Originally published at: Boba beware! Researchers in Beijing warn of an "emerging hazardous addiction problem of milk tea among youths" | Boing Boing
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Sugar is a drug.
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That seems like the slowest “addiction problem” I’ve ever heard of.
Also, what’s with the weird fuzzy number of “at least 6-11 cups”?
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This study brought to you by Douyin! Having trouble with your teen drinking too much milk tea? Try Douyin, the totally harmless pastime for kids!
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Taiwan’s secret weapon against the PRC!
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The results section is very poorly written. The first thing they focus on the 77% who consume very little without providing info on the small percentage consuming amounts that potentially indicate addiction.
I read quite far before eventually finding the percentage who consume excessive amounts and still didn’t see how much they consume before I gave up. Awful writing.
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The survey most likely used fixed brackets that you select from in a multiple choice format.
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FTA:
Milk tea has gained worldwide popularity in the recent years (Wu, 2020). It refers to an umbrella term encompassing all beverages sold in milk tea shops, such as milk tea, fruit tea, floral tea, bubble tea, and others.
This is an amazingly nonspecific “addiction.” And 6-11 cups of tea in a year? One cup less than once a month to trigger addictive behavior? Color me unconvinced. There are too many confounding variables in play here to pin this as an addiction to… some unspecified something sold in tea shops? Give me something to sink my teeth into here. What I am seeing is “kids who frequent milk tea shops seem to have a higher incidence of mental health issues.” Now, exploring why this is would be very interesting. Claiming an addiction here seems very premature.
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*laughs in British
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I thought of you as I typed that!
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6 in a day is a high average for me but not rare.
Maybe these kids are frequenting bars so that they have somewhere to socialise? The tea is the reason to go, not the addiction.
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Not at all an authority on Chinese culture, of course. But I was wondering if this was a case of kids seeking a peer group. There are a lot of reasons an out-group might have more mental health issues, if that is the case. Tea consumption is not one of them, though.
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Exactly, correlation isn’t causation. As you have just pointed out sometimes the effect and cause are mixed up 
(and in this case I was struggling to come up with an example and you have the perfect one right there!)
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Couldn’t they have said “at least six cups” without changing the meaning at all?
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Looks dangerous…
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Why now?? Bubble tea has been available outside of Taiwan since at least 1994 (when I first became aware of it as a huge phenomenon in the Vancouver area, even among non-Chinese folks like me), so what’s prompting the hand-wringing after nearly 30 years?
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Did they attempt to isolate once a month milk tea from the rest of the sugar noise?
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If I were some sort of dreadful cynic I’d suggest that xeno-tea consumption might be getting caught up in the same rise in bellicose-but-thin-skinned nationalism that has them fretting about clothing ‘detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese nation’; whatever that means exactly.
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Is this Beijing’s “Avocado Toast” moment?
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Oh dang, given that the psycho-active ingredient in boba tea is the tea, and how dangerous it is even when heavily diluted, it’s a good thing that no one drinks… tea… in China. Um.
And drinking the hard stuff, straight, no boba!
Hmm, I wonder if anything might be having a negative mental health impact on the youth of China today…
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