Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is known for having some controversial health takes. This week, he added another to the list: a claim that a ketogenic diet could cure schizophrenia.
“We now know that there that, that the things that you eat are driving mental illness in this country – and Dr. Palmer up at Harvard has cured schizophrenia using keto diets,” said Kennedy during a Feb. 4 stop in Nashville as part of the “Take Back Your Health” tour.
Kennedy’s health positions and decisions run from the generally accepted (like removing dyes from foods) to mildly confusing (working out in jeans) to questionable (touting raw milk, swimming in a creek with E. coli) and outright controversial. That last category includes his criticism of vaccines and claims that Tylenol and circumcision are linked to autism.
So, what does the data say about ketogenic “keto” diet and schizophrenia? Let’s check it out.
First, some definitions. Ketogenic diets are strict, high fat diets with varying levels of protein and low levels of carbohydrates, according to UC Davis Health. They are probably most well known as weight loss-oriented diets, but that isn’t how they started.
“The keto diet was first used as a treatment for pediatric drug-resistant epilepsy to reduce seizures in the 1920s,” UC Davis explained. “It’s still used [to] help prevent seizures in the U.S. when medications alone aren’t enough.”
We’ll put a pin in that for now. Our second definition is for schizophrenia, described by the National Institute of Mental Health as “a mental disorder characterized by disruptions in thought processes, perceptions, emotional responsiveness, and social interactions,” that can be severe and debilitating.
While exact statistics for those dealing with schizophrenia can be difficult to determine due to common overlap with other conditions, the NIMH estimates that the prevalence of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders in the U.S. range between 0.25% and 0.64%. Per the Mayo Clinic, the cause of schizophrenia is unknown, but it is linked to both genetic and environmental factors.
In his remarks, Kennedy appeared to be referencing Dr. Christopher Palmer’s work. In 2019, Palmer was listed as the author of the paper “The ketogenic diet and remission of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia: Two case studies,” published in the Schizophrenia Research journal.
More research on the subject was published in the Psychiatry Research journal in 2024 – a pilot study led by researchers from Stanford University. It found that a keto diet improved psychiatric conditions in patients taking antipsychotic medications and helped counter negative metabolic impacts of the drugs.
“It’s very promising and very encouraging that you can take back control of your illness in some way, aside from the usual standard of care,” said Dr. Shebani Sethi, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and the first author of the paper.
We can pull out that pin now on the history of ketogenic diets as a way to treat seizures. Sethi said she was inspired to conduct the research after witnessing a treatment-resistant schizophrenia patient “whose auditory hallucinations quieted on a ketogenic diet,” while working in an obesity clinic as a medical student.
“That prompted her to dig into the medical literature,” Stanford explained. “There were only a few, decades-old case reports on using the ketogenic diet to treat schizophrenia, but there was a long track record of success in using ketogenic diets to treat epileptic seizures.”
Another study regarding the impact of keto diets on schizophrenia was published last year in the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal.
“Ketogenic therapy holds potential for addressing unmet clinical needs in schizophrenia, including negative and cognitive symptoms, treatment-resistant cases, and antipsychotic-induced metabolic syndrome,” said the study authors. “It may also be explored as a preventive strategy in high-risk populations.”
Part of Kennedy’s approach with his “Make America Healthy Again” initiative is to stress the importance diets have on overall health. For example, during his Nashville remarks, the health secretary slammed the previous food pyramid for including the cereal Froot Loops, which he called “not food” but a “food-like substance.”
“There are studies right now that I saw two days ago where people lose their bipolar diagnosis by… by changing their diet,” he said. “It’s not only affecting our, our physical health, it’s affecting our mental health as well, and we’re asking people now eat real food, right?”
Authors of the 2025 study noted, however, that “larger controlled trials are needed to establish efficacy, safety, and feasibility in psychiatric settings,” for keto and conditions like schizophrenia. After Kennedy’s comments this week, The New York Times also reported that “the claim vastly overstates preliminary research into whether the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet might help people with the disorder,” citing experts.