Per capita sugar consumption in the US

As fewer Americans have tuned in to watch Survivor—a show about starving on a beach that has somehow outlasted most actual civilizations—Americans have also consumed less sugar per capita, a correlation that suggests either that the show was secretly a public health campaign or that both trends are simply measures of a nation losing its appetite for things that were popular in 2001. The correlation is 0.953 across seventeen years, during which both Jeff Probst's audience and the national sweet tooth have declined with the gentle inevitability of trends that peaked a long time ago.

Survivor's average viewership fell from about 20 million per episode in 2005 to under 6 million by 2022, a decline common to all broadcast television as streaming fragmented the audience into a thousand smaller pools. Per capita sugar consumption declined from about 100 pounds per year to roughly 77 pounds during the same period, driven by the anti-sugar movement, the rise of artificial sweeteners, soda taxes in major cities, and the general cultural shift toward health consciousness that made sugar the new dietary villain. Both trends are stories about American tastes evolving: away from broadcast television and away from added sugar, for reasons that have nothing in common except timing.

Seventeen years of Survivor ratings and sugar consumption declining together is a portrait of a nation that has outgrown two of its early-2000s habits simultaneously. The tribe has spoken, and apparently it said "less sugar, more streaming." Both trends will continue their decline until they reach whatever floor awaits things that used to be mainstream. The torch has been snuffed.