Casein and Cheese More Addictive Than Chocolate?
Of all the potentially addicting foods, cheese may be the most complex. In researchstudies using vegan and vegetarian diets to control cholesterol or reduce body weight,most participants soon forget the lure of ice cream, sour cream, and even burgers andchicken. But for many people, the taste for cheese lingers on and on. Yes, 70 percentof its calories may come from waist-augmenting fat, and, ounce for ounce, it mayharbor more cholesterol than a steak. But that cheese habit is tough to break.Why is cheese so addicting? Certainly not because of its aroma, which is perilouslyclose to old socks. The first hint of a biochemical explanation came in 1981, whenscientists at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., founda substance in dairy products that looked remarkably like morphine. After a complexseries of tests, they determined that, surprisingly enough, it actually was morphine. Bya fluke of nature, the enzymes that produce opiates are not confined to poppies -- theyalso hide inside cows' livers. So traces of morphine can pass into the animal's bloodstream and end up in milk and milk products. The amounts are far too small toexplain cheese's appeal. But nonetheless, the discovery led scientists on their searchfor opiate compounds in dairy products.And they found them. Opiates hide inside casein, the main dairy protein. As caseinmolecules are digested, they break apart to release tiny opiate molecules, calledcasomorphins. One of these compounds has about one-tenth the opiate strength of morphine.The especially addicting power of cheese may be due to the fact that the process of cheese-making removes water,lactose and whey proteins so that casein isconcentrated.Scientists are now trying to tease out whether these opiate moleculeswork strictly within the digestive tract or whether they pass into the bloodstream andreach the brain directly.(some paragraphs about chocolate addiction snipped)The cheese industry is miles ahead of them, having gone to great lengths to identify people who are most vulnerable to addiction. It dubs them "cheese cravers," andtracks their age, educational level and other demographics so as to target them withmarketing strategies that are tough to ignore.With a $200 million annual research andmarketing budget, the dairy industry is not content to have you just sprinkling a littlemozzarella on your salad. It is looking for those Americans who will eat it straight outof the package, whatever the cost to their waistlines or cholesterol levels.At a "Cheese Forum" held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president of CheeseMarketing for Dairy Management Inc., laid out the industry's scheme for identifying potential addicts and keeping them hooked.In his slide presentation, which wasreleased to our organization under the Freedom of Information Act, he asked thequestion, "What do we want our marketing program to do?" and then gave the answer:"Trigger the cheese craving." He described how, in a partnership with the U.S.Department of Agriculture, the dairy industry launched Wendy's Cheddar Lover'sBacon Cheeseburger, which single-handedly pushed 2.25 million pounds of cheeseduring the promotion period. That works out to 380 tons of fat and 1.2 tons of purecholesterol in the cheese alone. A similar promotion with Pizza Hut launched the
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