An informal lesson in reading “squishy science” papers touting “associations” and “correlations” would include looking at data sources and the means of obtaining them. For example, this sentence, in a posting of a paper’s abstract (followed by the paper itself) touting some rather scary statements is a red flag:
“Extensive dietary information was collected approximately every 4 years with a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire.”
1. Self-reporting. 2. “Squishy” term: “semiquantitative.” Those two things alone, quite apart from the simple fact that no mechanism for the squishy report “results” was even suggested by the questionable data means that the paper might be interesting, but not all that interesting. It might give someone a place to start making guesses, but there’s nothing that would be as firm as a hypothesis lurking anywhere in this or other “squishy” papers.
There are tons and tons and tons of squishy “peer reviewed” papers out there, hiding the facts of poor data and little real information in statistical manipulation and other squish.
No, I’ll not link the paper. Heck, you can probably find it by searching on the one sentence I quoted, so maybe that’s just petty of me. 😉