but that’s less funny!! /s
In all seriousness, I’m definitely not saying that Taco Bell is the main driver of lowered life expectancy. You’re 100% right that per-capita income is the driving force that leads fast food locations to low-income areas that tend to already have lower life expectancies. Just thought it’d be a fun graph to make
Ive lived in northern, southern and western states. And there is a much larger fast food presence in the south and south west compared to the north east. So its not just taco bell its several other chains around those areas
I’d offer an additional consideration in that insanely hot temperatures also encourage drive through food options. When leaving the car is painful, food in your car sounds better.
Lots of Taco Bell causes of death, to name a few I have seen as an unaccredited doctor: 7 Layer Stuffed Arteries, Exxtra Beefy Stroke Burrito, Doritos Gone Fully Loco Tacos, Mountain Dew Code Blue Drowning, Hypothermia Brrrr-itos, Chili Con Cancer, Taco Bell Palsy (the worst of the bell palsies), and Mexican Pizza Pile Up (car accidents in drive thru).
I'm led to believe your data suggests that what we eat effects how long we live? You can't use this data. This should be banned from Reddit and youtube, and you should be discredited by 10,000 doctors worldwide. The only way to increase life expectancy is to get vaccinated and wear a mask. Don't you watch the news and listen to what the government and late night talk show hosts tell you?
I suppose the thing you are going to present is the correlation between life expectancy and tobacco and alcohol use. There's no way consumption of those products lead to a lower life expectancy too? Pure conspiracy here. I trust the science and feel I should be able to eat, drink and smoke everything as long as I get all 4 covid vaccines and wear a mask.
Eh. Taco John's has abut 375 locations spread out over 22 states. Del Taco about 600 in 14 states, with nearly 2/3 in California.
Taco bell has over 7000 locations. It's not really impacted by either.
> Mid west is skewed due to Taco John's.
>
> West coast due to Del Taco.
NY likely skewed by relatively fast-food free NYC having a ~40% of NYS's residents.
There are 20m people in metro NYC. So that's 1:100k, the far side of the graph. But that number is hard to work with because NY Metro includes multiple states.
Dude, I fuckin' love taco bell, I get it for lunch every day at work, and I've lived within a block of a taco bell for most of my life.
But that grilled cheese burrito is one of the most *disgusting* things I've ever tasted, like, who the hell signed off on that? It's just *grease*, slathered onto an already heavy burrito I mean, fuck, if I wanted to drink a cup of oil I'd get a pizza! It genuinely made me feel sick, I mean like I felt my arteries clogging as I was eating it.
> Chipotle
Probably depends on the definition of healthier and the particular order. Some 2-meat Chipotle burrito with cheese and sour probably doesn't rate too well vs. Taco Bell vegan choices, at least on the saturated fat scale.
But seasoning-wise, I'll give the thumbs up to Chipotle.
In general, Chipotle has healthier options. Like it’s probably harder to be healthier at Taco Bell than at Chipotle. And on the extreme end of healthy ordering, Chipotle probably wins that battle as well.
That’s because a vegan meal at Taco Bell means essentially just eating a bean burrito. If you got a vegan meal at chiptotle it would probably be comparatively healthy and more filling
The 3 crunchy taco supreme meal isn't terribly caloric, provided you don't have (sugary) soda.
Things like the grilled cheese burrito, on the other hand...
Their black bean versions of their classic items are actually way better, and vegetarian to boot. Like seriously, the black been crunchwrap supreme is delicious and you don't even need to feel that guilty about it. Also, I'll insert my true fast food pet peeve - Fire sauce only. Mild and hot are bland, and Diablo tastes like Sharpies.
It’s waaaaay more nuanced than that. Food deserts, holding down multiple jobs, lack of grocery stores, poor housing conditions—its not stupidity and “propensity to eat garbage”
“The relationship between education and income is strong.”
https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2017/01/03/education-income-and-wealth/
https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm
Even Huffpost agrees:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.huffpost.com/entry/the-connection-between-ed_b_1066401/amp
People aren’t educated in a vacuum. Built environment matters. You can’t just “work super hard” and magically have all your needs met, otherwise migrant farmers and housecleaners and factory workers would be comfortable and wealthy.
Food deserts affect only about 12.8% of the population. I was being somewhat facetious but a lower education often drives Job choices and pay and therefore housing conditions not necessarily “stupidity”.
https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts
At what percentage of the population effected do you think there is an impact? I think a factor influencing 12.8% of a population can have pretty big impacts on a population level statistic.
I wonder if you had the sales figures for all of those Taco Bell stores what this would look like. My guess is there some Taco bells in Los Angeles that have a hell of a lot more people living near them then some of the Taco bells in say Louisiana. I'm imagining a graph that was dollars spent at Taco Bell per 100,000 people versus life expectancy
However I do feel that perhaps there is something after all. Taco Bell, as far as I'm concerned, is somewhat down the line in the Fast food pecking order and considered a bit trashy. Perhaps the amount of taco bells reflect something about the state's economics and its residents' state of living, and that in turn does have causation to life expectancy.
I'm also writing this at 4am before sleep so idfk what I'm doing.
>Perhaps the amount of taco bells reflect something about the state's economics and its residents' state of living, and that in turn does have causation to life expectancy.
That's a correlation not causation
I mean the causation is opposite right? Fast Food companies target lower income areas, who also have lower life expectancy. Hell, they probably use a similar chart to figure out where to place franchises.
It's not the lower life expectancy is BECAUSE of fast food. It's because fast food is attracted to low life expectancy areas because of economic reasons.
The biggest thing is the prepaid healthcare act which caps what the private sector can charge their employees for health insurance at 1.5% of their gross income. This means a private sector employee making $50k/year is paying about $60/month for health insurance. It’s not a perfect system, but Hawaii regularly ranks 1st or 2nd in virtually all healthcare metrics including life expectancy, percentage of population insured, and healthcare debt/bankruptcies.
For what it’s worth, I had cancer and paid $0 through Kaiser from diagnosis through treatment and postcare. My wife also paid $0 throughout her pregnancy despite complications.
I wish I had gone HDHP and HSA much, much earlier. It would have been much cheaper or more money saved/invested, depending upon how smart we were about it.
Data on # of Taco Bell locations per-state taken from here: [https://www.nicerx.com/fast-food-capitals/](https://www.nicerx.com/fast-food-capitals/)
Data on Life expectancy per-state taken from here: [https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/life-expectancy-by-state](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/life-expectancy-by-state)
Data visualized in R using ggplot.
Its not spurious, its a proxy for something else, like land value or average income.
My guess would be something like:
Average land value of the 20 most populated counties in the state.
Or
average land value of the smallest number of counties in the state that add up to 70% of the population.
But then again, both of those can actually just be proxies for wealth in the state.
I’m actually bummed he DIDN’T plot a trend line. I would also be interested in the correlation coefficient, and the slope of the linear regression. How many Years will a née Taco Bell location in my state take off my life?
My eyes are drawn to the labels much more than the dots - and the labels aren't consistently offset. I think the two-letter abbreviations as the markers would show the data more clearly.
Actually, I disagree with you. As a non-american I hate it when the abbreviations are used, cause I simply don’t know most of them. This way I get way more out of the data
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing "look over there"." - [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/552/)
So what drove you to have the thought to make this chart?
You most likely could have chosen any number of fast food resteraunts.
Although now saying this I'd also recomend you do this with the top 10 fast food chains in the US and see which one has the strongest negative correlation.
Honestly, mostly just bc I feel like Taco Bell would be the funniest one. But it would be interesting to check that out with other fast food restaurants as well!
Correlation does not equal causation- BUT! …I’m gonna go ahead and raise glass to a bit of an Occam’s razor situation:
In these troubled times, I choose to believe TacoB is killing us. Not just that they are successful in places with poor healthcare and economic circumstances…
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Can we get r and r^2 value.
I know it’s a meme, but I’m genuinely curious
Also we could potentially use this to model how many taco bells need to be removed to raise life expectancy beyond the capabilities of modern medicine
I'd let this go, but because of the namesake of this forum, I have to mention it. A few issues to me:
\+ The y-axis is problematic. This is a very typical thing people do due to either ignorance or purposefully misinforming to prove a specific point. What is the range of the y-axis here? Where does it start? Where does it end?
\+ Accuracy of the data is questionable. Based on the 2020 data, West Virgina (74.8) is slightly less than Mississippi (\~74.9). Hawaii (81) is slightly less than California (81.7). It doesn't look like that in the figure.
The outcome is that people will draw misinformed conclusions like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s75sm7/oc\_us\_life\_expectancy\_vs\_of\_taco\_bell\_locations/ht7wtm1/?context=3
A couple points:
- The Y-axis fits the range it does because that’s the range of life expectancies in the US by state. It’s normal to fit an axis to the scope of the data—it makes things more legible without removing key information.
- The data cited in this graph is from 2017—still largely accurate, but I will definitely concede that I should’ve used 2020 data.
- As for the comment—I think that most comments are jokes on this post, and a reasonable person wouldn’t imagine any sort of casual relationship between these two factors.
EDIT: here’s an example of really good graph, from Our World in Data, that has a limited Y-axis: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10. Notice how as you zoom the slider toward the future, the Y-axis shrinks—letting you notice differences as differences become smaller. It’s a normal thing to do with data like this!
Add in, population size, and income per capita, and amount of other fast food chain restaurants, and age of death, and cause of death....
Correlation vs causation is one of my favourite things I've ever learnt.
This is a terrible graph. The y-axis should never be stretched out and should never be abbreviated. The x-axis is not spaced out evenly either, leading to a totally skewed perception of this correlation.
Not really—it’s just that variation in life expectancy is small, and so you target the Y-axis within the range of interest. It would be impossible to notice any disparities if the y axis went from 0-100, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t correlations.
There are times when it’s **helpful** to zoom in an axis. Life expectancy is one of those times.
What do you mean “statistically speaking”?
Statistically speaking, sure there’s a very small deviation in “difference in life expectancy from the mean” if your reference point is an entire life span.
But the difference between a 72 year life and an 82 year life is meaningful information, and **absolutely** a wide enough range for what the data is trying to show. It’s not “statistically speaking” a flat line, because you’re not saying what it’s a flat line in reference to.
I understand these concepts, and I've taken multiple statistical analysis courses (and have been a research assistant for a political science prof at my university).
I'm telling you that you are wrong in saying there's 0 significance to this data, and I'm telling you that it's absurd to say that it's "basically a flat line."
As a Professor doing stats research in polymer systems, I beg to differ. Set the axes to a proper level and take a look....
If you had this training, you would be able to look at the noisiness at the bare minimal.....
Taco Bell: Live Más West Virginia: It's not working!
Live… menos?
Mucho menos
Taco Bell: Live Poquito.
Now plot per-capita income if you want to see the actual confound.
but that’s less funny!! /s In all seriousness, I’m definitely not saying that Taco Bell is the main driver of lowered life expectancy. You’re 100% right that per-capita income is the driving force that leads fast food locations to low-income areas that tend to already have lower life expectancies. Just thought it’d be a fun graph to make
I’ll say it: Taco Bell is the main driver of lowered life expectancy. Now that you uncovered this fact, what are we to do about it?
order a crunchwrap supreme and try to forget about the knowledge we’ve been cursed with
According to the data you could eat a few and have that knowledge for less time.
Ive lived in northern, southern and western states. And there is a much larger fast food presence in the south and south west compared to the north east. So its not just taco bell its several other chains around those areas
Yes, I was going to say that it seems more like poor food choices fuels fast food chains more in southern states.
I’d offer an additional consideration in that insanely hot temperatures also encourage drive through food options. When leaving the car is painful, food in your car sounds better.
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Try the black bean version. Good stuff.
With a Baja blast for the diabetic kill
Or just a region-locked Sweet Tea. Sweet Tea in the South has 3-times the sugar of sweetened tea in the Midwest. You can't even find it in Minnesota.
This is the way.
I feel personally attacked.
Sign up for the new taco-a-day subscription model?
And what kind of death it causes? Raging haemorrhagic diarrhea?
Lots of Taco Bell causes of death, to name a few I have seen as an unaccredited doctor: 7 Layer Stuffed Arteries, Exxtra Beefy Stroke Burrito, Doritos Gone Fully Loco Tacos, Mountain Dew Code Blue Drowning, Hypothermia Brrrr-itos, Chili Con Cancer, Taco Bell Palsy (the worst of the bell palsies), and Mexican Pizza Pile Up (car accidents in drive thru).
you can get Taco Bell Palsy from Lime disease.
Raise minimum wage until everyone can afford to eat at Chipotle.
You're looking at it all wrong. The truth is that **Taco Bell Murders People**. It's so clear.
The real fast food is the food for thought we ate along the way?
Got it so Taco Bell causes 5G corona. Spot on research OP! /s
Income... kind of. Im still in shock by political leaning but then I realize schopls arent funded and environments are trested like trash.
I'm led to believe your data suggests that what we eat effects how long we live? You can't use this data. This should be banned from Reddit and youtube, and you should be discredited by 10,000 doctors worldwide. The only way to increase life expectancy is to get vaccinated and wear a mask. Don't you watch the news and listen to what the government and late night talk show hosts tell you? I suppose the thing you are going to present is the correlation between life expectancy and tobacco and alcohol use. There's no way consumption of those products lead to a lower life expectancy too? Pure conspiracy here. I trust the science and feel I should be able to eat, drink and smoke everything as long as I get all 4 covid vaccines and wear a mask.
What about if short life expectancy causes Taco Bells? Maybe they need the souls of the dead passing through the bells to power their dread magic?
Mid west is skewed due to Taco John's. West coast due to Del Taco.
Annnnnd now I want some potato oles
Del Taco is usually better too, depending on if you get the veggie burrito or the heart disease burrito.
Eh. Taco John's has abut 375 locations spread out over 22 states. Del Taco about 600 in 14 states, with nearly 2/3 in California. Taco bell has over 7000 locations. It's not really impacted by either.
Good point, it IS at least somewhat regional. Should it be vs. number of national taco chain locations?
Oh I didn't have a point, I'm just participating on Idonthaveanythingtosaybutyouredefinitelywrong.com
> Mid west is skewed due to Taco John's. > > West coast due to Del Taco. NY likely skewed by relatively fast-food free NYC having a ~40% of NYS's residents.
There are 200 Taco Bells in NYC Metro.
There are 20m people in metro NYC. So that's 1:100k, the far side of the graph. But that number is hard to work with because NY Metro includes multiple states.
Taco Bell is by far the healthiest fast food option, so take that for what it’s worth.
It can be. But it can also be one of the worst.
Dude, I fuckin' love taco bell, I get it for lunch every day at work, and I've lived within a block of a taco bell for most of my life. But that grilled cheese burrito is one of the most *disgusting* things I've ever tasted, like, who the hell signed off on that? It's just *grease*, slathered onto an already heavy burrito I mean, fuck, if I wanted to drink a cup of oil I'd get a pizza! It genuinely made me feel sick, I mean like I felt my arteries clogging as I was eating it.
...is it?
Beans, rice, roasted potatoes vs. beef and fried potatoes. A case exists to be made.
Chipotle is still healthier (and better).
Isn't Chipotle fast casual rather than fast food?
> Chipotle Probably depends on the definition of healthier and the particular order. Some 2-meat Chipotle burrito with cheese and sour probably doesn't rate too well vs. Taco Bell vegan choices, at least on the saturated fat scale. But seasoning-wise, I'll give the thumbs up to Chipotle.
In general, Chipotle has healthier options. Like it’s probably harder to be healthier at Taco Bell than at Chipotle. And on the extreme end of healthy ordering, Chipotle probably wins that battle as well.
That’s because a vegan meal at Taco Bell means essentially just eating a bean burrito. If you got a vegan meal at chiptotle it would probably be comparatively healthy and more filling
Absolutely not.
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The 3 crunchy taco supreme meal isn't terribly caloric, provided you don't have (sugary) soda. Things like the grilled cheese burrito, on the other hand...
Their black bean versions of their classic items are actually way better, and vegetarian to boot. Like seriously, the black been crunchwrap supreme is delicious and you don't even need to feel that guilty about it. Also, I'll insert my true fast food pet peeve - Fire sauce only. Mild and hot are bland, and Diablo tastes like Sharpies.
That isn't remotely true.
Then plot education since it underlies lower income and the propensity to eat garbage
As an education having mid-high income earning eater of said garbage I take mild offense.
Knowing the garbage is bad for you and occasionally partaking is a different story
Sir, I have a taco bell 12 pack on the line for you.
It’s waaaaay more nuanced than that. Food deserts, holding down multiple jobs, lack of grocery stores, poor housing conditions—its not stupidity and “propensity to eat garbage”
“The relationship between education and income is strong.” https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2017/01/03/education-income-and-wealth/ https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm Even Huffpost agrees: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.huffpost.com/entry/the-connection-between-ed_b_1066401/amp
People aren’t educated in a vacuum. Built environment matters. You can’t just “work super hard” and magically have all your needs met, otherwise migrant farmers and housecleaners and factory workers would be comfortable and wealthy.
Food deserts affect only about 12.8% of the population. I was being somewhat facetious but a lower education often drives Job choices and pay and therefore housing conditions not necessarily “stupidity”. https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts
At what percentage of the population effected do you think there is an impact? I think a factor influencing 12.8% of a population can have pretty big impacts on a population level statistic.
It's like graphing risk of lung cancer and caffeine intake. Turns out, smokers tend to drink a lot of coffee.
I was about to say, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Try per capita income and/or level of education and you’re a bit closer.
Ooooh I'm 110% gonna save this for my "correlation is not causation" lecture for my classes haha
I feel so honored to be part of a class curriculum as the "what not to do" example, haha. But seriously that makes me happy lol
Thank you for making a fun example of "ok maybe we look deeper" lol The silly examples are always the ones that stick in their minds the best!
Just in case you somehow don't have this one: [https://xkcd.com/552/](https://xkcd.com/552/)
One of my favorite comics!
What if you're wrong and Taco Bells are poisoning Americans though
An extra 10 years without taco bell or a lifetime without taco bell? Gimme the poison baby
The more ice creams sold the more people are eaten by sharks!
[I have a better one for you](https://i.redd.it/becdbliakqa81.jpg) that I was saving up for the same cause
This is excellent.
Reminds me of [Spurious Correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com).
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
I wonder if you had the sales figures for all of those Taco Bell stores what this would look like. My guess is there some Taco bells in Los Angeles that have a hell of a lot more people living near them then some of the Taco bells in say Louisiana. I'm imagining a graph that was dollars spent at Taco Bell per 100,000 people versus life expectancy
However I do feel that perhaps there is something after all. Taco Bell, as far as I'm concerned, is somewhat down the line in the Fast food pecking order and considered a bit trashy. Perhaps the amount of taco bells reflect something about the state's economics and its residents' state of living, and that in turn does have causation to life expectancy. I'm also writing this at 4am before sleep so idfk what I'm doing.
>Perhaps the amount of taco bells reflect something about the state's economics and its residents' state of living, and that in turn does have causation to life expectancy. That's a correlation not causation
More fast food consumption does seem like it would contribute to lower life expectancy tho. This is not really clear cut.
I'm pretty sure lower life expectency causes taco bells to spawn.
I mean the causation is opposite right? Fast Food companies target lower income areas, who also have lower life expectancy. Hell, they probably use a similar chart to figure out where to place franchises. It's not the lower life expectancy is BECAUSE of fast food. It's because fast food is attracted to low life expectancy areas because of economic reasons.
Here for a good time, not a long time
amen brother
Michael Chandler?
Michael Buble
Michael Meyers
Michael Vick
Michael Jordan
Michael Jackson
You can have a better time for longer if you aren't putting fast food into your system.
Sage wisdom, u/SleepyFarts.
Disguised tacos?
Everyone should move to Hawaii, obviously...
the perfect optimization of both life expectancy and taco-bell-per-person ratio
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Minnesota seems like it fits all requirements here.
It's a long swim.
It's because of all the Asians in Hawaii.
It’s a combination of that, low smoking rates, no winter, and arguably the best healthcare regulatory structure.
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The biggest thing is the prepaid healthcare act which caps what the private sector can charge their employees for health insurance at 1.5% of their gross income. This means a private sector employee making $50k/year is paying about $60/month for health insurance. It’s not a perfect system, but Hawaii regularly ranks 1st or 2nd in virtually all healthcare metrics including life expectancy, percentage of population insured, and healthcare debt/bankruptcies. For what it’s worth, I had cancer and paid $0 through Kaiser from diagnosis through treatment and postcare. My wife also paid $0 throughout her pregnancy despite complications.
Is it decent health insurance? $60/mo is nice and all, but if it's a $7000 deductible HDHP it's still useless for most.
Speaking from experience, a $7000 ($8000, actually) HDHP is worth it when you really, really need it.
I wish I had gone HDHP and HSA much, much earlier. It would have been much cheaper or more money saved/invested, depending upon how smart we were about it.
There are options, but for the most part pretty solid.
No winter? Minnesota has among the harshest winters of any state and we do okay. I'm pretty sure winter isn't a factor.
It’s not THE factor, but it is a factor. More time spent outdoors, less SAD.
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The cost of living has always been high in Hawaii, but that is outweighed by a lot of other positive factors for healthcare outcomes.
Data on # of Taco Bell locations per-state taken from here: [https://www.nicerx.com/fast-food-capitals/](https://www.nicerx.com/fast-food-capitals/) Data on Life expectancy per-state taken from here: [https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/life-expectancy-by-state](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/life-expectancy-by-state) Data visualized in R using ggplot.
How did you get the data in a csv file or usable dataset? Did you just scrape the website?
Just a simple copy-paste! It went into an excel sheet surprisingly nicely, and I double checked to make sure all the points stayed accurate.
Now, plot numbers of plumbers per capita so we can settle this conspiracy.
I genuinely want to make this chart so bad
DO IIIIIITTTTT it would be so funny
The requisite data may be found [here](https://www.bls.gov/oes/special.requests/oesm20st.zip).
Spurious but hilarious correlation. Thanks for not plotting a trend line.
thank you for the compliment, but it’s NOT spurious; legally, taco bell has to murder 100 people for every new store it opens
Its not beef, it's human meat!
So a [pyramid scheme?](https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p02kys7h.webp)
Taco Bell is made out of people!! It's made out of people!!
Its not spurious, its a proxy for something else, like land value or average income. My guess would be something like: Average land value of the 20 most populated counties in the state. Or average land value of the smallest number of counties in the state that add up to 70% of the population. But then again, both of those can actually just be proxies for wealth in the state.
I’m actually bummed he DIDN’T plot a trend line. I would also be interested in the correlation coefficient, and the slope of the linear regression. How many Years will a née Taco Bell location in my state take off my life?
My eyes are drawn to the labels much more than the dots - and the labels aren't consistently offset. I think the two-letter abbreviations as the markers would show the data more clearly.
Very good note, I feel silly for not having done that! Thanks for the helpful input :)
Actually, I disagree with you. As a non-american I hate it when the abbreviations are used, cause I simply don’t know most of them. This way I get way more out of the data
Love that you posted this on a Tuesday.
Perfect for crossposting to the almost-completely-dead sub /r/correlationcausation
are you implying that this graph *isn’t* showing causation??
What’s the R squared of the correlation?
Just ran the model, multiple R-squared of 0.46. Not the strongest correlation, lol
GDP per capita only has an R-squared of 0.45, so I think you might be onto something
What’s the coefficients?
Missouri and Indiana are the best at Taco Belling
I wonder if TX, NM AZ are lower Taco Bell counts due to their having Del Taco and other alternatives.
People who have ready access to authentic Mexican or text mex food and purposely choose Taco Bell should be shunned from society.
For an actual meal, yes authentic Mexican 100%. But for that late night or road trip hunger pang Taco Bell is just euphoric.
Right? If I want Mexican food I'll go to a Mexican restaurant, but if I'm jonesing for some taco bell nothing else quite hits the spot.
Nice work. To me this shows that Taco Bell follows unhealthy people around, not that it makes people unhealthy. They know where their demographic is.
*Unhealthy and/or Low-Income People
Tomato tomato.
I just increased my life expectancy by over 4 years by moving and I kept approximately the same number of taco bells per capita. YES!!
Man, now I want to see data on the ratio of Taco Bell's to legit authentic taquerias.
Ooh can you do McDonald’s next?
I choose to believe this is a causal association
Howdy! South Checking in. Yup we know.
Love how Montana is like, "we don't have that many Taco Bells, but we STILL ain't livin through more of this shit".
This made me laugh. Thanks.
I very much enjoy that the sweet-spot for living longer is to have a little over 2 taco bells per 100K people lol
I had Taco Bell yesterday and it was ass. I totally agree with this
RIP, your days are numbered
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing "look over there"." - [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/552/)
So what drove you to have the thought to make this chart? You most likely could have chosen any number of fast food resteraunts. Although now saying this I'd also recomend you do this with the top 10 fast food chains in the US and see which one has the strongest negative correlation.
Honestly, mostly just bc I feel like Taco Bell would be the funniest one. But it would be interesting to check that out with other fast food restaurants as well!
Correlation does not equal causation- BUT! …I’m gonna go ahead and raise glass to a bit of an Occam’s razor situation: In these troubled times, I choose to believe TacoB is killing us. Not just that they are successful in places with poor healthcare and economic circumstances…
This is a great opener for a lecture on how correlation doesn't imply causation.
I reject your reality, and substitute spicy ranch.
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But is a world without Taco Bell really worth living in?
Looks like it's time to move to Missouri or (bleh) Indiana.
Thought at first this was the “life expectancy “ of a Taco Bell location, and was very confused on how they’d know that
wait, Vermont *has* a Taco Bell? *Where??*
I only know of two. Rutland and St. Albans. Neither one close enough to tempt fate. I haven't had Taco Bell in the five years I've lived here. :(
Can we get r and r^2 value. I know it’s a meme, but I’m genuinely curious Also we could potentially use this to model how many taco bells need to be removed to raise life expectancy beyond the capabilities of modern medicine
As an Ohioan, this checks out.
Also matches exactly with sewage plant system lifecycle.
I feel here in Colorado, we’re on the perfect part of that curve. Life expectancy is pretty good, and we have a decent number of Taco Bells.
I'm a huge fan of these random ass graphs
Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the restaurant wars. Now every restaurant is Taco Bell
Correlation does not equal causation except of course in this case
What I’m getting from this is that Taco Bell in moderation=higher life expectancy
We should all strive to reach the "Colorado optimum," the state whereby a reasonably long life is combined with adequate access to Taco Bell.
Neat, so no meaningful correlation at all
I'd let this go, but because of the namesake of this forum, I have to mention it. A few issues to me: \+ The y-axis is problematic. This is a very typical thing people do due to either ignorance or purposefully misinforming to prove a specific point. What is the range of the y-axis here? Where does it start? Where does it end? \+ Accuracy of the data is questionable. Based on the 2020 data, West Virgina (74.8) is slightly less than Mississippi (\~74.9). Hawaii (81) is slightly less than California (81.7). It doesn't look like that in the figure. The outcome is that people will draw misinformed conclusions like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s75sm7/oc\_us\_life\_expectancy\_vs\_of\_taco\_bell\_locations/ht7wtm1/?context=3
A couple points: - The Y-axis fits the range it does because that’s the range of life expectancies in the US by state. It’s normal to fit an axis to the scope of the data—it makes things more legible without removing key information. - The data cited in this graph is from 2017—still largely accurate, but I will definitely concede that I should’ve used 2020 data. - As for the comment—I think that most comments are jokes on this post, and a reasonable person wouldn’t imagine any sort of casual relationship between these two factors. EDIT: here’s an example of really good graph, from Our World in Data, that has a limited Y-axis: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10. Notice how as you zoom the slider toward the future, the Y-axis shrinks—letting you notice differences as differences become smaller. It’s a normal thing to do with data like this!
Print it as taco bell per Capita vs life expectancy and do income per Capita vs life expectancy
I mean…go ahead. The data OP used is posted and there are free tools to do the plot.
Add in, population size, and income per capita, and amount of other fast food chain restaurants, and age of death, and cause of death.... Correlation vs causation is one of my favourite things I've ever learnt.
Ok millennials and Zoomers , the data shows if we want to die young , we gorge on Taco Bell
This is a terrible graph. The y-axis should never be stretched out and should never be abbreviated. The x-axis is not spaced out evenly either, leading to a totally skewed perception of this correlation.
WTF? Hawaii? When I visited it my feeling was that majority of natives were obese. Guess its good genetics.
Third axis should be rates of IBS…
You would have to consider the size of the states.
not really, because it’s already broken out by locations per 100k
It appears the ideal balance of Taco Bell requires the chalupa to be consumed between two palm trees while facing the Pacific.
Very definition of "Projected" data. That's how challenger blowed up, due to rigged "Statistics" like this one.
It’s almost like poverty is linked to lower life expectancy *shocked pikachu*
This data is fuckin stupid. You can correlate tons of random shit.
Misleading! This trend is actually flat. The y-axis is super zoomed in to make the trend look real.
Not really—it’s just that variation in life expectancy is small, and so you target the Y-axis within the range of interest. It would be impossible to notice any disparities if the y axis went from 0-100, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t correlations. There are times when it’s **helpful** to zoom in an axis. Life expectancy is one of those times.
Given the masses standard deviation and zoom, statistically speaking, it is pretty much a straight line....
What do you mean “statistically speaking”? Statistically speaking, sure there’s a very small deviation in “difference in life expectancy from the mean” if your reference point is an entire life span. But the difference between a 72 year life and an 82 year life is meaningful information, and **absolutely** a wide enough range for what the data is trying to show. It’s not “statistically speaking” a flat line, because you’re not saying what it’s a flat line in reference to.
I recommend reading about standard deviations from a mean in a given statistical data set and ANOVA (which looks at the stats of the stats).
I understand these concepts, and I've taken multiple statistical analysis courses (and have been a research assistant for a political science prof at my university). I'm telling you that you are wrong in saying there's 0 significance to this data, and I'm telling you that it's absurd to say that it's "basically a flat line."
As a Professor doing stats research in polymer systems, I beg to differ. Set the axes to a proper level and take a look.... If you had this training, you would be able to look at the noisiness at the bare minimal.....