Jia Duo Bao Herbal Tea?

My mom keeps insisting that I drink this thing called Jia Duo Bao because of its many "health benefits". I was very skeptical. Here's what it looks like:

My girlfriend and I looked at the ingredients on the nutritional label the other night and we could not recognize most of the ingredients. The only two ingredients that we knew were water and sugar. She looked at the sugar amount and said "this is just sugar water!". There's 28 grams of sugar and I wasn't sure whether or not that's a lot. Is it? Well, I know that one teaspoon holds about 4 grams of sugar. So there's about 7 teaspoons in this drink.

Okay, that seems like a lot if I imagine myself just putting sugar in my mouth. But is it? According to an article published by the American Heart Association, the recommended upper limit for men is about 150 calories of sugar, which is 9 teaspoons. For women, it's 100 calories, which is 6 teaspoons. So if I have this one drink, I'm already close to 80% of your daily limit. That doesn't seem very good. I'm a pretty active guy, so I wouldn't get too worried having a soft drink every now and then. However, this make me less confident about the "health benefits" that my mom refers to.

In addition to water and sugar, there's seven additional ingredients that neither of us were familiar with. So I looked them up.

1. Mesona - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platostoma_palustre
2. White Frangipani - http://www.allthingsfrangipani.com/frangipanis.html
3. Microcos - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcos
4. Chrysanthemum - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysanthemum
5. Japanese Honeysuckle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonicera_japonica
6. Heal All - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunella_vulgaris
7. Chinese Licorice - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycyrrhiza_uralensis

Turns out, all of these are plants, which is probably where the "herbal" part of this drink comes from. In the front of the can, you see this line of text:

JiaDuoBao Herbal Tea - Made from prime herbal ingredients

I did some research on the company behind this product, Hangzhou Jiaduobao Drinks Co, and found that they've actually surpassed coca-cola in terms of sales in China with this product. They market the drink as a sweet drink with many health benefits from the herbal ingredients. In other words, it's like coke, but supposedly good for you. Good in what way? Lowering your internal heat, for example. I don't really know what that means so I can't really say whether or not this is even a real thing (as in can it actually lower your internal heat, whatever that is?), let alone one whether that has any health benefits whatsoever. I mean, maybe you don't need your internal heat lowered, I don't know. 

I'll probably dig into this some more. In the meantime, I think I'll be staying away from this sugar water.