Oh fuck that.
I presume you also hate Monavie then? How about the Sambazon guys? How about the people who SWEAR by Acai including many Xgames/"extreme sports" athletes (Burnquist, etc etc etc).
Or how about ANY anti-wrinkle cream, 60 minutes/Dateline/20-20 routinely test them and find they're basically all the same shit, this has been true for years. Yet walk into Sak's and find someone buying $300 cream who swears by it and feels good because she sees fewer wrinkles. Is that not worth $300 to her?
How about generic versus branded over the counter drugs (Tylenol/Advil/etc) - do you buy the generic? (I don't).
Huge portions of consumable products both offline and online, cheap and expensive, continuity and non, "credible" and "non" are very questionably 'needed' or can be 'proven' to be better (does Tide really make your whites whiter than other competitive detergents?)
This is marketing and this is capitalism. (This MAY even be SPARRRTAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!1111) Wash the sand out of your vagina.
I do buy the generic. There are a lot of cases where the brand name is better than the no name (like perhaps Tide, I have no idea - but Heinz ketchup is better than any no name ketchup, period)...
But, I also take your point, in a way. Even if the product doesn't work it can have economic value to the end user who feels good about it. That said, if you don't have a standard for what truth is, how does anyone ever find good information?
Obviously acai berry does not make people lose weight. Perhaps it makes them feel better, perhaps it motivates them to actually lose weight, perhaps it has real economic value, you're right. I still feel there's
something to be said for the claims.
That said, I'm a libertarian non-interventionist at heart, so I'm not sure how it should be dealt with. Perhaps private market weight loss accreditation needs to arise and get the word out there.
Edit: and just to add, yeah, I hate Monavie too. I hate Monavie more than I hate acai rebills, because of their fucking friend-to-friend style marketing tactics. That stuff is fucking scum. That said, I don't think it shouldn't exist, nor do I expect the big evil government to step in and clean it up.
Edit 2: suppose Burnquist was paid to support acai, and doesn't disclose that. Is this right or wrong? Neoclassical economics doesn't answer this question as clearly as your noninterventionist ideals would like to think. I don't think a government can fix that problem, but I still think its probably wrong to induce information problems (such as nondisclosure).