#3 Correlation: weight loss & the charity sector

Once again, we’ve delved into Google’s archives to take a look at meaningless correlations in the charity sector.

This time we compared ‘charity’ vs ‘weight loss’ in the UK over the last 12 months:

The most striking thing about this graph is the huge variation in both search terms in the first quarter - which, falls on December 25th.

The frequency with which people search for weight loss is self-explanatory. Interest falls off during December as people head out to enjoy some festive cheer, but the regret kicks in around Christmas Eve and BANG. Straight after lunch on Christmas Day, people are googling ways to shed the excess pounds on their sparkly new iPhones.

What’s slightly more interesting is that people’s interest in searching for charity drops drastically in the week or so before Christmas, with a low reached on December 25th. But then it rises (almost as fast as weight loss) and reaches a peak in early January.

There seems to be a rough correlation between the two at various other points during the year. But, for me, the second most striking is the dip on February 25th. A date only notable, as far as I can tell, as being the birthday of Julio Iglesias.

As a quick addendum, we’ve organised the search results below to show which term is searched for more. Charity is blue, and weight loss is red.     

Interestingly, the only other search we ran that resulted in this order of countries was by sheep population. Why this might be is a question perhaps best answered in the next edition of Correlation Corner.