 Hello guys, welcome to another episode of SugarMD and today we are talking about berberine. Berberine is a supplement that is commonly used to treat diabetes and we are going to talk about if it is really helpful to treat diabetes or not and how much you should take it. This is Dr. Ahmed Ergin. I'm an endocrinologist and a diabetes education specialist in Florida and we see patients in Florida and New York but primarily this YouTube channel is for everyone who wants to understand their diabetes. So please if you like these videos give a thumbs up, share this video and write a comment. Let's get started guys. Okay guys, so berberine it is commonly used in Chinese medicine for treating diabetes for centuries and centuries. That's one of the reasons we added berberine in our supplement. Some of you are aware of the SugarMD Advanced Glucose Support. We have that we use berberine in there and we use better melon and we have a total of 12 different ingredients to help you guys manage your diabetes a little bit easier. Now why did we choose to use berberine in our supplement? Now as I said the berberine has been used for centuries but we need to understand how it really helps diabetes. So primary mechanism is something that that's not gonna make too much sense to you but I'll say it anyways. Cellular mechanism called AMP kinase. That's an enzyme that almost works like a molecular signal switch. So it helps you to improve your insulin resistance. It makes your body break down the glucose better and faster. As a result when your insulin resistance improve, your cholesterol, your HDL, your total cholesterol improves, even your LDL improves as a result of use of the berberine. It also improves the gastrointestinal flora, the good bacteria goes up. It also help reduce the absorption of carbohydrates or break down of carbohydrates. Now that's one of the reasons sometimes too much berberine can cause side effects just like metformin does. What is interesting, yes metformin a lot of people hate it but it works very similarly to berberine. Now why berberine is preferred by some people? It's because it's totally natural. It comes or extracted from the plants unlike a pharmaceutical that is just something like metformin. But for both agents for both metformin and berberine you may have gastrointestinal distress like a lot of people get from metformin. So as a result instead of using a thousand or two thousand milligrams of berberine which is commonly sold if you look at Amazon or other channels you will see those but you be careful you may have a lot of gastrointestinal distress. So we added around 300 milligrams of berberine per serving because we have so many other things in it and to be honest with you you can put only so much in a capsule so we have to decide how much of which substance supplement the natural ingredient we need to put in those tablets or capsules. We use tablets typically but capsules can be used as well. The bottom line is berberine overall helps your diabetes but like any other supplement or medication it is not a miracle worker it is one of the things that helps you control your diabetes better it is relatively safe. Again you should discuss with your health care provider if you are wanting to use a higher dose of berberine but the bottom line it typically helps it takes a little while it also helps with the weight loss I forgot to tell you about that. You know in a modest fashion not significant but a lot of my patients who will take for example our sugar MD supplement will tell me that their cravings are much better. So that is partly because of the berberine and that's partly because of the banana extract we have in our supplement so I think controlling your cravings is a major part of diabetes care diabetes management so that helps for that so if you haven't checked out our supplement yet please do so and if you like to supplement please give us a nice amazon review we will appreciate that if you want to advise us if you want us to improve on anything please write us on an email at ask at sugarmds.com please check our website we have a lot of valuable information on our website as well and remember we also have a new diabetes book called the ultimate diabetes book for you guys so I hope this video helped you and we will continue to make videos stay tuned make sure you subscribe and we'll see you in the next video