Why Berberine Is Good For You?

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In this video, Dr. Katz and Dr. Gildea touch on the supplement berberine, why it is a good tool in your wellness toolbelt and how our BerbElite supplement is different than other berberine supplements on the market.

Transcript:

Martin Katz

Hi. I'm Martin Katz, double board certified physician in sports medicine and family medicine and today I'm joined by John Gildea, PhD from Johns Hopkins and university professor. Today, we're going to talk about a very important plant molecule called berberine. And hopefully you've been watching some of our other videos about other plant molecules, mostly the one we've talked about so far is sulforaphane.

Martin Katz

So when we look at human health, or rather disease, we're trying to focus on what brings health, but we have to address the other. Certainly, one of them is oxygen stress, and therefore we've created this molecule, sulforaphane. Please watch the previous videos. We've also created curcumin which, hold onto your seats, will be available soon. We're very excited about that molecule and how we're getting that into the body to have it be bioavailable. Today, we're going to talk about berberine.

Martin Katz

Berberine's a plant molecule that's been around for thousands of years in Chinese medicine and has thousands of studies behind it in and, again, it helps the body in numerous different ways. One of the major health problems we see here in America is this whole metabolic syndrome.

So what is metabolic syndrome? It is your body's inability to really process blood sugar, and for that matter, cholesterol. And unfortunately, that really increases your risk of one of the leading causes -- It really is the leading cause of death in this country -- and that's heart disease. So metabolic syndrome is a syndrome that really needs to be addressed. And again, insulin resistance, blood glucose increasing, which can significantly increase your risk of inflammation and cholesterol. Once that becomes oxidized, your blood vessels are really going to have a hard time staying functional and staying healthy.

Martin Katz

So here we have berberine, which is a plant molecule, which helps address both of those things. It helps address your muscles' ability to uptake glucose and it decreases your liver's ability to create gluconeogenesis and storing glucose. Very similar to a medicine in PharmD and I use a fair amount in my clinical practice called metformin. So we are, again, really focusing on this molecule because it has an effect, again, on insulin resistance and then also with helping blood cholesterol.

Martin Katz

The one problem, and we'll address this in another video, is its bioavailability. But first, John, if you don't mind telling us about what you've found in some of our studies here.

John Gildea

Yeah. So like you said a lot of supplements, including berberine, have a problem with bioavailability, and that's one of the targets of a process that we're really interested in bypassing is the ability to get these really beneficial nutrients to the cell in order to affect function. So in this particular case, berberine is known in the literature to affect long-term blood glucose regulation. But in the short term, it doesn't seem to change blood glucose levels really quickly. So we made a bioavailable version of berberine and we tested that, and it was able to lower blood glucose levels. So we think we have a product that has a lot of promise and, again, a natural product. So it's been around for a long time, very unlikely to have a huge number of side effects. And we were able to lower blood glucose levels approximately 10 points in a number of hours, so we're really excited about this product and the prospects of helping people become more healthy.

Martin Katz

Awesome. Well, thanks guys. Please keep watching. If you're interested, please subscribe to our videos and we'll be back.

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