 A new study from China says that Boba Milk Tea, yes, the beloved Zanzu Naita, can lead to depression, anxiety, and even be addictive. David, is this a case of correlation or causation? If you drink too much taro, you will not believe in tomorrow. You will be in sorrow and have no money to borrow. This is going viral right now, Andrew. I'm not going to lie. I can't believe this is real. This is a real study from Beijing, Andrew. Milk tea addiction, link to it, anxiety, depression amongst use, and even possibly, suicidal ideation. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Guys, we're going to look into the study of what we can find, alright? This study comes from China. I feel like there's some ulterior motives here to get kids off of Boba. Anyways, we're going to get into it. Don't worry, Boba's not going anywhere, but maybe this is a cautionary warning. Please hit that like button. Check out other episodes of Hot Pop Boys. But one thing that doesn't cause anxiety, depression for sure is Sma La Sauce. In fact, it only can spice up your life and spice up any dish you put it on. It will tingle your taste buds and give you a sensation. Yeah, you know the study from Beijing applies to Boba, but not to Sma La. Sma La can only improve your life. David, can you read the study? Oh my goodness. Well, literally it says this. The damage comes when students use milk tea as a means to self-soothe and escape from their reality. Milk tea can function as a strategy for self-soothing in the face of stressors and difficult emotions like loneliness. Experiencing negative emotions can drive individuals to engage in particular behaviors as means of escape. Andrew, they got correlation factors. Long story short, Andrew. Their conclusion was because they saw that people who drink more Boba have a higher level of like suicidal ideation. Our findings highlighted that milk tea consumption may lead to addiction as it is associated with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Oh my gosh. And then the study was published in last November. Found the consumption of milk tea might lead to symptoms of addiction such as craving or dependency, inability to stop and guilty feelings. Oh my goodness, David. I think there was a lot of comments and I guess what do you have your first initial thoughts? Like, what do you think this study is trying to do? Is it a real study or is this like kind of like something lost in translation where they find a correlation but now it's being worded like it's the causation? Long story short is this. I believe the study was real. I would not be shocked if that's even there's a correlation. I don't think they necessarily made up their findings. But yes, the correlation and the causation was so unbelievably clearly like tiger parenting to be like anti-sugar. Possibly there's a Taiwan play in there. I think it has more due to sugar because Singapore recently launched a war on sugar. But this was just the most old school outdated, outmoded essentially tiger parent way of convincing everybody to stop drinking so much Boba. Which will eventually, let's be honest, lead to heart disease due to caloric surplus and things like that. I'm not doubting that. But it's just so ridiculous to the outside world. Do you think China's like, yeah, you know where we have to outlaw Boba and we have to find a way because Singapore did it first and Singapore is so successful. So we are going to do what Singapore does and we're going to outlaw Boba. We're even going to do Singapore even one up because Singapore, they're just trying to give it a D grade, F grade. For us, we're going to say that you will not see tomorrow if you drink too much. Dude, I think it's crazy how this study doesn't want to just look at the stress that students go through and that's the reason why they go to Boba. So I'll say this, Boba is not a healthy drink. I'll say it again, it's never been healthy. It is a dessert drink. It is a nice drink to have that you should have in moderation. Now, I think what is happening really is a lot of kids, they're either lonely, they're either single children or they don't love their lives or they don't love their opportunities. They don't love studying. Studying is very hard. There's the whole gow-cow. And then there's a number of factors. Being the only child, China's economy is shrinking. They didn't handle COVID. The university system is very rigid, hyper-rigid. So in this already somewhat anxious place, you're building some anxiety, you go for Boba, which is a tasty drink that's going to make you feel better. It's got a lot of sugar. It's got calories. It's smooth. It's creamy. It's going to release dopamine. It does make you feel good. I just had a Boba for the first time in a few weeks and it was pretty good. And not only that, Andrew, talk about how pleasant Boba shops feel. Have you ever seen anybody insult somebody in a Boba shop? Ma run. You've never seen it happen in a Boba shop. A Boba shop is like a country club. Addicted to Boba, the actual product, why not? It's really as simple as people are just addicted to going to get Boba. David, hey David, you want to go get Boba? Yeah, let's go get Boba. It's already a fun time. I think people are addicted to going to the Boba shop maybe because that's their outlet. That's what's fun. That's associated with being fun and with friends. It's almost like one of the only easy dopamine triggers probably in mainland China, right? I mean, I guess it would be the equivalent of looking at energy drink, Cheeto consumption, potato chip consumption amongst the gamer crowd in America. And then you're drawing this correlation between purchasing alienware performance gaming equipment and Cheetos and like body fat content, BMI's or like blood pressure. Yes, they're all correlated though. But they're not necessarily directly causated, right? Yeah, listen, I'll be honest. If you buy Boba and you drink it every single day, then you're clearly reaching for some type of feeling that you get from Boba and you need Boba for your comfort. It's like your security blanket or something. You know what I mean? So anyways, there's no, there's like, I cannot believe that Boba would cause depression. I could see people who are depressed go for Boba even more though. Makes sense. Right, right, right. Why do you think Asian parents and it seems like Chinese parents in particular, because they're the most old school of all the Asian parents. But Asian parents in general, it depends on how old school your parents are. I understand there's variants. One parents old school, one parents new school. Why do you think they believe they don't really differentiate as much as Western parents between correlation and causation? For example, you get tattoos, you get earrings, you bad, you a gangster, you sell drugs, you do drugs. Is there potentially some correlation between those things? But are they directly causated? But why? But why do you think that old school Chinese parents, but any Asian parents, but particularly Chinese parents, they really believe in correlation almost as an equivalent to causation. And here's a couple of charts. They are different, right? So basically just to explain the difference Andrew. So some people are saying, think about it, when the temperature goes up, people, the sunburn rate goes up and ice cream sales go up. So those two things are correlated ice cream sales and sunburn rates. But the direct causation is the increased weather. So I'm saying that how come, but that, but Asian parents would be like, Oh my gosh, ice cream sales is going up for sure. It's directly correlated to the sunburn rate. Right. Well, they're basically drawing like a domino impact. Yeah. And I guess people are saying that when you draw domino effects from things, it works and it doesn't, right? Like it's like a heavy handed approach to mitigating downside risk. It's crazy for people to think that it causes depression though. Like that's just not like, it's just sounds ridiculous. And I don't think people, I think you should just explain to how, how unhealthy it is or how costly it is. Doesn't it make more sense? Like didn't more people start making coffee at home, especially with the pandemic, but they started making more coffee at home. And then once people were like, Hey man, save that 550 a day in the morning and then you can invest that. So you invest like $28 into the stock market and said, What if they just redirected or reorganized their flow chart where they said, yeah, a lot of people who feel like there's no hope for the future and they cannot get ahead in life, they're going to turn to coping mechanisms such as gaming and Boba. Right. That would have been a more logical thing without with using still within the frame of the information gathering. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, like dude, definitely like depression is connected to eating unhealthy foods, eating ice cream. Because it makes you feel good, right? Yeah. Cause you want chips. You just want the things that make you feel good. No one gets depressed and then go eat kale. Doesn't happen. That's a good point. Um, somebody just said murder rates and ice cream sales also peak around the same time in America. Do you, what do you guys think Andrew murder rates? Because Andrew in the summer, human interactions are increased. Gun deaths actually soar in America, but so do ice cream sales. Correlation versus causation. People taking breaks, vacation. Somebody said everything in this woke generation causes anxiety, man. This is so stupid, man. Of course, other people were saying, you know, for me, a sport of tea actually calms me down. It seems highly unlikely it causes depression, but these people were European and they have tea time. European tea time is different than boba time. Would you agree? Yeah. European tea time is not treated like a dessert. I feel like it's treated more like a... Part of brunch, lunch, I don't know. I don't even know. It just serves a different societal function. Somebody said, what's the difference between this and getting a mocha frappuccino from Starbucks? Is that the equivalent? I'm not Asian. Can somebody explain it to me? I would go ahead and say the frappuccino probably has more caffeine because it's coffee based. Equal amount of calories, would you agree? Probably equal. A mocha peppermint mocha frappuccino? Yeah, probably similar, but boba, if you jam-pack it with the boba pearls and brown sugar, it probably has a little bit more calories. But just as much milk and cream. Someone said, for example, I am a middle America white man and I've been noticing my daughter is 12 and she has been asking me to go get boba tea quite often. But ultimately, it seems just part of a certain youth culture just like animes, it's all new to me. Yeah, I think the only issue about boba, it's like getting a milkshake. But you know how milkshakes you can't get every day, but there's kind of something about boba that makes you want to get it every day. So it's a little sneaky in those calories because people are like, yeah, I could drink a boba four or five times a week, but you wouldn't say, oh, yeah, I get four or five milkshakes a week. But it's probably the same amount of calories. Do you have any thoughts on middle America, their children being exposed to boba now the kids that are like 10 years old? Because I've seen that because there is a country-ass part of Seattle. If you guys know about Seattle, it gets real ruled like the second you get like 40 minutes out of the city. I remember in Covington, there's like a ton of boba shops now and I see kids with like freckles that look like they're like, they never seen an Asian before getting boba like once a week. Yeah, no, I would, I would, yeah. But I think you just got to make sure you put it in the dessert category. Like you're not eating boba more than you eat ice cream. Do you think like the older grandpas are like, so are you saying this is kind of like the ice cream soda parlors of the 1942s? Yeah, it is, it is. Instead of a banana split, you're just getting this mango passion fruit. Yeah, man. Oh, banana splits are really good. Dude, I missed the ice cream soda parlors. I'm not going to lie. This Indian comment said, there are two types of humans on earth. There's homo sapiens, then there's Chinese. I'll say this, man, I just think that Chinese are the most different for how high profile they are and how much they produce. Like they're just like, it's hard to understand. They produce a lot, but they're just really different. Somebody said, I wish people would realize that a habit is not an addiction. Learn the differences. Very few substances cause hardcore addiction. Other cries, other addictions are simply cravings, not a physical reaction to something stopping. Even cocaine and meth are not addictions. They are habits and cravings. For example, are these addicts going through physical withdrawal symptoms? I had to look this up because I was like, whoa, what a statement. This person claimed that cocaine and meth are not addictive. So here's what I looked up. It is true that the withdrawal effects are not as extreme as, for example, and this is crazy to talk about on our channel, heroin. Right, heroin is like super strong. Yes, so that is what they're talking about. They're talking about extremity of withdrawal. And I guess that it is true that even of hard drugs, there's different ranks of withdrawals. So basically this person was claiming, Andrew, that if we have to have like different addiction levels, almost like burn levels, addiction level one, addiction level two, you know, like a third degree burn, a second degree burn. Now we're getting real technical with everything. Someone said, leave it to the CCP to blame these issues on a coffee drink instead of their oppressive policies or maybe they're collapsing economy and different things that the youth are probably stressed out about. How much do you think it is that they were just, that there's a lot of things going on in China and so the agencies blaming the Boba, but the people are just going to the Boba because all the other things are happening. All right, it's not really a war on Boba until Xi Jinping comes out and says it, all right. I mean, these are all just little studies that get kind of blown out of proportion because they get spread on the internet and go viral. They're fine, they're a good headline. So it's not really the biggest issue. I don't think they think Boba is a huge issue, but the message here and I wish China would just say this instead would just educate people on calories and that would make people more healthy versus like, you know what I mean? This is like an old auntie telling you to eat a lot of carrots or else you're going to go blind. Just do what Singapore does, man. Just do what Singapore does. Just do what Singapore does, man. They got it right, man, for the most part. They still got some old Nongchuan holdovers ways of doing things, though. This is some superstition, right? This is some classic Chinese superstition. Yeah, don't drink Boba, okay? Or your life will be over, okay? Yeah. Man, I'll say this. Don't get Boba with your body or you cannot study. I definitely think it's an old-school thing in Asia to really not differentiate between correlation and causation and obviously when it suits them people still slip into some old-school thinking patterns, you know what I mean? Whether it's TCM, I'm not going to lie, guys. We got to move on from that, too, probably. David, if you continue to eat and drink all the tapioca pearls, you will never find a girl. You know what I've realized, though, about correlation and causation? A lot of Asian parents, you know how they're always flipping out? They're like, oh, you smoke weed once. You're going to die, you know what I mean? Because they're basically thinking in their head, the probability of adopting bad degenerate behaviors has just jumped up 3%. But that 3% to them is everything. Right, right. Well, that's 300% more than what they thought you were at. They're like, oh, my God, why are you doing all this? My son is dying. You're like, man, you just moved from 1% degen to 4% degen. That is a 400% increase. Dude, I'll tell you a couple stories. I remember one time I was accidentally speeding 8 miles over the speed limit with my mom. And we passed by a cop car that was pulling over another car. And I remember mom just acted like I shot somebody. She was like, no! It's over! And another time, I got to say this, our cousin's wife, who is more from, you know, whatever, from rural China, she screamed at us for ordering cold water at Dim Sum before. I'm saying that that's the equivalent of this study. Like, I'm just like, man, sometimes some of this stuff is so old-school. But yeah, of course, guys, sugar, it can cause visceral fat. You know, it can domino into a bunch of other issues. High fructose corn syrup. I'm sure that's ultimately what they're trying to caution against, but the methodology is just very old and villagey. Anyway, guys, let us know what you think of this study. Until next time, we're the Hop Hop Boys. We out. Peace.