Sydney Smith, aka MedPundit, is dubious about the Actual Causes of Death I cite below, pointing out that the

Journal of the American Medical Association published a paper deceptively titled Actual Causes of Death, 2000 that claimed that obesity was gaining on tobacco as the number one cause of death in the United States. Except that the paper's objective wasn't to quantify actual causes of death, it was to attribute the risk of death to various behaviors -- behaviors that were preselected by the researchers.

She then cites SCIENCE WITHOUT SENSE on attributed risk:

ATTRIBUTABLE RISK MAY NOT BE SCIENTIFICALLY JUSTIFIABLE. IT IS CALCULATED FROM VERY UNCERTAIN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATIONS. THESE ASSOCIATIONS MAY NOT REFLECT TRUE BIOLOGICAL CAUSE-AND-EFFECT. AT BEST, A STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION IS A REPRESENTATION OF WHAT WAS OBSERVED IN A PARTICULAR POPULATION STUDIED AND IS NOT APPLICABLE TO OTHER POPULATIONS NOT STUDIED.