February 10, 2016

Cheese addiction yet again

So, for people just joining us, there is a story making the rounds of the world media that cheese is literally addictive because the protein casein stimulates the same brain receptors as opiates like heroin.

The story references research at the University of Michigan, which doesn’t show anything remotely related to the claims (according not just to me but to the lead researcher on the study). This isn’t anything subtle; there is not one word related to the casein story in the paper. The story is made up out of nothing; it’s not an exaggeration or misunderstanding.

This time the story is in GQ magazine. It references the December version (from the Standard), but adds some of the distinctively wrong details of earlier versions (“published in the US National Library of Medicine”)

If I were a science journalist, I think I’d be interested in who was pushing this story and how they’d fooled so many people.

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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 »