EndurElite Chief Endurance Officer discusses how the supplement berberine can benefit runners, cyclists, OCR, and other endurance athletes by lowering blood glucose, increasing insulin sensitivity, and replenishing muscle glycogen.
Video Transcription:
Good morning family of fast, Matt Mosman, the chief endurance officer over at EndurElite, coming at you today with Friday's supplement fast fact. Today we're gonna talk about one of my favorite supplements, and this is berberine. Kind of fun to say.
What Is Berberine used for?
So, berberine is a bioactive alkaloid found in certain Chinese herbs that has been used in Chinese medicine to treat things like gastrointestinal distress and in even some cases diabetes.
Berberine Benefits
Now, there's a lot of other cool benefits to berberine like lowering cholesterol and improving overall cardiovascular health, but kind of the most appealing benefits of berberine as it relates to endurance athletes is its ability to lower blood glucose and then also to improve insulin sensitivity/reduce insulin resistance just as effectively as the drug metformin. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, big pharma.
Berberine & Carbs
So, what those two benefits mean is that when you eat a high carbohydrate meal with berberine, the berberine actually promotes greater uptake of glucose into the skeletal muscles to be stored later as glycogen, and we all know that glycogen is the preferred energy source to be used during endurance exercise.
How to Dose Berberine
Now, traditionally, the way you want to take berberine is to take about 500 milligrams three times a day with meals that contain a carbohydrate, so it kind of regulates blood glucose levels, and then also shuttles the glucose into the muscle cell to be stored as glycogen.
Now, the most typical form of berberine is berberine HCL. Now, those are kind of all the benefits of berberine, and this is why we are including it in our soon to be released recovery product, RecoverElite, which is a combination of various carb sources, protein, and amino acids, and berberine.
So we put the berberine in there to basically help with the uptake of glucose into the muscle cells after exercise, so your glycogen is replaced quicker and to a greater extent than if there was not berberine in there at all. Now, our form of berberine that we're gonna include in RecoverElite is called dihydroberberine, and this is basically a lot more bioavailable than berberine HCL. Probably about six times more bioavailable, and that's why we put 100 milligrams of dihydroberberine into our RecoverElite product.
So, that is all I have on berberine for today, my endurance friends. If you like this video, share it with a berberine-loving buddy or carbohyrdate-loving buddy. If you want other videos like this on everything endurance training, nutrition, and supplementation, subscribe to our YouTube channel or head on over to the EndurElite blog at www.endurelite.com. Get social with us on Instagram and our EndurElite Training & Nutrition Club page on Facebook. And until next time, family of fast, stay fueled, stay focused, stay fast, and stay informed.
