Deaths from falling out of bed in the US

As US turkey production has declined, deaths from falling out of bed have increased, a correlation that suggests either that turkey's famed tryptophan was keeping Americans safely sedated in their beds or that the nation's relationship with both poultry and sleep has deteriorated simultaneously. The coefficient is -0.901 across seventeen years, during which Americans produced less turkey and fell out of bed more often. One imagines a Thanksgiving public service announcement: "Eat turkey. Stay in bed. Save a life."

US turkey production has declined modestly from about 5.9 billion pounds in 2005 to about 5.3 billion by 2021, as consumer preferences shifted toward chicken (which is cheaper to produce and more versatile) and plant-based alternatives. Deaths from falling out of bed rose as the population aged, with the over-65 demographic growing by roughly 50 percent. The negative correlation exists because one metric slowly declined while the other slowly rose across the same seventeen-year window. Turkey production is a food industry story; bed-fall deaths are a geriatric medicine story. They share a nation and a timeline, but the turkey did not keep anyone in bed.

Seventeen years of turkey declining and bed-fall deaths rising is a correlation that contains a perfectly good Thanksgiving joke and absolutely zero causal information. The turkeys are fewer, the elderly are more, and the correlation between them is the kind of statistical artifact that exists only because both trends were quietly monotonic for nearly two decades. The tryptophan defense, sadly, does not hold up.