Does Berberine reduce glucose?

A self-experiment using continuous glucose monitoring

Hello friend,

“Why on earth would you search for a drug to reduce glucose?”, you may ask.

Well, well, well, young disciple…
The reason is very simple and yet very, very complex:
to justify eating ice-cream, for the sake of science.
For that, young warlock, is the purpose of life. Anyway..

“So, what’s Berberine then?” Berberine is a plant-extract that has been shown in both human and animal trials to be as effective as pharmaceuticals for treating type-II diabetes. Unfortunately, all the clinical trials I could find only showed how it reduced biomarkers of diabetes, such as fasting blood glucose and HbA1c, but none showed the actual trend after ingesting a meal. This, you may have guessed is important on the days you want to have the upsides of pizza, with none of the downsides.

So I decided to try it home instead. The result? It exceeded my expectations.

How the experiment went

• Every day at the same time I took 150g of cooked rice (that is about 45g of carbohydrates).

• To measure my glucose, I used a continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and analyzed my data using glyco in Python.

• Most trials use a dose of 0.5g of Berberine, 3 times a day. Instead I took a dose of 2g in one meal. Go big or go home, right?

• I either took the Berberine or a placebo (used Berberine-500 from Thorne Research). And I either took them 15min before or right after a meal. I sat down for 2hours after the meal, and avoided exercise and food before the rice meal.

Results: how Berberine exceeded my expectations

Figure 1 — Glycemic response to 150g of rice taken with Berberine or a placebo

As you can see in Fig. 1, you don’t need statistics to see how big of an impact it has on glucose. When taken 15min before the meal, Berberine largely reduced my peak glucose, but also the area under the curve of glucose. The effect was so large I could guess that I did not have placebo that time.

This should not be surprising given the large body of evidence supporting Berberine, including mechanistic evidence about how it indirectly activates AMPK [Brusq et Al. 2006]. But seeing it in real-time using the CGM left me stunned. I looked at the data, looked back at the empty bowl, looked back at the data, I could not believe it.

I have to admit, however, that I stopped the experiment early. While the original plan was to do this for 10 days, ingesting 150g of rice made both my heart-rate and blood pressure go up.

For this reason, I was worried the effect might have been due to something else (you never know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). So I tried again, this time with a snack bar that has about 15g of carbohydrates. And once again, the drug did the job (Fig. 2 below).

Figure 2 — Response to a snack bar with either Berberine or a placebo

As skeptical as I was at the beginning of this experiment, these results were not only convincing, but impressive.
I am now officially a Ber-believer. Yes, yes, I just made that up.

Discussion: Why I don’t use Berberine daily

After seeing the dramatic effect on glucose, I still do not to use it everyday. Instead, I would probably use it when exposed to high amounts of glucose in parties or other uncontrolled high-carb high-GI scenarios.

Other than the extra 2$/meal it would cost, there are two more reasons why I would not use Berberine everyday:

1. When I take Berberine, my glucose drops (Fig. 3 below). This drop is so abrupt that I feel tired afterwards. This feeling was worse when consumed in a fasted state.

2. In the world of supplements, there is no such a thing as a free lunch, and the risks of taking a supplement must always be weighed against the risk of not taking it. And in this scenario, I think staying relatively low-carb is a better strategy.

3. Don’t try using Berberine as a powder in ice-cream. The taste is not worth it (and believe me, my taste is as stoic as it gets) and it will turn your teeth yellow (unless that’s the style you’re going for).

Figure 3 — Large drop in blood glucose following the consumption of 2g of Berberine

For those of you who skip directly to the end of this article

Here’s the summary: Berberine largely reduced my glucose levels after a high-carb meal. It is now an essential supplement in my ice-cream emergency cupboard, but I would rather avoid it in regular days and just stick to lowering carbohydrates in general.

Thank you for reading, if you liked this post, please give it some claps, it’s easy but it would mean a lot to me.