I can't get over the fishy smell of the stuff. I started Berberine last night, no problems. IIRC it improves lipids/triglycerides slightly better than Metformin does. everything else is equal efficacy and less risk, so it was an easy choice.
Thing about prescription meds is that they're a bit like swatting mosquitos with a hand grenade. (Not my analogy; I read it elsewhere.) Sure, you'll get the mosquito, but what else will get caught in the explosion?
Maybe if my blood work looks bad at 65+ I would consider it but taking metformin for 30+ years is insane to me if your goal is to live as long as possible. You are basically betting on a type of free lunch and racing to be first in line to see what the consequences are. TRT from 50 to death with an expectation of not living much past 75 is a worthy trade off to me. Metformin at the scale of decades in healthy people is a total unknown unknown. Just like with TRT it is crazy to me that some people are taking HCG and anastrozole. You are not going to get a free lunch taking HCG and anastrozole for 40 years. Much of this IMO is that we don't care much about scaling in complex systems. I can easily imagine a 1 year study of healthy 20 somethings smoking a few cigarettes a day that would show improved response to stress if smoked right after stressful events with minimal risk. If we didn't have the actual empirical long term study ran on the actual population over the actual scale of lifetimes I could easily imagine the life extension community smoking cigarettes to live longer. We know without question stress is really bad for you and everything has been great the first year smoking these cigarettes. What could possibly go wrong? You should always keep in mind too that the book The Principles And Practice Of Medicine: Designed For The Use Of Practitioners And Students Of Medicine from 1923 was still recommending bloodletting. Should always keep in mind this research paper when it comes to life extension as well Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/