If you’re over 45 there’s a good chance that you are taking or have at least been offered a statin drug to lower your cholesterol and so cut your risk of heart disease but is it good idea? Your doctor obviously thinks it is, but there is another side to the statin story. The link between cholesterol and heart disease is not as strong or as simple as the familiar statin story suggests.

For instance, the UK is quite high in the international heart attack league table but on a table ranking countries average cholesterol level, it’s quite far down. If high cholesterol equalled high heart attack risk, the two should match. What’s more the number of people in the UK with high cholesterol has been falling for several decades but during that time the rate of heart attacks has been flatlining. Likewise you’d expect the two to come down…