Gastric lesions in rats fed salted food materials commonly eaten by Japanese.

A high intake of salted food is thought to be related to the high incidence of stomach cancer in Japan. In the present study, female F344 rats were divided into four groups. They were fed a nutritionally deficient purified diet (Group 1) and standard purified diet (Group 3) for 113 weeks and the same diets supplemented with salted cuttlefish guts, broiled, salted, dried sardines, pickled radish, and soy sauce (Groups 2 and 4). The incidence of papillomas and ulcers of the forestomach was highest in Group 4, which was given the standard diet supplemented with the salty food materials (p less than 0.05). These results suggest the importance of salted food as a suspicious causal factor in human stomach cancer in Japan.