Do scientists just randomly publish obvious nonsense now?
The causation is obviously in the other direction: Healthy people socialize more.
Proposing the inverted causation, without even examining the alternative is ridiculous. This is just trash science.
Having a correlational result and using it to pretend that one has to cause the other with absolutely no mechanism is not science, it is reading tea leaves.
A healthy person has more opportunities and more abilities to engage in social activities. The less healthy a person becomes the rarer those opportunities become. Basically every single health condition, especially the most common ones like obesity, make it harder for people to engage in social activity.
The alternative explanation is pretty simple and does not require some magical mechanism whereby social interactions are somehow causing your body to age slower.
Exactly right. I doubt we can get to causation unless we conduct proper long term experiment instead of just looking at correlations and assuming causation goes one way.
The study says social bonds are associated with lower inflammation. It's well documented that inflammation causes anxiety and depression. How does this affect one's social activity? Negatively, the mechanism is very clear - you don't socialize if you are depressed and anxious. And somehow they assume the reverse casual relationship without explaining the mechanism for it.
The causation is obviously in the other direction: Healthy people socialize more.
Proposing the inverted causation, without even examining the alternative is ridiculous. This is just trash science.
Having a correlational result and using it to pretend that one has to cause the other with absolutely no mechanism is not science, it is reading tea leaves.
A healthy person has more opportunities and more abilities to engage in social activities. The less healthy a person becomes the rarer those opportunities become. Basically every single health condition, especially the most common ones like obesity, make it harder for people to engage in social activity.
The alternative explanation is pretty simple and does not require some magical mechanism whereby social interactions are somehow causing your body to age slower.