Berberine Plus

What Is Berberine Plus?

Berberine is the pigment that makes barberry root yellow: an isoquinoline alkaloid carrying a permanent positive charge. This one comes from the bark of Berberis aristata, the Indian barberry. Beside it sits alpha lipoic acid, a small sulfur-containing fatty acid the body also makes.

How It Works in the Body

Berberine does much of its work in the digestive tract itself, where most of a serving stays. The bark has a long record in Ayurvedic and Chinese practice, prepared as a traditional bitter.

Alpha lipoic acid is mapped in detail. It is bonded to a lysine side chain on the enzyme complexes it serves, where it goes by the name lipoamide, and it swings between a closed sulfur ring and an open pair of thiols. Each swing moves an acyl group one way and reducing equivalents the other.

What It Supports

• Glucose metabolism: Berberine supports glucose metabolism already in the normal range.
• Energy metabolism: Lipoamide sits on pyruvate dehydrogenase, the gate between glycolysis and the citric acid cycle, so alpha lipoic acid plays a role in normal energy metabolism.
• Carbohydrate handling: Alpha lipoic acid supports glucose metabolism already in the normal range, since the pyruvate step it serves is where carbohydrate fuel enters the mitochondria.
• Antioxidant partners: In its two-thiol form, alpha lipoic acid helps maintain vitamin C and glutathione in their reduced forms.

Who It May Suit

People who want berberine with a metabolic cofactor beside it rather than alone. The capsule is vegetable cellulose, so vegan eating is covered.

Good To Know

Berberine here is the hydrochloride salt. Talk with your provider before use: this one carries a real interaction risk. Berberine inhibits CYP3A4, CYP2D6 and CYP2C9, the liver enzymes clearing a large share of prescription medicines, and acts on the P-glycoprotein transporter at the gut wall, so other drugs can build up. Skip it in pregnancy and while nursing.