Excellent article. Do you happen to know of any evidence based research on cholesterol? Mine just came back at:
Whole Cholesterol 242
Triglycerides 73
HDL 55
LDL 172
and my doctor wants to have a talk with me about lowering my cholesterol. I'm already doing all of the easy things so I suspect he will want to put me on drugs.
Cholesterol -- specifically, the importance of "cholesterol" (actually, lipoproteins) numbers -- is a hotly contested topic. There are so-called cholesterol wars about it. The mainstream position has been slowly evolving from "cholesterol is the devil" to "LDL is the devil" to "You need to look at HDL and trigs as well, but LDL is bad anyway" to "It's complicated" :-/
Doctors, unfortunately, tend to have a hard boundary in mind and if your cholesterol is above it, they feel the need to drive it below that bo...
John Ioannidis has written a very insightful and entertaining article about the current state of the movement which calls itself "Evidence-Based Medicine". The paper is available ahead of print at http://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(16)00147-5/pdf.
As far as I can tell there is currently no paywall, that may change later, send me an e-mail if you are unable to access it.
Retractionwatch interviews John about the paper here: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/16/evidence-based-medicine-has-been-hijacked-a-confession-from-john-ioannidis/
(Full disclosure: John Ioannidis is a co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), where I am an employee. I am posting this not in an effort to promote METRICS, but because I believe the links will be of interest to the community)