@MissA You say you are not looking to argue with me, yet you are being argumentative with your bolded statements. You want to learn and gather information? Okay, sit back and learn. The way science works, and the way medicine works is that you have a hypothesis, you develop a test, and you see if the test proves your hypothesis. The quality of the results depends upon the quality of the test.
When someone makes a claim such as “Goji berries prevent you from catching a cold” (and yes, I realize you didn’t write that but I’m using that as an example) what you need to do is develop a test. One test would be you put 100 healthy volunteers in a room that has been sprayed with a cold virus. Give 50% placebo and 50% gogi berries and see how many of each group come down with the cold. If you want to be unethical about it but enhance the validity, don’t tell them that the room is contaminated with a cold virus.
Do goji berries hold nutritional value? Of course they do, just like strawberries, blueberries, and tomatoes. But if someone wants to claim that they have extra health benefits, then they need to develop a test that proves it.
So I counter your reportedly-not-argumentative-but-argumentative-anyway bolded statement with my own statement, not bolded: Anybody who wants to show goji berries have extra health benefits needs to prove it. Otherwise the null hypothesis stands—they’re just another fruit.