Disclaimer: A Word of Caution - Association vs Causation

I just wanted to back up for a moment and talk about association vs causation. I myself had a lot of trouble with this when I first learnt about it, and I think it's worthwhile to mention it here. Most of the studies that I have cited here do not use randomized controlled trials because of it is unfeasible and impractical to do such studies on the environmental scale that I am considering risk factors for obesity and comorbid conditions.

Association or correlation basically means that there is a trend that seems to go along with another trend. So for example, one of the things that obesity seems to be related to is a lower socioeconomic status in a community. However this is an association and not a causation. The studies that have found this out are observational studies, and you cannot find out about causation from these studies.

Causation requires researchers to conduct experimental studies that control for variables, and have control groups to compare a certain experimental or intervention group. So for example, one of the studies talked about having specialty coffee shops having a protective associative effect on risk of obesity. This is only a correlation and does not mean specialty coffee shops will prevent obesity. The study needs to be accounted for by other explanations such as the fact that specialty coffee shops are often more densely placed in communities with higher SES demographics.