Milk tea is delicious and makes people want to stop. Do you understand these three questions？

     Milk tea is a drink that many people are "obsessed with", and it has also spawned many places for punching cards in online celebrity. It is common to queue up to buy milk tea. Is drinking milk tea healthy? Why is it satisfying to drink? What should milk tea controllers do? Let’s take a look at the three questions about milk tea today.

     Milk tea is a healthy "milk+tea"?

     Milk tea is not literally "milk+tea", that is, tea health plus milk health does not mean "milk tea" health.

     Most people drink almost all instant milk tea, liquid milk tea and freshly made milk tea in tea shops. These "milk teas" may often have neither milk nor tea, or only a little content.

     However, according to the General Rules for Labeling in prepackaged foods, the list of ingredients for food packaging needs to be arranged in the order from more to less. That is, which raw material is used the most in the ingredient list, it should be written at the front, and the less it is.

     However, among the above-mentioned "milk tea", "milk and tea" are not the main ingredients, but the non-dairy powder is. The fragrance of milk tea mainly comes from it. Just one drop can make milk tea fragrant.

     Even the freshly made milk tea is made from drinking water and milk tea base with some auxiliary materials, not pure milk and tea. These raw materials and ingredients also determine that these "milk teas" are actually not healthy drinks and should not be drunk.

     Why does drinking milk tea make people happy and addicted?

     The reason why milk tea can make people happy is from our brains. There is a reward system in the brain that can make us feel happy when we do something, and this is achieved by a neurotransmitter called dopamine. When people or animals satisfy hunger, neurons in specific areas of the brain are activated, and then dopamine is secreted and released to the nucleus accumbens, which makes us happy and wants to experience this pleasure again.

     And delicious food can also activate the brain reward system, so that dopamine release increases, and the body gets satisfaction and pleasure, thus becoming addicted to food. This is especially true for sweets and fats, which can activate the central nervous system, stimulate the production of dopamine, make people feel satisfied and happy, and become addicted. This is the case with milk tea. Based on the desire for happiness, the brain will make people want to order a cup of milk tea in normal times.

     This unhealthy hobby once drove our ancestors to actively eat high-calorie food to increase their chances of survival in the primitive times when food was scarce. But if modern people let this "instinct" be the master, it is easy to get sick.

     In addition, many milk teas also contain caffeine, which can make people feel refreshed and can’t stop.

     What’s the problem with drinking milk tea often?

     Drinking milk tea often will bring people emotional happiness, but it will also bring physical troubles.

     Step 1 make people old

     Milk tea is sweet and delicious, but drinking milk tea every day may make people’s skin get old. This is because sugar will eventually break down into glucose in the body and then be used by the body. If too much sugar is added to food, the excess glucose will more easily react with protein, amino acids or lipids to produce advanced glycation products (AGES), which can saccharify collagen and elastin and accelerate skin aging.

     Step 2 get acne

     The content of polysaccharide in milk tea is not low, and it is generally a high GI food. Studies have shown that foods with high GI may be related to acne.

     Even sugar-free milk tea may have a high sugar content. In March this year, the Consumer Protection Committee of Qianwan New District, Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province conducted a comparative test on some milk tea products sold in the market, and 33 batches of samples were taken, all from brands that people often buy in the market. After testing, the sugar content in these samples ranged from 2.9 to 11.4 g /100 g, the average sugar content of milk tea without additional sugar was 3.97 g /100 g, and the average total sugar content of all-sugar milk tea was 7.53 g /100 g.

     The capacity of a large cup of milk tea is mostly 450ml/cup. Even sugar-free milk tea will consume nearly 18g of sugar after drinking one cup. If you often drink whole sugar milk tea, the sugar intake will be as high as 34g/cup, which exceeds the limit of sugar intake in Dietary Guidelines for China Residents (the sugar intake should be controlled within 25g/day).

     3. Dental caries

     If you don’t rinse your mouth in time after drinking milk tea, the sugar in it will provide a "comfortable" growth and reproduction environment for bacteria in the mouth, and bacteria and sugar will gradually form dental caries.

     4. Obesity

     Milk tea is high in calories, and it will naturally gain weight if you drink it often. However, in addition to the problem of calories, milk tea makes people gain weight and there is another mystery.

     Milk tea generally contains fructose, and sucrose will release fructose after digestion. A foreign animal study found that the villi of mice fed with fructose diet were 25%~40% longer than those fed without fructose, which made the mice gain weight. The reason is that fructose can improve the survival rate of intestinal cells and increase the length of intestinal villi. With the increase of villi length, the surface area of intestine also expands, which increases the nutritional absorption and fat content of high-fat food. Researchers say that we can use the results of this study to try to shorten human intestinal villi to reduce fat absorption.

     5. cardiovascular diseases

     The non-dairy creamer in milk tea contains trans fatty acids. Excessive intake of trans fatty acids will increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases.

     6.gout

     Drinking fructose in milk tea will also promote uric acid production, and the intake of polysaccharide may also cause insulin resistance, indirectly reduce uric acid excretion and increase the risk of gout attack.

     7. insomnia

     The caffeine content of milk tea is not low. Some researchers have tested the caffeine content of milk tea sold in Shanghai. There is a big difference in the caffeine content of 42 milk tea samples. The difference between the highest and lowest content is more than 10 times, ranging from 2.57 to 27.90 mg /100 g, with an average of 11.8 mg /100 g. That is to say, drinking a cup of 450 ml milk tea may consume 53.1 mg of caffeine, which is almost equivalent to 2 packets of instant coffee.

     Caffeine can refresh the mind, especially at night, which makes people sleepy and difficult to fall asleep.

     This article is scientifically checked by Zhang Na, an associate researcher of Peking University Institute of Public Health.