I could never give up cheese
Short answer: Cheese is genuinely hard to quit, fat, salt, habit and mild opioid-like casein fragments. But cravings are learned, and fade once you stop feeding them.
Casomorphins are real but weak, far less potent than morphine. The bigger grip is fat, salt and decades of habit.
npj Science of Food (β-casomorphin-7 review)
The objection
“I could go without anything else, but not cheese. I’m addicted to it, I genuinely can’t imagine giving it up.”
The answer
There’s a real basis to this, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Cheese is dense fat and salt, two things humans are wired to chase, and during digestion casein releases peptides called casomorphins that have mild opioid-like activity (npj Science of Food). “Dairy crack” is an exaggeration, but the receptors involved are real.
The peptides are weak, though. At the very top estimate they come in around 20 times less potent than morphine, and most of the pull of cheese is plain habit and palatability rather than chemical dependence. You’re not hooked the way the meme implies.
That matters, because the way out is the way out of any habit. Food cravings are a conditioned response: a cue (toast, wine, a sandwich) triggers a learned urge, and that urge fades when you stop pairing the cue with the food. The evidence is that long-term abstinence reduces cravings rather than stoking them (PubMed, 2018). People who quit cheese routinely report that after a few weeks they simply stop wanting it, and that strong vintage versions start tasting overpoweringly of, frankly, fat and salt.
You don’t have to white-knuckle it forever. Decent melting cheeses now exist for pizza and toasties, and umami-rich swaps like miso, nutritional yeast and smoked paprika cover a lot of what you’re actually craving. Give the conditioning a fortnight to unwind. “Never” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for something that fades in weeks.