Deaths from falling out of bed in the US

Every year between 2013 and 2021, Americans fell out of bed and died, and also ate chicken wings at the Super Bowl, and these two activities tracked each other with a correlation of 0.97. The most obvious causal hypothesis — that Super Bowl parties cause hazardous levels of bed-adjacent reclining — cannot be ruled out by this data. Neither can the alternative: that America's bed-falling death rate is simply a reliable indicator of the scale of its annual chicken wing appetite. Public health researchers have been strangely silent on this.

Deaths from falling out of bed in the US have risen steadily due to demographic aging — the population over 65, which is most vulnerable to this type of injury becoming fatal, has grown substantially since 2010. Super Bowl chicken wing consumption has also grown steadily, from around 1.2 billion wings in 2013 to over 1.4 billion by 2021, tracking both US population growth and the increasing commercialization of Super Bowl food culture. Both are time-series that trend upward with population size and demographic composition, making their correlation a function of shared underlying growth rather than any mechanical connection.

Many things get bigger as populations grow and age. This is perhaps the most humbling source of spurious correlations: not that we are pattern-seeking, but that some patterns are entirely real — they just have causes too large and obvious to be interesting.