This seems to be a favorite of media these days. I assume in an effort to get more clicks.

In the past, if the media said "The President may have have committed perjury", they'd actually lay out the evidence - President testified X, but documents suggest X is untrue.

Today it seems like "may have" is just a cop out for generating smoke where there is no fire. And when someone comes back and says "you actually have no evidence that's true" they say "well, that why we said 'may have'".

Exactly, all-cause mortality studies always seem so prone to confounding factors. The abstract of the linked paper doesn't mention if they tried to control for anything. Granted they do acknowledge this - "He cautioned that the biological connection between phthalates and early deaths has not been established, so the study does not prove phthalates were the direct cause of these early deaths."

At least they report science in a scientific way. I find it much worse when papers are sold as the "new definitive knowledge" by some newspaper and then you open the actual article and find a tiny sample size and autors thenselves listing dozens of warnings that could make their paper inconclusive.

Just curious, Did they control for the fact that people with elevated level of phtalates may be consuming more ultra processed food that are just extremely bad without any plastic?