Healthy Basics
Sometimes all of us feel like having some kinds of foods or drinks which aren’t so healthy. These things include:
BUT- these foods and drinks have a lot of fat, salt, or sugar, and not enough of the good stuff. If you eat them regularly, you can put on weight and risk getting diabetes or heart disease.
It’s ok to eat some of these foods sometimes if you:
For small amounts, think 2 to 3 sweet biscuits, one small can of soft drink, 30g potato crisps (that’s less than a small packet), 2 scoops of ice cream, half a small chocolate bar.
Soft drinks are full of sugar.
In one 375ml can there is 8 teaspoons of sugar.
It is easy to consume a lot of sugar when drinking sugary drinks, because they don’t make us feel full – so we can keep drinking! Tooth decay and weight gain are common side effects from having sugar-sweetened drinks too often.
Bubble tea, also called boba tea or pearl milk tea, is a popular drink made from tea, milk (or a milk substitute), flavoured syrups, jelly and/or tapioca pearls (the ‘bubbles’) that contain added sugars. The amount of sugar and energy in bubble tea depends on what kind of tea you get, what topping you have, and how big the tea is.
For example, a regular sized (500 ml or 16 Oz) Pearl Milk Bubble Tea has 38g or 9 teaspoons of sugar.
The World Health Organisation recommends having 5 to 10 teaspoons of added sugar a day. So just one serve of bubble tea has almost 100% of recommended added sugars for the day.
Wok for Health is for young people (12 to 25 year old) from Chinese backgrounds who are looking to develop their cooking skills, eat well and keep active.