Marsha and anyone else (except possibly Kefy, if you do have familial hypercholesterolaemia, it's going to be different for you) - if you're getting your cholesterol levels checked, do make sure they test for total, HDL, LDL, triglycerides and the LDL:HDL ratio (or it could be the other way around but no matter, A ratio). Total cholesterol is an utter red herring. I had mine done "for fun" mid last year, along with fasting glucose and so on - it flagged as a high total (7.6, iirc) BUT my LDL was within range, my HDL was high, my triglycerides were fine and my ratio (whichever way round it goes) was ALSO within range. MY HDL WAS HIGH - this is supposedly the "good" cholesterol (carrier), as it's the one that moves cholesterol out of the bloodstream and back to the liver for recycling. Therefore my GP was more than happy to say "I don't know what you're doing, but keep doing it!"
I have been getting progressively more and more angry about the whole statin issue, and I know I'm in an increasingly large group (But still a huge minority) - statins are not a cure-all, they may help some people (possibly people in Kefy's situation) to have better health, but I do NOT believe they are a wholesale preventive for heart disease. SO much bollocks has been written about heart disease, it's upsetting, and as LittleMiss says, so much of it has been sponsored by Big Pharma, it's untrustworthy.
A few years ago, the New England Journal of Medicine issued an edict that they would no longer take papers from people who had had any payment or vested interest in their production. Many doctors are paid by the Pharma companies to write up these papers, to put some medical name to the papers - but the docs almost never see the raw data, they see the managed data, which has had the statistics done, had any rogue elements removed, etc. - basically the data can be made to show whatever outcome the researchers want, and this is what the doctors base their write-up on.
Anyway, as a result of this ban on funded papers, NEJM ran out of sufficient papers to keep publishing at normal rate, so they had to rescind their edict and change it to "No papers from anyone who is paid more than [I think] $10k for their work".
Another interested person did some research on the statistics used in pharmaceutical sales and came to the conclusion that a staggeringly huge percentage (again, I can't remember exactly but I think it was ~93%) of statistics used were made up 
. They were in the product leaflets that the reps give to doctors (not the pack inserts), not made up by individual pharma reps. Disturbing!
So - final note on statins (and well done for reading this far) - the health problems with the vast majority of statins are that they block natural cholesterol production at a point in its biochemical pathway prior to the pathway splitting - and the alternative product of the pathway is a substance called coenzyme Q10, which is vital for energy production in mitochondria, little energy factories inside most of the cells in our body. Specifically useful in muscle cells, especially ones working all the time, like the heart muscle. SO blocking the production of CoQ10 isn't the brightest idea ever in heart health terms. The Pharma know about it, but choose not to worry about it - rather than include CoQ10 in the pills, they say that people can supplement their own if they need to. The most serious statin-induced complaint is called rhabdomyolysis - I'm not going to bang on about that, but you can google it if you're interested.
I refused to let my Dad go on statins when his cholesterol went over 5 - the "acceptable" levels have been reduced and reduced to get more people into "needing" statins for the last several years, and it's all bollocks. Women in particular - remember that cholesterol, as well as being the glue that holds us together (every cell wall is made of cholesterol), is the basis of steroid hormones, so if we don't have enough of it, our hormones, particularly oestrogen/progesterone etc., are at risk. It used to be that women who hadn't gone through the menopause were not prescribed statins because of this - don't know if that's changed?
There's loads more where this lot came from but I will leave my soapbox in the corner now.
As an aside, I was down another 2lb this morning which was "Woohoo!" but back up again this eve, which is a bit less exciting, of course. Still working on getting enough water into me - but had a yummy lunch of smoked salmon, feta, chives and cheddar omelette. I wasn't going to add the cheddar but I really don't like egg without cheese, so ended up doing so.
Dinner was burger with salad and swede-salad. Yum!