Stomach Cancer Diet

What Are The Best Foods For Stomach Cancer?

The goal of this article is to answer the questions what is a good stomach cancer diet and what are the best foods for stomach cancer.

Diet is an important factor in both preventing stomach cancer and treating it. The best foods for stomach cancer patients are also the foods you should eat to prevent the disease.

Stomach cancer causes are still being debated by the medical and scientific community, but there's a growing body of evidence that diet can have a significant influence as a cause of stomach cancer tumors.

In Japan, for instance, you are 5-10 times more likely to get stomach cancer if you eat a traditional Japanese diet.  Yet Japanese people who move to America and start eating a typical American diet suffer the same low rate of stomach cancer as Americans. There's considerably more stomach cancer as a whole throughout Eastern Asia.

Research done recently in Hawaii compared Japanese and Caucasian populations. The Japanese subjects ate a more traditional Japanese diet of rice, pickled vegetables, and dried/salted fish, and had a higher stomach cancer rate.

There seems to be a connection between a nitrate rich diet and stomach cancer. Nitrates in food, and preservatives that are added to food (which often contain a lot of salt) appear to put someone at higher risk. Even food that's not normally high in nitrates or salt cancer be dangerous over the long term if they're grown in nitrate rich soil.

Another study, this one in Belgium, found a probable connection between nitrate and salt consumption and stomach cancer. According to the study, higher sodium intake resulted in higher stomach cancer mortality rates.

In at least one study, however, Vitamin C appeared to inhibit nitrate formation in he stomach, lowering the stomach cancer risk.

According to a study on stomach cancer diet and stomach cancer risk in Shanghai, China, stomach cancer prevalence was lower among subjects who ate a lot of fresh vegetables and fruits, drank tea and took antioxidant vitamins. Protein, fiber, poultry, eggs, and plant oil also produced lower stomach cancer prevalence.

On the other hand, subjects who ate a diet consisting of a lot of carbohydrates, salty or fried foods, foods with a lot of preservatives and hot soup or porridge had higher rates. Interestingly, there was also a higher stomach cancer risk among subjects who ate irregular meals, ate too fast, or were "binge eaters."

When you consider all the evidence, it seems likely that there's definitely a connection between diet and stomach cancer.

Also see stomach cancer testing.