage.
The girl was taken to the hospital after she complained about stomach pains, couldn’t eat, and had been constipated for five days. The doctor performed a CT scan and reportedly found “unusual spherical shadows,” AKA undigested boba, dotting her colon all the way down her digestive system.
According to EBC Dongsen News, the patient reluctantly admitted she had drank a bubble tea five days earlier; however, the doctor who treated her said it would have taken a lot more boba to get to this point.
Her digestive problems were apparently caused by around a hundred undigested tapioca pearls, according to EBC Dongsen News. The doctor prescribed laxatives for the girl to get the undigested pearls out of her system.
The director of Zhuji People’s Hospital’s emergency department said that boba, being made of tapioca starch, are already difficult to digest, but some makers also use thickeners and preservatives, the significant consumption of which may lead to gastrointestinal problems, reports EBC.
Just a word of caution, folks.
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