The researchers find that more-emotional words were used to describe the first group of recipes, which were presumed to be less healthy. “My family begs for this dish! If you are a fan of Chinese food, prepare to become ADDICTED to this yummy sesame chicken,” for example. Meanwhile, descriptions for dishes with a “healthy” tag went more like this: “Traditional vegetarian refried beans that taste great with hardly any fat.”

The difference—between the “tasting great” for the bean dish and the “prepare to become ADDICTED” for the sesame chicken—is stark, Fishbach says. The language we use to talk about food often reveals excitement and eagerness to eat it, she notes, and when it comes to tasty but healthy foods such as fruits or vegetables, “people, as intuitive (yet mistaken) advertisers, are going to say, ‘This is good for you; this is healthy’ and not, ‘This is delicious; you will love it.’”

Five-star Yelp reviews and celebrity Instagram posts displayed the same pattern. On Yelp, the posters, all of whom indicated they’d had a good experience at the restaurant, used more-emotional language when talking about dishes such as burgers, tacos, and macaroni and cheese than when describing asparagus, broccoli, salads, or cauliflower.

The researchers’ lab experiments further confirmed this. When they asked 200 people to write an endorsement for either some junk food or some healthy food that they’d eaten in the past, those recalling junk food used significantly more-emotional words.

In another experiment, Turnwald and Fishbach removed any mention of the food about which the messages had been written, and then had a new group of participants decide whether they wanted to try the mystery food. The more emotional the description was, the more people wanted to try the food it described—even when they had no idea what that food was, the researchers find.