Choking deaths on food in the US

Between 2005 and 2021, US choking deaths and lottery ticket sales both rose, correlating at 0.9639 across seventeen data points. The darkest reading is that Americans are eating their lottery tickets, which would explain both the choking and the low win rates. The more reasonable reading is that an aging, growing population both chokes more frequently and buys more lottery tickets, and seventeen years is long enough for any two upward trends to align convincingly. The lottery ticket and the choking hazard have nothing in common except a population that keeps growing older and more optimistic simultaneously.

Choking deaths rose due to population aging. Lottery sales grew from $52 billion to over $100 billion, driven by jackpot inflation and state marketing. Both are population-driven upward trends across 17 years, one demographic and one commercial, with no shared mechanism beyond the fact that more people—particularly older people—generate more of both statistics.

Seventeen years of two population-driven upward trends will correlate. The choking death and the lottery ticket are both products of a growing, aging population, and the r-value measures the demographics, not the desperation.