Well thank you for your factually incorrect assessment of the situation. I will take it under advisement and have decided not to tell a camp of type 1 diabetic kids that sugar causes diabetes, because then I would be as wrong as you are.

By this logic I should stop drinking water because if I drink too much I'll drown. And that's a life style modification thus water causes death.

Well that’s why I said ‘can’ lead to. I’m not saying literally everyone in that situation ends up the same, what I’m saying is it’s an indirect cause for some people. Of course there’s always other causes, whether direct or indirect.

Obviously not everyone who has a reasonable amount of sugar gets fat or diabetes.

However, NO ONE has actually claimed that straw man. This culture of 'only drink things that have at least a hundred calories of refined sugar added' is a huge problem for weight gain and diabetes.

In your analogy, yo usay removing the pancreas causes type 1 diabetes. This is absolutely a cause. Yet on the other hand you seem to be arguing that since there are other causes besides high sugar diets that can also cause type 2 diabetes, you shouldn't say high sugar diets cause diabetes.

High sugar diets are a huge risk. Some people manage to get away with such a diet without diabetes (but likely get other issues with weight gain), and some people have the misfortune to get it anyway, but the fact remains a high sugar diet can result in diabetes, though arguments can be had about how direct/indirect the relationship is.

"can lead to" isn't medical terminology; it's just ordinary English, and you haven't done anything to convince me that "can lead to" has a specific meaning in medicine and what that meaning is. See further down this subthread for a quote from professionals that backs me up.

I don't know why doctors would have any authority on my statement which does not mention medicine. My statement is about logic and language, not about medicine.

I suspect you're also wrong in the particular case. Let's see what the first article I pulled out says:

SSB [sugar sweetened beverage] consumption can lead to weight gain, inflammation, and T2DM [type 2 diabetes].

The fact that it talks about drinks directly rather than sugar is, if anything, more relevant to our discussion! Now, there are many caveats in the paper, obviously, but we are talking about a narrow statement that consumption of sugar (or drinks containing it) "can lead to diabetes" and you denied it.

I think you're hung up on the direct causal links to the point where you're objecting to perfectly ordinary turns of phrase. "Can lead to" does not mean the same as "directly causes." Do you have a way, in your preferred language, of referring to the path from too much sugar to diabetes, without explicitly mentioning weight gain?