Want to predict how obese a country's population will be in 3 years? Just check out what they're reading about food in their county's newspapers, researchers suggest.
The kind of food words trending today in 2015 can be a good guide to how obese a country's population will be in 2018, say the researchers who analyzed 50 years worth of nonadvertising food words in newspapers such as The New York Times and 17 years of food words from the London Times.
"The more sweet snacks are mentioned and the fewer fruits and vegetables that are mentioned in your newspaper, the fatter your country's population is going to be in 3 years, according to trends we found from the past 50 years," says lead author Brennan Davis, a marketing professor at California State University, San Luis Obispo.
In contrast, fewer mentions of sweet snacks and more mentions of vegetables and fruits can be linked to a skinner public, he says.
For the study, the researchers statistically correlated foods receiving mentions in newspapers annually with the average Body Mass Index (BMI,) a commonly used way to measure obesity, in the paper's country.
Newspaper references to sweet snack foods were associated with higher levels of obesity 3 years on, they found, although no similar association was found for salty snack words appearing in print.
Lowered obesity levels 3 years later were strongly associated with mentions of fruits and vegetables, researchers said.
A country's newspapers can serve as "crystal balls for obesity," says Brian Wansink, director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab and co-author of the study. "This is consistent with earlier research showing that positive messages - 'Eat more vegetables and you'll lose weight,' - resonate better with the general public than negative messages, such as 'eat fewer cookies.' "
The finding of an easily researched obesity "predictor" in newspapers could provide epidemiologists and public health officials with a new and quick tool to assess how effective obesity intervention methods are proving, the researchers say.
Obesity rates in adults in the United States and the United Kingdom have risen, the authors note, from 13.4 percent in 1960 to 33.8 percent in 2010 in the U.S. and from 15 percent in 1993 to 25.4 percent in 2010 in the U.K.
The study, self-funded by the Cornell lab, has been published in the journal BMC Public Health.
