Can Vitamin B Help Lower High Cholesterol? What To Know

When you have high cholesterol (meaning your numbers are above normal cholesterol levels for people your age), your doctor may suggest a variety of measures to reduce your "bad" low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and raise your "good" high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. Some measures are fairly commonplace, like finding cholesterol-lowering foods you can eat every day, exercising more often, or taking medications like statins. But there's one recommendation you might not have heard before: increase your intake of some B vitamins.

There are eight varieties of B vitamins, including vitamins B1 through B3, B5 through B7, B9, and B12. However, the one that's historically been most connected with bringing down cholesterol is vitamin B3, which is also called niacin. (However, it's not the only B vitamin that could help; more on that in a bit.)

As explained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), niacin is involved with the processing of cholesterol in the body. Consequently, when taken in higher than normal doses, niacin may bring down your LDL cholesterol and give your HDL cholesterol a boost of up to 30%.

There's a bit of a catch, though. You have to take significantly more niacin than you'd normally consume to see results. How much niacin could you expect your doctor to recommend? Typically, this ranges from 500 to 3,000 milligrams daily. For perspective, the NIH sets the recommended dietary niacin dose for adults at 14 milligrams for adult women and 16 milligrams for adult men. 

As you can see, therapeutic niacin levels are far higher than everyday levels. And you shouldn't just start taking large amounts of niacin without first speaking with a healthcare professional, because excessive niacin can cause serious side effects like gastrointestinal discomfort, diarrhea, skin irritation, a faster-than-normal heart rate, and vomiting.

If all this information makes you question whether niacin is worth considering, you're not alone. Some experts have argued that the risks associated with excessive niacin consumption outweigh the rewards.

According to Dr. Stanley Hazen, research has revealed reasons not to recommend vitamin B3 supplementation for managing high cholesterol levels (via Cleveland Clinic). "We found that 1 in 4 people in both the United States and European cohorts had high enough levels of 4PY to correspond to a doubling of the risk for heart attack, stroke or death," he said. (4PY is a byproduct of niacin that has been linked to inflammation of the blood vessels.)

If you and your doctor decide that high-dose niacin isn't right for your needs, you could still reduce your high cholesterol levels if you focus on eating more foods that are high in vitamin B3, like chicken, peanuts, and mushrooms. A 2022 study in Clinical Nutrition analyzed dietary intake data of 211,567 individuals who were 40 or older from Korea. The study found that those who regularly ate more than the suggested daily intake of niacin (based on gender and age) had lower incidents of high cholesterol than those who didn't.

And here's a final bright spot about all those Bs: There are two B vitamins other than niacin that might provide at least some degree of protection against rising cholesterol based on clinical experiments. Specifically, a 2020 trial from the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that when subjects took folic acid (B9) and pyridoxine (B6) for 12 weeks, they experienced lower total cholesterol and higher HDL cholesterol.