Hyperlipidemia is a type of disease involving lipid metabolism disorders. It is also the leading cause of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, such as coronary heart disease, cerebral infarction and atherosclerosis, which have become one of the most harmful chronic diseases to human health in the word. At present, the development of new, high-efficiency and low-toxicity target, lipid-lowering, hypolipidemic, traditional Chinese medicines is essential for improving hyperlipidemia and its secondary cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. However, because of the complexity and compatibility of traditional Chinese medicine ingredients, it is difficult to conduct in-depth research on the effective components of the therapeutic effect and the specific lipid-lowering mechanism by relying on a single lipid-lowering model. Therefore, the establishment of an ideal high-fat model is a key factor in screening lipid-lowering Chinese medicines and studying the pathogenesis of hyperlipidemia. In this paper, several of the most commonly used lipid-lowering models were reviewed from three aspects: cell models, mammalian models and zebrafish models, and the common modeling method of various models and their respective advantages and disadvantages were summarized. As a result , this work provides references and an experimental basis for selecting reproducible hyperlipidemia models for hyperlipidemia mechanism research and screening of effective lipid-lowering traditional Chinese medicines.