You have it backwards. It is not incumbent on those who question a drug's efficacy to conduct studies showing why it is not effective. On the contrary, those who propose a drug therapy have the obligation to defend it by providing sound studies demonstrating statistically significant benefit (because all drugs have side effects). Those who promote statins have never satisfactorily done that. And they are the ones who cherry-pick the studies to support the results they seek. If you actually read the studies they offer in support of statin therapy and drill down into the data (as opposed to accepting at face value the abstracts where the authors of the study say what has been proved), you would see that what Guided_by_Voices and I have said in our previous posts is correct: reliable double-blind placebo-controlled primary prevention studies (i.e., using subjects who have not had a heart attack but simply have elevated lipid levels) of significant size have not been able to reliably demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in all-cause mortality from the use of statins. Statins unquestionably lower total cholesterol and LDL. Since that lowering does not produce a statistically significant reduction in all-cause mortality in primary prevention, it must follow that such elevated serum lipoprotein levels, in and of themselves, do not increase mortality risk. They may be a marker of disease (and I'm not even so certain of that), but not a cause. This is another way of saying correlation does not prove causation (although lack of correlation does prove lack of causation).
Yes, the food pyramid, with a base of "at least 11 servings of healthywholegrains" is one manifestation of the "diet-heart hypothesis," which traces back to Ancel Keys and his "Seven Countries" study. His hypothesis was that higher levels of dietary fat raise cholesterol in the blood and leads to higher heart disease rates. It's called the Seven Countries study because it examined statistics relating to fat consumption and heart disease rates in seven countries (Greece, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Japan, and Finland). The results "proved" his hypothesis. The problem is that more comprehensive data from a wider set of countries does not support this theory (there are countries such as France, Holland and Norway where people eat a lot of fat but have little heart disease and countries such as Chile and Russia where fat consumption is low but the rate of heart disease is high). Keys later insisted that these were the only available data and he was not cherry-picking. But whether that's true or not, the fact is that available data does not support this relationship between fat consumption and heart disease. The recommendations based on that theory, i.e., a low-fat (read "high carb") diet to prevent heart disease, are therefore inherently unsubstantiated.
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