Is cheese addictive?

The objection

“I could go without anything else, but not cheese. They call it dairy crack for a reason. I’m addicted to it, and I genuinely can’t imagine giving it up.”

The answer

Cheese does have a real hold on a lot of people, but the evidence on why, and on what happens when you stop eating it, is more encouraging than the “dairy crack” story suggests.

Is cheese addictive?

Cheese has not been shown to be addictive in the way drugs are, though when 384 adults in a 2015 University of Michigan study rated 35 foods for how likely each was to cause them addiction-like eating problems, cheese came 10th, behind nine processed foods [1]. The participants, recruited online, scored each food from 1 (not at all problematic) to 7 (extremely problematic) against the problems described in the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which adapts the criteria for substance dependence to eating [1]. Pizza came top at 4.01, just above the middle of the scale, followed by chocolate, crisps, biscuits, ice cream and chips; cheese averaged 3.22, the highest of the 17 foods the researchers classed as unprocessed [1]. How processed a food was, its fat content and its glycaemic load all predicted its rating, and the authors called the findings preliminary [1].

Does cheese contain opioids?

Cheese can contain casomorphins, fragments of milk protein with opioid-like activity, but their effect on the brains of adults who eat them hasn’t been verified in human trials. The best studied, β-casomorphin-7, is released when the body digests the A1 form of β-casein, a milk protein variant found in dairy breeds such as Holstein and Friesian, and it has been detected in Cheddar, Gouda, Gorgonzola and Fontina, mostly in qualitative tests that did not measure how much [2]. A 2026 review in npj Science of Food says it may be able to cross into the brain, but the proposed effects there rest on animal work and small or observational studies in people [2]. The review links the low levels found in the blood and urine of healthy adults after they eat casein to gut-cell experiments in which little β-casomorphin-7 passed through the intestinal lining [2]. Until trials in people show an effect, the “dairy crack” idea remains a hypothesis.

Do cheese cravings go away?

Cheese cravings may fade if they behave like the food cravings researchers have studied, but giving up a craved food can make the craving stronger at first, and the studies that found this lasted two weeks at most, too short to tell whether the rise later turns into a fall. A leading explanation of food cravings, which covers meat cravings too, is conditioning: eat a food again and again alongside a cue, such as the time of day or the television, and the cue can come to set off a craving for that food by itself [3][6]. A 2020 review by Adrian Meule of LMU Munich’s university hospital lists short experiments in which university students gave up one food, such as chocolate, rice or bread, for between one and 14 days, and almost every one found the craving for that food rose [3]. In one of them, at the University of Salzburg in Austria (2017), 39 students who craved chocolate strongly gave it up for two weeks while otherwise eating as usual, and reported stronger cravings for it than after a week of eating it normally; in 21 with weaker cravings, the same two weeks without chocolate did not raise them [4]. The authors suggested a longer study to find out whether the craving eventually drops [4].

Weight-loss trials, which cut calories rather than a single food and were run almost entirely in adults with overweight or obesity, have found the opposite. In the recent ones the 2020 review lists, lasting from four weeks to two years, cravings generally fell, mainly in the first weeks, and where people were followed up later they did not seem to rebound [3]. In an analysis of 270 of the 307 adults with obesity in a two-year US trial, those on a low-fat diet, which limited foods such as cheese, lost more of their cravings for high-fat foods like bacon and fried fish, and more of their liking for high-protein foods like cheese, than those on a low-carbohydrate diet, whose cravings for starchy foods fell further instead (Martin and colleagues, 2011) [5]. An analysis of 367 adults with overweight or obesity from POUNDS Lost, another two-year US diet trial, found that eating a craved food less often went with craving it less, an association the authors call correlational; it was clearest for sweets and fast food, and fell short of significance for high-fat foods such as fried chicken and sausage (Apolzan and colleagues, 2017) [6]. Meule’s reading is that going without a food for at least several weeks may break the learned link between cue and food, and that unlearning such a link takes longer than learning it [3].