Some netizens asked: Hello Teacher Yu, I would like to ask, can kimchi be eaten? Is it harmful to human body? I often make kimchi to eat. And I am a cancer patient, what should I pay attention to? What about eating? Thank you!

　　I think, first of all, we should understand whether foods such as kimchi, sauerkraut and pickles are healthy foods. There are two biggest problems in this kind of pickled vegetables:

　　 One is the problem of nitrite, which is a well-known unhealthy factor. Nitrite is produced by nitrogenous substances in food under the action of bacteria and is considered to be very likely to cause cancer. I saw a friend two days ago, her family is also cancer, and often loves to eat pickles. This has to be related to some things.

　　 Another is the problem of high salt in this kind of pickles. Compared with nitrite, high salt food is also harmful to health. In addition to having a negative impact on the cardiovascular and cerebrovascular, it will induce hypertension with high probability, and it will also cause damage to the digestive tract. High-salt foods will damage the gastric mucosa, making some pathogenic substances more likely to damage the digestive tract. It even induces serious diseases such as gastric cancer and esophageal cancer.

　　 In fact, for cancer patients, there are two parts of the dietary principle. One part is to strictly control food according to the principle of dietary treatment of disease, especially do not eat food that is unhealthy for health. The other part, if it is a patient with advanced cancer, it needs to be relatively humanized. Personally think that the conditions can be relaxed appropriately. In the case where the patient particularly wants to eat, such food can be provided in small amounts, and the amount control needs to be done.

　　For healthy people, this kind of pickled food should not be eaten as much as possible. If you like it, you should eat it as little as possible. The problem of nitrite can be degraded between two weeks and one month of pickling vegetables. To a safe value, the kind of kimchi that is only marinated for a few days is of course unhealthy. Another factor that needs to be eaten less is: regardless of whether nitrite is degraded to a safe value, all the salt content of pickled vegetables exceeds 10％ that is to say, it is quite salty, such foods cannot be eaten often, otherwise The health of the digestive tract is not good.

　　 Among such pickled vegetables, I think Sichuan pickles are relatively safer than other pickled vegetables exposed to the air. First, it is marinated in a relatively closed, high-salt environment, and some pathogenic bacteria will be killed. During the pickling process, kimchi will ferment to produce lactic acid bacteria, which will consume the oxygen of some miscellaneous bacteria, causing them to die. However, if the salt concentration in the kimchi is not 10％ or the ambient temperature is too high, and dirty water or fat is dripped into the soup, it is easy for the kimchi to grow a lot of bacteria, which is not suitable for consumption.

　　Kimchi is an era of underdeveloped technology. It appears in order to have cheap vegetables to eat during the season of food shortage. There are many fresh vegetable foods at any time. Of course, you don’t need to eat kimchi as a regular food.

　　If the concentration of nitrite in food is not very high, then the harm to normal healthy people is still very small. It only causes damage to the human body in a few cases:

　　1. When the body is sub-healthy or diseased, the resistance is reduced, and the body''s ability to expel toxins is low.

　　 2. The elderly and children are relatively more vulnerable.

　　 3. In the case of insufficient water and vitamin C in the diet, they are easily attacked by nitrite.

　　 Therefore, if we occasionally want to eat pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, it is best to soak and rinse with water. In addition, there should be enough vitamin C-rich food intake in the diet.

　　 There is also a "poisonous salt" that nitrite is more than, that is-nitrosamines! It is mainly cured after marinating, especially after smoking It exists the most in the category, and its harmfulness and carcinogenicity are relatively stronger, so we should eat less or not of these preserved foods!