When hamsters ate a fatty, cholesterol-rich diet and were given a daily pill of berberine for 10 days, their bad cholesterol levels dropped a lot—like going from really high to much healthier levels.

Taking berberine pills daily for a few months may help lower your bad cholesterol and overall cholesterol levels if you have high cholesterol, diabetes, or metabolic syndrome.

Taking berberine pills for 3 months helped people with high cholesterol lower their bad fats in the blood—cholesterol dropped by almost a third, and triglycerides by over a third—so it might be a natural way to help manage cholesterol.

Taking berberine pills every day for 3 months can lower your bad cholesterol and fat levels in the blood by a lot—like cutting your cholesterol by nearly a third.

Taking a natural supplement called berberine hydrochloride twice a day for three months helped people with high bad cholesterol lower it by about 25%, without changing their good cholesterol levels.

A natural compound called berberine can significantly lower bad cholesterol in hamsters with high cholesterol, and it does this by helping their liver make more of a special protein that pulls cholesterol out of the blood.