The Gouda, bad and ugly: NYC law student addicted to cheese went to nearly $6K-per-week rehab

A Manhattan law school student was so hooked on cheese she had to go to rehab to end her insatiable appetite for dairy, she told The Post. 

Adela Cojab said her Camembert cravings began during her junior year at New York University, in spring 2018, when she binged almost daily on the "cheapest" bricks of white cheddar and Parmesan she could find.

"I stopped by either Morton Williams or by Whole Foods and I would just buy cheese, and I would literally just eat a block of cheese with my hands," said Cojab, 27, often while sitting on the floor of her Midtown apartment alone in the dark.

"It was the only thing that would make me feel somewhat whole." 

The feta fiend said she devoured an estimated 5.5 blocks of cheese per week, along with savory parmesan crisps she stocked in her pantry.

Her pitiful attempts at a salad, she said, amounted to "eating Parmesan with Caesar, with lettuce on the side." 

"I kept telling myself it was actually cheaper to just buy some blocks of cheese" than to get a $12 salad from Fresh & Co.," Cojab said. 

"I was telling myself I was making an economic decision, as people with addictions rationalize." 

Dr. Neal Barnard, author of the "Cheese Trap" and adjunct professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine, explained people like Cojab become addicted to cheese due to the high concentration of fat and salt in the food, along with a protein known as casein that can "get people mildly hooked."   

"Cheese contains opiate chemicals that attach to the very same brain receptors that fentanyl or any other narcotic attaches to," he said, adding that due to the high concentration of casein in cheese, "some people refer to cheese as 'dairy crack.'"

Cojab said her addiction stemmed from stress.

She was the president of a Zionist student group called Realize Israel, at odds with other student activists and professors calling on the university to sever ties with Israel.

The dairy diet quickly wrecked Cojab's health.

Her weight skyrocketed to a peak of 172 pounds.

She also stopped menstruating for five months during the throes of her cheese feasts and became at risk for Type 2 diabetes.

"My mom said, 'You're not well, you're not okay. . . . you need to go away for a while,'" she said of the family intervention that saved her.

Attending a two-week wellness retreat at Hilton Head Health in South Carolina, which costs at minimum $5,820 a week, helped the asiago addict gain control over her eating disorder.

Instructors and counselors taught her the basics of how to order and prepare healthy meals, count calories and consider healthier snacks, like blueberries or popcorn in lieu of havarti.

Her weight has since dropped to a string-cheese-slim 123 pounds, in part aided by Ozempic prescribed to deal with her diabetes risk, she said.

Still, Cojab, who settled an antisemitism lawsuit she brought against NYU in 2019 and is set to graduate from the Cardozo School of Law in June, hasn't sworn off cheese completely.

These days, she said she reaches first for a "lighter" mozzarella over a Vermont cheddar or parmesan.

And during a visit to the Ideal Cheese Shop in Midtown East, she smiled while nibbling on samples of Gruyere and Prairie Breeze cheddar with crackers. 

"I dabble, but not in the way that I used to before," she said, adding the recent waves of anti-Israel encampments at Columbia and other universities prompted brief relapses.

"When I'm really stressed, I'll have a block of cheese, but it doesn't happen that often."