Digested by the stomach. The pearls in bubble tea are normally made of cassava starch, and the amylopectin content in cassava starch is as high as 83%, so pearls with a high sense of export can be made.

However, pure tapioca starch can't make pearls full of elasticity. Nowadays, it is more common to add wheat protein to them. Even so, some merchants feel that the elasticity is not enough. In order to make pearls more chewy, they add synthetic polymer materials. Polymer materials are plastics, and such ingredients cannot be absorbed by the human body.

Extended data

As for "pearls", generally, powder balls with larger particles are used, and the diameter after cooking is about 7mm or more. Otherwise, the powder balls are too small, and it is easy to become "full of pearls" when using a large-caliber tea straw, and it is not convenient to taste the bite of round and fragrant Q.

For a while, the foam tea shops in South Taiwan Province called bubble tea with large powder round as "Boba milk tea", while those with small powder round as "bubble tea". However, in North Taiwan Province, rare milk shops usually only sell "bubble tea", and all of them use large pink balls, which later became a unified name and specification for the whole island.