Choking deaths on food in the USPer capita cheese consumption in the US
American cheese consumption climbing and American choking deaths on food also climbing. The negative way to read this is unkind, the positive way is implausible. The graph is, charitably, a coincidence.
US per-capita cheese consumption grew from about 32 to over 41 pounds per person across this window as pizza chains, cheese-on-everything menu trends, and fast-casual-segment expansion lifted dairy demand. Choking deaths on food climbed across the same window almost entirely as a function of an aging population, with most such deaths involving adults over 65, whose cohort grew from 36 to over 55 million people. Two completely unrelated trends sharing a window because the same seventeen years inflated both cheese consumption and the over-65 population. The demographic curve does most of the work on one of these lines.
An aging country choked more often. The cheese is, mostly, not the point.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Choking deaths on food in the US” vs “Per capita cheese consumption in the US” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
