Return of the cheese addiction beatup
Remember cheese addiction? It’s back (in the Independent)
Using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, designed to measure a person’s dependence on, scientists found that cheese is particularly potent because it contains casein.
The substance, which is present in all dairy products, can trigger the brain’s opioid receptors which are linked to addiction.
This time there’s enough circumstantial evidence to track down the open-access research paper. It does not contain the word “casein” (or “casomorphin”).
The research paper does not make any assertions about cheese or dairy products and opioid receptors. In fact, it doesn’t single out cheese at all. It says
…we observed that highly processed foods with added levels of fat and/or refined carbohydrates (like white flour and sugar), were most likely to be associated with addictive-like eating behaviors
The cheese obsession in the media coverage is a complete fabrication. It would be interesting to know who’s behind it.
Update: the lead author, Erica Schulte is Not Happy with the cheese claim in this radio interview (at 17:30).
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »