Many people eat a late-night snack before bed, or because of busy work, dinner time is repeatedly delayed. These eating habits are common among modern people. A professor from the University of Tokyo in Japan conducted a study and found that people with such eating habits have a significantly increased risk of developing stomach cancer compared to the average person.
The study focused on the daily eating habits of stomach cancer patients aged 30 to 40, excluding the time of their illness, and found that most of these patients had the habit of eating late-night snacks, among which 38.4% had irregular dinner times. The professor pointed out that eating late-night snacks is very harmful to the stomach because the lifespan of the gastric mucosal epithelial cells is very short, about 2-3 days for regeneration, and this regeneration process usually occurs during the rest time of the gastrointestinal tract at night.
When the gastrointestinal tract should be resting, eating a late-night snack or having dinner too late prevents the gastric mucosa from being repaired in a timely manner. In addition, the food eaten will stay in the stomach, promoting the secretion of a large amount of gastric juice, which in turn stimulates the gastric mucosa, leading to weakened resistance and problems like gastric ulcers. Furthermore, if the daily diet often includes fried, grilled, or cured foods, the carcinogens in these foods can further harm stomach health.
How should daily diet prevent stomach cancer?
First, develop a regular eating schedule for three meals a day, and try not to eat after 8 PM, and quit the habit of eating late-night snacks.
Second, the daily diet should include more vegetarian food and less meat. Stomach cancer is a common malignant tumor of the digestive tract, and men are more susceptible to it than women. Eating too many animal and processed foods in the daily diet is a cause of diseases such as stomach cancer, gastritis, gastric ulcers, and colorectal cancer.
The human stomach's acid concentration cannot quickly digest meat, and the intestines are long, making it unable to quickly expel decaying meat. Therefore, to prevent stomach cancer, one should reduce meat intake and eat more vegetarian food. If you cannot completely give up meat, you should also maintain a light diet. The variety of foods per meal should not be too complex. For example, digesting carbohydrates and protein requires different digestive juices; if eaten together, neither can be fully digested, which can overburden the stomach's function. Undigested food is prone to accumulate and decay in the intestines, creating an environment for harmful bacteria to grow. And this is a major cause of carcinogenesis.
In addition, a high-salt diet can also lead to stomach cancer. Scientists have found through animal experiments and human disease studies that as salt intake increases, the incidence of gastritis, digestive tract ulcers, and stomach cancer also rises. After consuming excessive high-salt food, the high osmotic pressure of salt directly damages the gastric mucosa, causing a series of pathological changes such as extensive congestion, edema, erosion, ulcers, necrosis, and bleeding. High-salt foods also contain a large amount of nitrate, which is converted into nitrite by reducing bacteria in the stomach and then combines with amines in food to form nitrosamines, which are highly carcinogenic. Therefore, it is also important to reduce salt intake.