Health secretary likely referred to Harvard psychiatrist who says he’s ‘never used the word “cure” in my work’
Psychiatric researchers are pushing back against Health and Human Services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s claims that a doctor at Harvard “cured schizophrenia using keto diets”, while also acknowledging that a carefully supervised ketogenic diet shows promise for a variety of mental health conditions.
Kennedy Jr’s statement likely referred to Harvard psychiatrist Dr Christopher Palmer, who said he has “never once used the word ‘cure’ in my work. I have never claimed to have cured any mental illness, including schizophrenia,” but added: “I have talked about ketogenic diet being a very powerful treatment, even to the point of inducing remission of symptoms of schizophrenia.”
On a tour to promote his “new food pyramid” that encourages more consumption of red meat and dairy, Kennedy Jr mentioned keto’s curative power. The ketogenic diet, which requires a high ratio of fat in comparison with both protein and carbs, does not typically emphasize red meat, and is also markedly different from the “carnivore diet” the health secretary follows himself.
The evidence that ketogenic diet might help with schizophrenia symptom remission comes from two case reports that Palmer published in Schizophrenia Research in 2019. When discussing them, Palmer was quick to emphasise that “yes, it’s only two”, and that “case reports don’t prove anything. They’re not controlled. They come with tremendous amounts of bias.” But, Palmer noted, that can be important for generating hypotheses about what treatments might work. Palmer thought it was valuable to publish these case reports because remission of schizophrenia symptoms is incredibly rare.
