Andrea Collier talks about the ‘fad’ of lemon water in this video. She makes the point that people are being lied too, yes, but there are testimonies where people ‘feel’ it works. It’s not really someones fault to have a belief they’ve been lied about. They have some semblance of justification for it.
What’s interesting to me is that I too have fallen for this, at least in one case, where I was trying to get leaner. I stopped really eating carbs. Then, I attributed being lean to a lack of carbs which is not what makes sense scientifically. You can still find correlations in your life for this belief but if there is a ‘better’ justification for it, you should defer.