Your cheese addiction may be more real than you know

Can’t seem to resist that last piece of cheese on the snack tray? You can blame compounds in cheese like casein, which “can trigger the brain’s opioid receptors which are linked to addiction,” according to a recent study.

The authors of the study set out to determine why some foods seem to be addictive. They found that cheese ranked atop the addiction scale, and also found that processed and fatty foods were also quite addicting. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever struggled to put away a half-eaten chocolate bar.

Interestingly, the study found that the foods high on the addiction list were chosen by study participants regardless of whether or not those participants were addicted to food. Or to put it another way, cheese tastes really, really good. This hypothesis can be verified by perusing the EYB Library, where over 50,000 online recipes contain cheese, fresh cheese, blue cheese, goat & sheep cheese, and/or Parmesan-style cheese, like the Melty cheese fondue pot from BBC Good Food Magazine by Cassie Best pictured above.