Deaths from falling out of bed in the USUS frozen pizza retail sales
Between 2005 and 2021 Americans have, year by year, fallen from their beds at higher rates and purchased frozen pizzas at higher rates, and the correlation (r = 0.958) tries nobly to suggest a causal arrow that should not exist. The DiGiorno is innocent, we stress. The hour of the fall tends not to be dinner. The graph, however, does not care.
Falls from bed rose from about 460 to 900 deaths annually, concentrated in the 75-and-up population whose medication and blood-pressure profiles make nighttime bathroom trips structurally risky; frozen pizza sales rose from about $3 billion to over $7 billion, powered by the DiGiorno rising-crust category and the broader normalization of weeknight convenience. Both are monotonic upward trends in the same country over the same window, and any two such trends will correlate beautifully. The actual link, if one cares to find it, is that both are symptoms of an aging population eating differently and living longer with chronic conditions than any previous American cohort.
The oven preheats. Somewhere, much later, the floor meets someone who misjudged the mattress. Please chew, and please rest.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Deaths from falling out of bed in the US” vs “US frozen pizza retail sales” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
