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The "thoroughness" of the research doesn't matter much when it's based upon a false assumption or two.

You describe one mechanism by which cholesterol could cause heart disease. As you say, there is lots of evidence that it happens -- in an unknown subset of the population, with defining characteristics that nobody's managed to figure out.

The science just isn't there. And the financial success of statins seems to really get in the way of people wanting to work it all out.

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The molecular mechanism by which cholesterol causes heart disease is well understood, and atherosclerosis has been experimentally induced in every species of mammal ever studied by either feeding the animals a high cholesterol diet or knocking out genes related to LDL metabolism, and these results are consistent between hundreds of studies performed over the past 100 years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4525717/