Berberine tracking thread, fasting glucose and lipid shifts over 10 weeks

Posted by restlessemma in Weight Loss & Metabolic - 1 points, 2 comments.

So I've been running berberine HCl at 500 mg twice daily with meals for about 10 weeks now, mostly out of curiosity after seeing it called "nature's metformin" all over the place. I tracked fasting glucose, lipids, and HRV the whole time because honestly that's just what I do with anything I put in my body...

For me, fasting glucose came down from around 5.3 mmol/L to averaging 4.8 over the last four weeks. Could be other factors, I changed my walking routine around week 3, but the trend lines up with when the berberine would've been steady-state. LDL dropped from 2.9 to 2.4 at the six-week bloodwork. Triglycerides barely moved though, which surprised me.

The GI stuff was real for the first week, mostly mild cramping and loose stools, then settled. I found taking it mid-meal instead of before helped a lot with that.

HRV didn't change meaningfully, maybe a tiny uptick but honestly within my normal noise range. Sleep scores were unchanged.

I'm curious if anyone else here has tracked lipids on berberine specifically? I'm wondering if the LDL shift is something people see consistently or if I got lucky with timing on that bloodwork. The half-life is so short that twice daily dosing feels like it leaves gaps, but three times daily felt like a lot of pills to manage... Imo twice daily with bigger meals has been a decent compromise.

Anyone gone up to three times daily and noticed a difference?

Comments

• fasted_scientist: The LDL drop is interesting but ngl I'd be careful attributing that to berberine alone. Ten weeks is plenty of time for your walking change to shift lipids on its own, especially LDL. Did you get a baseline before starting the walking or was that already part of your routine? I tried berberine for about six weeks a while back, similar dose, and my LDL barely budged. Triglycerides came down a bit though, which is the opposite of what you saw. Could just be we're different responders or could be
• restlessemma: Yeah you're probably right about the walking confound, that's a fair call. I was walking maybe 30 min a couple times a week before, then bumped it to 45-50 most days around week 3. So not a huge change but not nothing either. I don't have clean baseline lipids from before the walking increase, just the one from week 1 of berberine. Frustrating, eh. The triglyceride difference between us is interesting though. Mine were already pretty low, around 0.9, so maybe there wasn't much room to move. Wha

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