this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Almost all science and logic in the history of the world is based on correlation. Discovering the causal link comes later, or more often than not never.
Your glib comment seems smart to people on the internet, but what it actually demonstrates is a complete lack of understand of both words.
Yes, but in case of this kind of nutrition/health studies the correlation=/=causation is often a big problem. There are usually so many things at play and the studies just look at a tiny subset of them, making the results irrelevant or just plain wrong. I think this field would benefit greatly from a more ecological approach - in ecology, scientists often use methods for multidimensional analysis of a big number of factors that can or do influence the studied problem. This is rarely seen in medicine and nutrition, unfortunately.