如何将一个健康的国家变成一个服药的国家，用五个简单步骤：

1. 选择一种每个人都有且无法避免的物质，最好是身体自身产生的。胆固醇就很完美。

2. 设定一个阈值。让它听起来很科学。然后，每隔几年悄悄地把它调低，这样数百万人在一夜之间就变成了患者，而他们自己什么都没改变。

3. 用相对术语报告你药物的益处，那些吓人的大百分比，然后把绝对数字——那些小的诚实的数字——埋藏在患者不会去看的地方。

4. 倚重你能治疗的那个数字，胆固醇，而忽略那些你无法轻易卖出一颗药丸的，比如胰岛素抵抗和内脏脂肪。

5. 当任何人指出这一点时，称他们为危险的、反科学的，以及对公共健康的威胁。永远不要去争论那些算术。

面不改色地穿着白大褂做完这五步，你就能为半个国家的人开药治疗一种他们大多数人并不患有的疾病。

How to turn a healthy nation into a medicated one, in five easy moves:

1. Pick a substance everyone has and nobody can avoid, ideally one the body makes itself. Cholesterol is perfect.

2. Declare a threshold. Make it sound scientific. Then, every few years, quietly move it lower, so millions become patients overnight without changing a thing about themselves.

3. Report the benefits of your drug in relative terms, the big frightening percentages, and bury the absolute numbers, the small honest ones, where no patient will look.

4. Lean on the number you can treat, cholesterol, and look past the ones you cannot easily sell a pill for, like insulin resistance and visceral fat.

5. When anyone points this out, call them dangerous, anti-science, and a risk to public health. Never engage the arithmetic.

Do all five with a straight face and a white coat, and you can medicate half the country for a condition most of them do not have. @SamaHoole