By Estefania Zavala
March marks the beginning of National Nutrition Month (NNM), a month-long holiday in honor of eating well and making healthy choices. NNM is timed well, arriving long after New Year’s resolutions may have faded and just after binging on Valentine’s Day chocolates have destroyed diets. The primary focus of NNM is awareness.
NNM urges Americans to look at their eating habits and make the conscious choice to eat better. But what about those mysterious, ambiguous foods that one consumes without thinking? A staple of the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) resident’s diet: Boba tea.
Boba tea is pervasive throughout Southern California but especially throughout the SGV where it seems you can walk into any restaurant and walk out with an iced milk tea Boba. So whether you are in Cafe Roule in Temple City or Flour+Tea in Pasadena, how can you keep nutrition in mind while still enjoying the 626’s quintessential drink?
Boba pearls are made from tapioca starch, the same ingredient in a grandmother’s tapioca pudding. The starch is derived from a cassava root, a potato-like plant. So Boba is a vegetable? Well, not really. Boba is a highly processed food with countless additives. Furthermore, the cassava root is as tasteless as you might expect a root vegetable to be so it is soaked in sugary syrups to give it that sweet, soft texture.
Once the Boba pearls are ready, your beloved Boba barista pours a sugary sweet drink atop of them. These drinks come in an amazing variety of flavors ranging from banana slush, to honeydew milk tea, to black sesame to lavender latte. These flavors and additives range in nutritional value but they all have one thing in common – an astounding amount of sugar. All of this culminates to make Boba drinks a distinctly poor drink for someone who is nutrition-conscious, as it delivers a very large amount of carbs with few health benefits.
Additionally, once you are in your favorite SGV tea shop, you may be tempted to eat something like perhaps deep fried spicy tofu or a blueberry Danish. The atmosphere is conducive to staying a long time and there is usually a plethora of free wi-fi, so eventually you may slip and order a mountain of halo-halo to follow your drink. So, in order to fully honor NNM, would it be better to stay away from Boba shops altogether? Well, maybe. However, you would truly be denying yourself a unique experience to the SGV.
Instead, opt for healthier choices at these places. Most Boba tea shops still serve actual, hot herbal tea. You can add your own sugar. Or you order an iced tea with no Boba. If you absolutely must, try skipping the slush and the milk tea and get a plain black tea Boba. And of course, make good eating decisions – a lot of these places feature healthy options such as turkey sandwiches.
NNM is about realizing which foods are beneficial to you and which foods are harmful but it is not about making yourself miserable with carrot sticks. If a Boba drink does for you what it does for so many people – entertains and energizes you – then throw caution to the wind and indulge in the most popular SGV drink.
