The answer to your question is literally answered by my comment that you’re replying to. Frequentist statistics cannot be used to affirm the null. That is, you cannot say “cardiovascular deaths was not significantly associated, therefore SFA does not cause CVD mortality”.

So I’m not disagreeing with or omitting anything in the study. The study said no significant association with CVD mortality. Ok, no problem. That doesn’t mean SFA doesn’t cause CVD mortality.

However, the study does show that SFA is associated with CVD events. So there’s a significant finding. It’s not cherry picking, this is just how frequentist statistics works.