Deaths from falling out of bed in the US

As energy drink sales have grown, bed-fall deaths have risen, a correlation of 0.990 that does not mean Red Bull gives you wings out of bed. The energy drinks are consumed by young people seeking alertness; the bed falls happen to elderly people losing balance. The demographic overlap is approximately zero, and the coefficient is approximately one, which tells you everything you need to know about what Pearson coefficients actually measure. The can opens, the body falls, and the chart pretends they are related.

Energy drinks grew from about 3 billion to over 20 billion dollars. Bed-fall deaths rose with the aging population. Both monotonic upward curves across seventeen years. The consumers (18–34) and the victims (75+) are separated by half a century of age. The correlation is purely a product of shape.

Seventeen years of energy drinks and bed falls is a correlation between the youngest consumer demographic and the oldest mortality demographic, connected only by the accident of both numbers going up at the same time. The caffeine kicks, the elderly slip, and the chart records both with the mathematical precision of a coefficient that does not check IDs.