Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was brutally fact-checked on Thursday after he made a wild claim about the benefits of the keto diet.
Kennedy was speaking to a crowd in Tennessee as part of a nationwide tour to get Americans to eat healthier foods when he claimed that scientists at Harvard University had cured schizophrenia in a patient using the keto diet, The New York Times reported. He also claimed that the food Americans eat is "driving mental illness in this country," a claim that experts have said ignores environmental and social factors.
The Times spoke to multiple experts about Kennedy's claim, one of whom described it as "simply misleading."
"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," the Times reported. "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.'"
Columbia psychiatry professor Dr. Mark Olfson was more direct with The Times.
“There is currently no credible evidence that ketogenic diets cure schizophrenia,” he said.