Brands Bird's Nest Drink, Yo

My mom recently bought my sister a case of birds nest drink. I remember drinking this when I was younger but I never questioned what it was. I was just told to drink it because it was good for me. I also knew that it was really expensive (~$10 per small bottle) so it's gotta be good right? This time I'm going to do a little bit of digging to figure out what the heck this drink is.

The main ingredients listed are:

• Water
• Rock Sugar
• Dry Bird's Nest
• Gellan Gum

The two unknown ingredients in this list are dry birds nest and gellan gum. So what are they? So turns out the dry birds nest is exactly what it sounds like. It's a birds nest. But what's with the word "dry"? Well, turns out - this is a special kind of birds nest that's not constructed out of mud, twigs, leaves or feathers. It's made of bird saliva. Yup. It's created by a bird called a swallow that uses its saliva to build a nest that eventually dries up and solidifies. If you look inside the drink, you'll see a bunch of semi-transparent, gelatinous substances floating around. Those are pieces of dried birds nest.

Gellan gum is a type of gum that's used as a stabilizer in this case. A stabilizer is an additive to food used to preserve its structure. In this case, I think it's dissolved in the drink to prevent the dry nests you see in the drink from settling at the bottom.

The company behind this drink, Brands, claims that this drink helps reduce "heatiness". Heatiness is a topic that seemed to come up all the time in my household that nobody could really explain. It's supposedly bad. French fries are heaty. Chicken wings are heaty. Chips are heaty. Apparently anything fried was heaty and heaty is bad. Anything that reduces heatinesss, like bird saliva, was good.

So what's this mysterious heatiness?

Some answers I came across:

Source #1:

"The heatiness and cooling effect of foods refer to their capacity to generate sensations - either hot or cold in our body. They do not refer to the state of the food but its effect on our bodies. For example, tea is a cooling food. This means that it generates cold energy in our body." - http://www.benefits-of-honey.com/heaty.html

Source #2:

“Heatiness” and its opposite, “coldness” (not “cooling”, which is actually a traditional Chinese medicine treatment method), is a classification system that describe the factors that cause certain types of illnesses, says Lau Kiew Teck, a TCM practitioner at Raffles Chinese Medicine. 

And those factors can be food- or weather-related. For example, durians and chocolates are considered “heaty” foods because they possess factors that cause ailments that are associated with excessive “heatiness”, such cough with sticky phlegm, chapped lips and mouth ulcers. " - http://www.menshealth.com.sg/health/what-do-heaty-and-cooling-tcm-really-mean

Source #3:

characteristic of certain foods or stimulants said to cause emotional or physical reactions associated with temper, fever, passion, excess, or true heat. Editorial Note: From Chinese culture and medicine.  - https://www.waywordradio.org/heatiness/

Source #4 (most accurate):

a female gangsta; causes jealous bitches to hate because they're bitch ass cunt motherfuckers. - http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=heaty

Most of the answers I came across seem to agree that heatiness is not so much about the actual heat quality of the food (whether it's actually hot or cold) than it is about the effects of the food. In traditional chinese medicine, the consumption of a food that are likely to cause certain effects or symptoms such as mouth ulcers or yellow urine are considered "heaty". From what I've read so far, it's not clear whether or not there's consensus within TCM about what symptoms associated with heatiness are and the types of foods that cause them. I'd also be curious to know how that attribution is established. Like, is it scienced or nah?