The correlation between free and reduced lunch and premature death

From the County health rankings website there are a number of county and national datasets to choose from, of these data sets I took a deep dive into the 2021 national analytic data and started to compare elements from one another at random. To my surprise several of these elements seemed to have a strong correlation despite how you might intuitively think. Of these elements and comparisons there is a particular relationship that struck my curiosity and that is the relationship between ‘Children eligible for free or reduced-price lunch raw value’ and the ‘Premature death CI high (White)’ this relationship produced a positive correlation of 0.499, which is rather high in terms of the unlikelihood of the relationship. Now there are several weird correlations out there like ice cream consumption leads to murder, but that relationship is very random. With our relationship between children eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and premature death I think that there is a much more causal relationship then our ice cream example.

If a child is eligible for reduced lunch in their earlier years how can that lead to a premature death? Well I think that there are other correlations to consider that play into this. One of these correlations being between free and reduced-price lunch and household income. Of course there is going to be a strong relationship here because if the household had a substantial income then the child would not need free or reduced lunch. But this factor also plays into the correlation between household income and drug usage, and drug usage can sometimes lead to a premature death.

Money can be very stressful on families and often to alleviate the stress a lot of people turn towards substances. And these choices can affect their children’s perception of how substances are treated and abused. For example, there is a strong correlation between household income and excessive drinking with a value of 0.407. Children of course look up to their parents, and when they see the person, they look up to turning towards a substance when things get hard and stressful that carries on into how they are expected to deal with things later on in their life.

As you may have noticed before I used the premature death correlation of “White”, there is also a strong correlation with “Black” and “Hispanic” as well with values of 0.341 and 0.352. And these numbers come to no surprise because they are proportional to the demographic within the United States. This relationship is inclusive of all races and genders.

The most likely causal relationship between free and reduced lunch and premature death I believe is that children are getting free and reduced lunch due to their household income, because of the low household income there is a likely alcohol or substance abuse going on. Due to the alcohol and substance abuse that the children’s parents are portraying they also fall into that path because that is what they grew up around, and due to that habit of alcohol and substance abuse they end up having a premature death.

Now this may sound like a bit of a stretch, but I think it is the most logical causal relationship as to why this correlation might be. And it doesn’t make too much immediate sense as to why getting a free and reduced lunch would lead to a premature death. And the correlations that ultimately lead to that conclusion are strong enough to support that claim. Now the solution here seems quite simple, although you cant make immediate change of ones household income and their children getting free and reduced lunch, we can make change of peoples perception of drug use. Drugs will forever be apart of our culture, and for a lot of people it’s a means of escape and comfort to deal with the daily weight that life bestows upon us, but there is a way to coexist than to abuse these things. Once that is accepted and acknowledged and put into practice, I am confident that we would see a significant change in this correlation. Fortunately there is a great deal of research being done in the drug use area around the world and I’m sure we are going to see change within our lifetime.