But it wasn’t until the arrival of the statins that the cholesterol hypothesis fully conquered the world. Once it was proved that statins both lowered LDL and prevented heart disease, any remaining doubters were silenced.

In fact, you will almost certainly kill them. And, by the time you have managed to get a brain scan done, it is usually too late to give any drug at all, because the damage will already have been done.

However, the big daddy, the one that kills most people, is not truly a disease of the heart at all. It is a disease of the arteries that supply blood to the heart, and is usually called atherosclerosis. ‘Athero’, or ‘atheroma’, describes the build up of grey-white/fatty gunk in the artery walls. These thickenings are sometimes called atheromatous

(In a nutshell, statins are drugs that lower cholesterol and so, in the eyes of the mainstream medical community, are believed to reduce the risk of heart disease.

Sex hormones. Cholesterol is a building block for most sex hormones.

That said, spotting the point at which an idea achieves dominance is tricky. Often ideas seem to have been around forever, and it is surprising to find how recent they are.

1: It was not until some time in the early 1950s that coronary heart disease (CHD) was seen as a massive health problem. Recognition first occurred in the USA, almost certainly because the USA did have by far the highest rate of heart disease at that time…

After all, we now had the following evidence: • Countries with a high saturated-fat consumption have higher cholesterol levels and high deaths rates from heart disease. (See: Ancel Keys) • People with high levels of cholesterol in the blood have high rates of heart disease. (See: Framingham Study and familial hypercholesterolaemia) • Rationing in

My view is that any hypothesis that has to keep changing all the time to survive the relentless assault of contradictory facts is, in reality, a dead hypothesis. To quote James Black from a 200-year-old lecture: A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination, but does not