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Health Studies do not Prove Cause and Effect
As an engineer I do not understand why the media publish health studies that do not demonstrate cause and effect. The typical study goes something like this:
Researchers found that those who:
------ exercised regularly
--or--
------ ate fruits and vegetables
throughout life were less likely to have contracted xyz disease than
those who did not.
One can not make such type of conclusions without first proving there is a relationship between the variables. The conclusions are as absurd as saying "people who eat chocolate are less likely to contract xyz disease". While the statement may be true for the sample population , it does not establish there is any relationship between chocolate and xyz disease.
Using the health study approach, I could argue that bridges made of steel are less likely to break compared to those made of wood. Why? Because historically and statiscally steel bridges have a better track record than wooden bridges.
However, any decent bridge engineer knows they can build a wooden bridge that is 10X stronger than a steel bridge made of thin and undersized beam sections! This is because they understand the relationship between loads, forces, stresses, and material properties. Detailed mathematics , physics and chemistry can explain what the relationships are.
However, in medicine it seems the health studies really have not identified the association between exercise and heart disease or smoking and lung cancer. They seem content with simply observing that some association may exist which is just as primitive as saying "all bridges made of steel are less likely to break than wooden bridges".
I realize that any theory has at its foundation statements which are accepted as true without being proven. You cannot build a theory starting with nothing. It just seems that other sciences are able to successfully dig a lot deeper into the foundations than medicine is able to.