June 19, 2016

Cheese addiction hoax again

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Two more news sites have fallen for the cheese addiction story.

A recap for those who missed the earlier episodes:

  • There was a paper using the Yale Food Addiction Scale that evaluated a lot of foods for (alleged) addictiveness.
  • Pizza came top.
  • Someone (we don’t know who) pushed a story to various media sites saying the research had found cheese-based foods were the most addictive (false), and that this was because of milk protein fragments called casomorphins (which aren’t even mentioned in the research paper, as you can check for yourself, and which haven’t been shown to be addictive even in mice).
  • The people behind the research have disclaimed these weird interpretations of what they found. Here’s a detailed story

 

 

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »