I don’t know what it is about people, but we sure like to find a cause for every effect. It starts when we’re very young – all kids love stories and it seems that what they love most is the way the stories explain the why of events, the what-caused-it that the hero must understand, most times, in order to fix it.

And we don’t outgrow the pleasure the way we outgrow liking to roll downhill or the way we grow into liking wine and kisses; people continue to hunger for stories, to stop what they’re doing to listen to a story, to look for the lesson and the moral in every event. People like plots, and people love character development.

That’s fine. I love narrative too. I think all education should be story-based. But I warn you: don’t be overready to connect cause and effect. It’s usually more complicated than it appears. Anyone can make up a tale that explains observed phenomena. If you can get enough folks to buy it, you have at least a myth and maybe a religion. But you don’t have truth.

And it’s just plain silly to observe the same situations occurring to more than one test subject and conclude that one situation is causing the other.

For example, there was a public service message on television a year or two ago, which stated that of the kids who finished high school, most had been enrolled in pre-school. It advised parents to send their kids to preschool or risk having them drop out later. Aack! I began to do what I do: I sputtered. It was obvious to me that the same parental quality – attention to what’s best for the child – could lead a parent to enroll a kid in preschool and also to take enough interest in later schooling that the parent would influence the child, when necessary, to stick it out. But it’s just crazy to think that the preschool experience in itself prevented truancy …

And recently, in Diabetes Forecast magazine, I read that there’s a statistical coincidence of poor sleep and type 2 diagnosis. Even non-diabetic test subjects, when restricted to 4 hours of sleep a night for 6 nights, showed changes in sugar metabolism. Okay. That’s not surprising. And it was refreshing to read that the scientists running the study are concluding that sleep is good for the body as well as for the brain (a fact already known to all).

What sent me sputtering (again) was the article’s conjecture that sleep deprivation may cause diabetes. Nowhere in the piece did I see the suggestion that was shining out so brightly to me I almost had to shade my eyes: the same conditions that can disrupt sleep – among them, failure to manage stress – can cause type 2.

Consider this: every case of cancer, worldwide, involves a person who regularly drinks water.