Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asserted on Wednesday that the keto diet could cure schizophrenia — an unfounded claim that experts say vastly overstates preliminary research into whether the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet might help patients with the disorder.
Mr. Kennedy made the remarks while traveling in Tennessee as part of his national tour to urge Americans to “eat real food” — a message he is delivering in conjunction with his recent overhaul of federal dietary guidelines, which now emphasize protein and fats, including steak, cheese, butter and whole milk, over carbohydrates.
“We now know that the things that you eat are driving mental illness in this country,” Mr. Kennedy told a crowd at the Tennessee State Capitol. “Dr. Palmer at Harvard has cured schizophrenia using keto diets.”
He went on, “There are studies right now that I saw two days ago where people lose their bipolar diagnosis by changing their diet.”
Mr. Kennedy was apparently referring to Dr. Christopher Palmer, who in 2019 wrote about “two patients with longstanding schizophrenia who experienced complete remission of symptoms” with the keto diet. He said both patients “were able to stop antipsychotic medications and have remained in remission for years now.”
More recently, Dr. Palmer and his colleagues described the diet as a “promising therapeutic approach for schizophrenia.” Dr. Palmer did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The health secretary’s claims were amplified on social media by MAHA Action, an advocacy group that promotes Mr. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, but the post was taken down after The New York Times asked a spokesman for Mr. Kennedy to provide evidence to support his assertions. The spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Kennedy has a history of promoting ideas with little to no scientific evidence to back them up. He has rejected established evidence that H.I.V. is the cause of AIDS, pushed the idea that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jews and Chinese people, and repeatedly insisted that vaccines are a possible cause of autism despite a lack of proof.
The popular ketogenic diet typically consists of at least 70 percent of calories derived from fat, less than 10 percent from carbohydrates and less than 20 percent from protein. It has been hailed as a way to lose weight, but it also poses risks to heart health.
Some small short-term studies, including one at Stanford University, “offer very preliminary evidence” that the diet “might be helpful” in patients with schizophrenia, said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and past president of the American Psychiatric Association.
But it is “simply misleading to suggest that we know that ketogenic diets can improve schizophrenia symptoms, much less that they can ‘cure’ the condition,” he said.
Dr. Appelbaum said most of the patients in those studies continued to require antipsychotic medication. He and another Columbia psychiatry professor, Dr. Mark Olfson, both said that while the early research was promising, more thorough long-term studies were needed.
“There is currently no credible evidence that ketogenic diets cure schizophrenia,” Dr. Olfson said.
Antipsychotic medications, currently the first-line treatment for psychotic disorders, generally work by blocking dopamine receptors and can reduce symptoms like hallucinations and paranoia to a manageable level for many patients.
But they also have serious flaws. Weight gain, a common side effect, contributes to a high rate of cardiac disease and early death among people with schizophrenia. And many patients stop taking the medications, complaining that they leave them sluggish and unmotivated.
Emily Cochrane and Ellen Barry contributed reporting.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics.
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