The average American eats more than 33 pounds of cheese a year. This is according to Neal Barnard , physician and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. And that's a problem, he says, because it's helping to make us overweight and sick. Barnard's new book , The Cheese Trap: How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy , is set to hit shelves Tuesday. In it, Barnard writes about cheese in strong terms: "Loaded with calories, high in sodium, packing more cholesterol than steak, and sprinkled with hormones — if cheese were any worse, it would be Vaseline ... Some foods are fattening. Others are addictive. Cheese is both — fattening and addictive." I'd never before thought in terms of dairy products being addictive (with the personal exception of milk chocolate, I admit). Barnard explains that dairy protein — specifically a protein called casein — has opiate molecules built in. When babies nurse, he notes, they're
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