Suggests. A fart suggests lactose intolerance but it also suggests lentils or kidney beans.
Certain words in study results are red flags. You see them all the time in anything having to do with dietary studes. 'Linked to' and 'sugggests' and 'may' and 'associated with'. They always mean that the studies weren't proper clinical studies with large sample size and control groups and all that. This of course is a fact of life with dietary studies because you can't control food intake precisely for large groups of people over a suitably long time. So the best you can do is ask people to self report their food intake and then look for even a slight correlation between people's health and some common factor. Cherry pick the one that supports what you were looking for and you have your headline.
For viral research it's bad. Do real science for that.