If you are trying not to overeat this year you may want to rethink your resolution to stick with healthy snacks. According to a new study out of University of Texas at Austin, the way people perceive their food has a correlation to how satiated they feel after eating it—and the “healthy” label leads to hunger coming back with a quickness.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a third of American adults—close to 80 million people total—are obese. Labeled as a serious chronic condition, obesity-related diseases are among the highest causes of “preventable death” and cost $162 billion each year.

Because excess food consumption is the gateway to obesity, Jacob Suher, a PhD student at the McCombs School of Business sought to better understand what drives people to overeat—even as the market has rapidly filled with “healthy” products.

“From 2001 to 2010, the percentage of new food and beverage products with health-related claims has increased from 25 to 43 percent” he writes. “While this may appear to be a boon for the fight against obesity, psychologists have uncovered a paradoxical phenomenon whereby people tend to overeat foods that are portrayed as healthy.”

Working with professors Raj Raghunathan and Wayne Hoyer, he tested his theory that most people presume that healthy food is not as filling, and therefore subconsciously think they need to eat more.

Over three small-scale studies the researchers tested how participants saw the relationship between how healthy and how satiating something is, how that perception actually impacts hunger, and how that translates into actual eating behavior. They found that not only does a “healthy” label lead to stronger feelings of hunger—but also an increase in consumption.

However, when they replaced “healthy” with “nourishing” the effect was largely diminished.

“We find that highlighting the nourishing qualities of a food reduces people’s tendency to over-order and over-consume a food portrayed as healthy without directly impacting perceptions of the food’s healthiness,” they write. “Since perceptions of healthiness did not change, it appears that the beliefs surrounding the concept of healthiness, such as fillingness judgments, are driving the results.”

The first study included an “Implicit Association Test” with 50 undergraduate students, who were asked to pair pictures of foods with words to evaluate their beliefs that healthy foods are less satiating. In the second, they asked 40 students to eat and evaluate cookies, but randomly gave them packets of information that said the cookies were either healthy or not healthy.

For the third study, the researchers disguised the test as a video experience and allowed 72 participants to choose the amount of popcorn they consumed to determine how the perception affected not only hunger—but also portion size. This time they tested “nourishing” as a term along with healthy and unhealthy.

The researchers conclude that healthy label—while a boon for business—may be a driver of over-eating, (and ultimately obesity), especially when unhealthy foods are disguised and mislabeled. Their findings, they say, highlight several important implications.

“The concurrent obesity epidemic and rapid increase in health-related food claims has led to the discovery of an ironic phenomenon whereby people overconsume foods portrayed as healthy,” they write. “Our results show that a relatively simple and straightforward tactic reduces the effect of the healthy = less filling intuition. Highlighting another association that people have with healthy food, that it is more nourishing than unhealthy food, mitigates consumers’ tendencies to order larger portion sizes and consume more when a food is portrayed as healthy.”