New research suggests that predicting a country's obesity levels in three years might be easily done today using a newspaper.

After analyzing 50 years of all the food words mentioned in major newspapers like The New York Times, researchers at Cornell University found that food words trending today in 2015 will predict a country's obesity level in three years.

"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 three years, according to trends we found from the past fifty years," Brennan Davis, lead author of the study, said in a statement.. "But the less often they're mentioned and the more vegetables are mentioned, the skinnier the public will be."

For the study, researchers analyzed the different foods mentioned in the New York Times and the London Times. They statistically correlated the food words with each country's annual body mass index, or BMI, a measure of obesity.

Their analysis found that while the number of mentions of sweet snacks were related to higher obesity levels three years later, the number of salty snack mentions were unrelated. The number of vegetable and fruit mentions were related to lower levels of obesity three years later.

"Newspaper's are basically crystal balls for obesity," researcher Brian Wansink said in a statement. "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 findings, which are detailed in the journal BMC Public Health, provide public health officials and epidemiologists with new tools to quickly assess the effectiveness of current obesity interventions.