In 1804 Thomas Jefferson sent thirty-three men to walk off the edge of the known map and find out whether America went all the way across. They came back two years later having lost one man, and the reason the rest lived is written in the journals in a word no dietitian uses: fat. The Corps of Discovery left St Louis in May, hauling a keelboat up the Missouri against the current, by rope, through mud to the waist. Nobody knew what was out there. The maps gave out at the Mandan villages. Beyond that was rumour: mountains that might be a day's walk across, rivers that might run to the Pacific, and animals the size of carts that nobody back east believed in. The men ate like no men have eaten since. Nine pounds of meat a day each, when it could be got. Four deer for the party, or a buffalo, every single day. Clark wrote that they consumed an immensity of meat. And by the autumn of 1805, on the high plains, they had learned the thing the plains people had always known. The buffalo in October carries inches of yellow fat down its back, and the men stripped it off and ate it before they touched the lean. They roasted marrow bones in the embers and sucked them like sweets. Charbonneau stuffed buffalo gut with meat and kidney fat and Lewis, a man who did not hand out praise, called it one of the great dishes of the frontier. They rendered bear grease into kegs and carried it over the Rockies like gold. Then came the winter on the Pacific. Fort Clatsop, rain for a hundred days, and the only game was elk, lean as rope after the mountains. The men lived on it and the journals turn dark: boils, bowel trouble, men laid flat with nothing left in them. The meat was plentiful. It was the fat that had gone. In January a whale washed up on the shore. Lewis sent a party through the surf and over a headland to buy its blubber from the Clatsop people, and when it came back he wrote that providence had been kinder to them than to Jonah, since it had sent the whale to be eaten rather than the reverse. The men came back to life on it. They crossed the Divide, found the river, saw the ocean, and walked home. One grave in 8,000 miles, three months in, a sergeant with a burst appendix. No scurvy in two years without a vegetable. The greatest expedition in American history ran on buffalo fat, bear oil, marrow and whale blubber, and its captains knew exactly what was keeping their men on their feet. Send the same thirty-three men out today with oats, lean turkey and a bag of lentils, and the only thing that reaches Oregon is the paperwork.

5 years on a statin buys you 3.2 days. That is the median. Measured across the trials, in the journal, by people who wanted a bigger number. 5 years of a pill before breakfast. 5 years of aching stairs. 5 years of a repeat prescription that renews itself. 3.2 days. A long weekend, delivered at the very end, when you are least able to use it. 100 people, 5 years, and 1 of them is spared a heart attack. The other 99 paid the same price for nothing. 2 of the 100 pick up diabetes on the way. 10 damage a muscle. Deaths prevented across the whole 100: none that the trials could find. The industry read those numbers and priced them at $125 billion for one brand. The guideline read them and lowered the bar until 8 million Britons qualified. Your doctor read them and told you it was just to be safe. Nobody in that chain gains 3.2 days. They gain the 5 years.