low cholesterol and gastric cancer.

I am a 28 yo half black half asian male.  very active, 165 lbs 9%bodyfat.. 22.9 bmi..  normal bp and am bradycardic because of my better than average physical condition.  My question is.. I dont have a great diet, at all.  I dont really watch what I eat.  I dont eat mcdonalds, but I will eat lots of pizza and other processed foods.   My cholesterol has been 121 and 135 the last 2 times Ive checked it in the last year.  Because of my terrible diet, and the recent reports, I am now worried about stomach cancer.  If I eat something not healthy early in the morning on an empty stomach, lets say, drink a carbonated beverage, Ill get a slight pain in my upper left quad.  I used to have IBS when i was younger, that used to also make me nauseous, but not anymore.  No one has had cancer is my family, not in the last 3 to 4 generations at least.  I just wanted to know should I be concerned about a potential correlation between my low cholesterol levels and gastric cancer?

[gnorb]

Probably not. Low cholesterol, by itself, is not indicative of anything. A lot of the studies which say low cholesterol is a risk factor don't take into consideration incubation period.

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From Reuters, in the 2009 article "Low cholesterol may be sign of undiagnosed cancer"

Low total cholesterol may be a sign of cancer rather than a cause, as some researchers have suggested, and men who have low cholesterol actually have a lower risk of developing high-risk prostate cancer, two teams reported on Tuesday.

Both studies, reported in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, shed new light on the role of cholesterol and cancer.

For years, researchers had noticed that people who have lower total cholesterol -- a combination of both low-density lipoprotein or LDL, the "bad" kind, and high-density lipoprotein or HDL, the "good" kind -- appeared more likely to have certain types of cancers than other people.

That was worrisome because having low cholesterol, and particularly low levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol, has been shown to protect against heart attacks and strokes.

"Our study affirms that lower total cholesterol may be caused by undiagnosed cancer," Dr. Demetrius Albanes, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement.

"In terms of a public health message, we found that higher levels of 'good' cholesterol seem to be protective for all cancers," he said.

The 18-year study of nearly 30,000 Finnish male smokers is the largest and longest of its kind. During that period, 7,545 men developed cancer.

The men with lower total cholesterol levels -- below 230 milligrams/deciliter -- had an 18 percent higher risk of cancer overall -- just as in earlier studies.

But, when they excluded cancers that occurred in the first nine years of the study, this risk disappears.

"This finding supports the idea that the lower serum total cholesterol level we detected as a possible cancer risk factor may actually have been the result of undiagnosed cancers," Albanes told reporters in a telephone briefing.

They also found men who had higher levels of HDL or "good" cholesterol (above 40 milligrams/deciliter) had a 14 percent lower risk of cancer even after excluding nine years of early cases.
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Given your age and stated physique I probably wouldn't worry too much about cancer at this time. Family history is a possibility, but unlikely given the distance. However, you will want to look at your habits because that type of eating can lead to gastric disturbances like chronic gastritis which, longstanding, is a risk for gastric cancer. (This, by the way, could cause that pain you describe in the upper left quadrant.)  Additionally, diets high in sodium are thought to contribute to gastric cancers, which is why cancers of the digestive tract is more common in Asian populations, whose diets are generally high in sodium.

It's probably a wise idea to speak with a gastroenterologist, just to be safe.

Best of luck.