Choking deaths on food in the US

As Super Bowl ad costs have grown, choking deaths have risen, a correlation of 0.981 that connects the most expensive airtime in television to the most preventable cause of death in geriatric medicine. Seven million dollars buys 30 seconds of advertising. Forty dollars buys a food processor that reduces choking risk. The chart treats both as equivalent measures of a nation that spends extravagantly on some things and negligently on others.

Super Bowl ads grew from about 2.5 million to over 6.5 million per 30-second spot. Choking deaths rose with the aging population. Both seventeen-year upward curves. The advertisers and the choking victims are different demographics, but both metrics measure the same thing: a growing, aging, consuming nation where everything costs more and everything happens more every year.

Seventeen years of Super Bowl ads and choking deaths is the same chart as bed-fall deaths vs. Super Bowl ads, with a different mortality statistic and the same conclusion: a nation that invests lavishly in spectacle and parsimoniously in prevention. The ad airs, the food lodges, and the budget priorities are recorded in the coefficient.