Statins Solve What Problem, Exactly?

Perhaps the prescription of statins for cholesterol is hunting for a ghost.

...Why, in other words, is cholesterol considered to be bad enough that doctors would prescribe more drugs for the side effects of statins rather than returning to the root? 

The history of high cholesterol as a medical bogeyman is a long one, too long to be chronicled here. It is enough, for now, to note that standard medical practice today links high cholesterol to heart disease and stroke. 

But one of the few long-term, controlled studies on the health effects of vegetable oils done in 1968–73, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, casts doubt on this bedrock belief, as I have previously reported. The experiment was one of the most rigorous ever conducted on vegetable oils and cholesterol in the human diet, and included 9,423 participants in state mental hospitals and nursing homes, between the ages of 20 and 97 years old. Participants were studied for 56 months, both groups eating the same healthy diet, with the exception of fats: one group’s fats came exclusively from corn oil, the others from animal fats. ...

...What the experimenters found was remarkable: While substituting vegetable oils for animal fats lowered the total level of cholesterol in the participants’ blood, this lowered cholesterol did not result in longer life. In fact, as cholesterol fell lower, the risk of death increased—22 percent for each thirty-point fall. Incidence of heart attacks, most notably, was unchanged in the first group, despite their eating what is still today considered to be the gold standard of a “heart healthy” diet....

Part of the problem is the "expert" class's fallacy of "progress."  We're told that we are making "progress" with pharmaceuticals, "progress" in education, "progress" against crime, and "progress" in the environment.  All that "progress" will enable ...........something........mumblemumblefartmumble........good.

And all of those claims are made without evidence, as journalists love to say.

We don't need to recite the actualities in the above categories, do we?