At the New Year, Stay Away from Cured Meats, Barbecue, Hotpot, Alcohol and Tobacco—and Away from Cancer and Stroke

It is again the turn of the year. The Spring Festival is the grandest of Chinese festivals: ten thousand families reunite, relatives and friends gather, and old times are recalled—this is the day of the year we Chinese most look forward to.

Festivals can enrich the happiness of our lives, but the bad old customs tied to the New Year are many. Most foods full of "festive flavor" in China are carcinogens. The various cured foods—cured fish, cured meat, cured sausages, cured chicken, beef jerky, pressed salted duck, and the "tastes of mother" found in almost every home, along with savory pickled vegetables and salted greens—are all strong carcinogens. The hotpot and barbecue Chinese love most at the New Year are also strong carcinogens.

The cancers most easily caused by Chinese eating habits are gastric and esophageal cancer; Chinese patients together account for more than half of the world's total gastric and esophageal cancer patients.

Various cured and pickled foods are full of nitrite, a Group 1 carcinogen. Eating such foods first harms our digestive system. That is why China is a nation of digestive-tract tumors: the incidence of several common digestive cancers here ranks among the world's highest.

Many say our ancestors ate this for generations and stayed well. It is not that they stayed well, but that life expectancy was short; most people did not live to the age of developing cancer. Moreover, many who did develop cancer could not be detected without advanced diagnostic tools, so ordinary people never knew.

The Huangdi Neijing long ago said that "rich, fatty, thick-flavored food readily produces great boils." China in ancient times had many cancer patients, and medical literature from ancient to modern times holds abundant cancer-related records. We only feel there are more cancer patients today because, as medicine has advanced, more cancers are being diagnosed by instruments.

Most unfortunately, from ancient times to today, all the cancers recorded in Chinese medical literature are incurable. "Incurable" does not mean no one ever survives, but that the great majority of patients ultimately die of the disease; only a tiny fortunate few recover.

The cured and pickled foods Chinese love have produced not only a great many cancer patients but also many stroke patients. Every Spring Festival is a high-incidence period for stroke (apoplexy). Excess salt intake is not merely "overly salty"; it can also cause death and disability.

China's communal eating system is also a major reason for our high rate of digestive tumors. Helicobacter pylori is the biggest culprit in gastric cancer, and it spreads mainly through shared eating utensils. Over 40% of people in southern China and over 60% in the north carry H. pylori. Eradicating it can lower gastric-cancer incidence by 46%.

In China, sharing meals with relatives at the New Year is unavoidable; by our custom, separate plates would seem distant and standoffish. But "not standing on ceremony" intimacy carries a price—it means we breathe the same air and share the same fate as our relatives; whatever they carry can be passed to us.

Hotpot and barbecue are the two most common festive dishes, and both are carcinogens.

Hotpot is a scalding food, and such food most easily causes esophageal cancer. We Chinese are too devoted to eating while it's hot; back home many people eating always complain that it "scorched the heart." The heart is not what gets scalded first—the esophagus is. Hotpot lovers easily develop esophageal disease; once the esophageal mucosa is damaged, reflux esophagitis follows—and that is a precancerous lesion of esophageal cancer.

Barbecue contains many carcinogens. Charcoal-grilled food produces heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that readily cause cells to turn cancerous, and the smoke from grilling is also carcinogenic. Long-term eating of heavily carcinogenic barbecue easily destroys the digestive tract.

Another New Year bad habit is that when relatives gather, alcohol and tobacco are sure to add to the merriment.

China is a nation of lung cancer, our number-one cancer by incidence; the great majority of lung-cancer patients have a long smoking history. Cigarettes are the main lung-carcinogen. Our smoking rate is high, and most teenagers pick up the habit among friends and relatives.

China is also a nation of liver cancer, with the world's highest incidence, directly linked to hepatitis B virus and alcohol. Apart from a few coastal places (such as Qidong in Jiangsu) where long-term seafood consumption makes residents prone to cirrhosis and liver cancer—seafood is also a carcinogen—the liver cancer in most other parts of China is caused by hepatitis B virus and long-term drinking. Recently Russian scientists reported that even the smallest amount of alcohol can induce cancer.

These ignorant, backward customs produce millions of cancer patients in China every year and destroy many families. Many are careless about them until they get cancer; once cancer strikes, they feel the sky has fallen. And it is not just the sky—once a family has a cancer patient, treatment generally pushes it into financial hardship. Middle-class families can barely bear it; families below that level basically cannot afford the costly treatment.

Preventing cancer matters more than treating it. We need to transform old customs, improve our festival culture, and have more people spread medical science among the public.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the United States declared a national "war on cancer," mobilizing all of society against it. The results show: U.S. cancer mortality has now fallen for 26 consecutive years, with the sharpest drop in 2019.

America's anti-cancer achievements are of course tied to medical technology, but more importantly to its great progress in quitting smoking and changing lifestyles. This came from a whole-of-society effort: medical-science writers popularized knowledge; lawyers brought public-interest suits against tobacco and alcohol makers; public-service ads about cancer prevention appeared widely; civic groups pushed people to improve living and eating habits; and medical institutions carried out early cancer screening. Together these measures lowered U.S. cancer incidence and raised the proportion of cancers found early, so America's national anti-cancer strategy succeeded.

We too should take cancer prevention seriously. I hope everyone will transform old customs, stay away from harmful habits, and spend a New Year that places no burden on the body.