Americans identifying as LGBTQ+

Between 2012 and 2022, Americans identifying as LGBTQ+ and US frozen pizza sales both increased, correlating at 0.9632 across eleven data points. The reading that coming out increases frozen pizza consumption—or vice versa—is available to anyone willing to abandon causal reasoning entirely. What the data actually shows is that the 2010s were a decade in which Americans became more open about their identities and more enthusiastic about convenience food, and these two facts about the same population share a timeline and nothing else. The frozen pizza does not care about identity. Identity does not care about the frozen pizza. The decade produced both.

LGBTQ+ self-identification grew from 3.5% to over 7%, driven by generational change. Frozen pizza sales grew from about $5 billion to over $7 billion, driven by product innovation and convenience. Both are upward trends across the same 11-year window in the same country, driven by independent social and consumer forces.

Eleven data points of two things rising in the same country during the same decade will produce a strong correlation. The data describes the decade, not a relationship between identity and pizza.