As the government slowly comes round to the realisation that, with an obesity problem costing us £47 billion a year, we probably should have a sugar tax. But scientists have warned that there are other not-so-great-for-you food items that are pretty addictive.
One being cheese. A study conducted by the University of Michigan (which is separated from Wisconsin, the ‘cheese state’ by just one great big lake, incidentally) found that it can be as addictive as drugs!
The survey of 500 students, using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, found that a) the first group found high-fat foods to be the most addictive and b) the second group found highly processed foods to be the most addictive.
As you can imagine, a lot of high in fat foods are also highly processed foods.
Cheese, especially, has an ingredient called casein, which releases opiates called casomorphins. Dr Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine even went so far as to nickname it ‘dairy crack’, reports* The Telegraph*.
As for pizza? Well, as well as being topped with cheese, it has a sugar-laden tomato sauce base literally on top of a crust of carbohydrates, which, if very simple, break down into sugars rapidly, sometimes while still in your mouth!
Foods such as salmon and brown rice were – unfortunately for the state of America’s health (and, let’s not kid ourselves, our own) – seen as the ‘least addictive’ food items.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.