Per capita margarine consumption

As Americans have eaten less margarine, more of them have died falling out of bed, a correlation of -0.991 that, combined with the margarine-choking correlation, is building a compelling but entirely false case that margarine was America's secret safety food. The margarine disappears from the table, the elderly disappear from the bed, and the chart traces their divergence with the greasy precision of a spread that has lost the trust of a nation.

Margarine consumption declined from about 4.2 to under 2.5 pounds per capita as butter was rehabilitated and trans fats were banned. Bed-fall deaths rose with the aging population. One smoothly declines, the other smoothly rises, and the negative correlation is mathematically inevitable. The margarine consumers and the bed-fall victims overlap only in the broadest demographic sense: the same aging population that grew up eating margarine is now falling out of bed, but their margarine abandonment did not cause their falls.

Seventeen years of less margarine and more bed falls is another entry in the infinite catalog of things that inversely correlate with an aging population. The spread thins, the falls thicken, and the coefficient achieves -0.991 with the mathematical purity of two trends that were always going to produce this number. The margarine is not missed. The bed rail is.