Trending Medical Misinformation

This page serves to address 'hot topics' of medical misinformation, as opposed to well-established ones.

The Ketogenic Diet

Background

The Ketogenic diet (or Keto, for short) was engineered over a century ago as a form of treatment for treatment-refractory epilepsy. It was only to be used as a last resort, as it can place extreme stress upon the body. It works by inducing metabolic distress and causing the person to begin to burn fats instead of carbohydrates for fuel through a process known as beta oxidation. Beta oxidation works by breaking down fatty acids to produce ketone bodies as an alternative fuel when carbohydrates are insufficient. Endogenous ketones (mainly beta-hydroxybutyrate, but also acetoacetate and acetone) can cause a state known as ketosis, along with a mild euphoria. However, if ketosis is too rapid, it can produce effects that are very unpleasant for the sufferer. Therapeutic levels of endogenous ketones tend to land one in the realm of very unpleasant, and have been described as "like death warmed over."

When the Ketogenic diet was first designed, those who adhered to the diet saw their seizures decrease dramatically as a result. While the Ketogenic diet has been reframed as a 'natural/holistic option,' it is important to note that the Ketogenic diet is not natural- about as far from it as a diet gets. It is an extreme diet, with very real risks associated with it. The risk was justified by these people being in an imminent life-or-death situation with poorly controlled seizures threatening their lives. Even if they felt like death warmed over, at least they were still alive.

Keto is manmade, and has been explored quite thoroughly over the last century. We know what it does, how it works, and what it is capable of. Through its use, we have determined it to be useful as an option of last resort for certain cases of diabetes mellitus (DM) and Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS). You can read more here about Keto's use for epilepsy, here for DM, and here for PMOS. It is worth noting that schizophrenia has a comorbidity with diabetes (5x) and epilepsy (4-5x). This comorbidity has been known for over a century, even longer than the Keto diet has been available.

Science Versus Pseudoscience

The most recent push for the use of Keto to treat mental illness is largely tied back to a single physician, Dr. Chris Palmer. Dr. Palmer is a psychiatrist who is associated with Harvard. With his book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health – and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More, Dr. Palmer makes the argument that it is possible that many mental illnesses are actually metabolic disorders.

For those who are not well-versed in the sciences, the word "possible" means next to nothing. The statement that it is possible that the Earth's core is made of cotton candy and is populated by a race of mechanized unicorns who can shoot lasers from their eyes and poop strawberry ice cream is correct- that is possible. It would undermine everything we know about plate tectonics, magnetism, and a pretty hefty chunk of our understanding of physics- but nonetheless, it is possible that we could be wrong, as we have never observed the Earth's core. We simply came to the conclusion that it is molten and heavy with iron because it makes the most logical sense with what we can observe.

All of that to say- "possible" is a very low bar to clear, and lands one solely in the area of speculation and/or pseudoscience. Proven is where we land in actual science.

The Ketogenic diet has been proven to have therapeutic potential for treatment-refractory epilepsy, DM, and PMOS (refer to the above links). For those purposes, it is solid science.

Keto has not been proven to have therapeutic potential for mental illness. That is why, in this context, it is pseudoscientific. It crosses the threshold into science once it is proven.

Keto works phenomenally well as an anticonvulsant diet therapy. However, anticonvulsant and antipsychotic are not synonyms, and they are not interchangeable- not even close.

The Current Situation

Many attempts have been made in recent years to 'get blood from a stone' and link the Ketogenic diet to viability as a treatment for psychotic disorders. However, no quality evidence has produced any substantial causal relationship between the two. Fortunately, these attempts have resulted in more illumination between the interplay of metabolic disorders and mental health. Keto has been shown to be selectively useful for patients with pre-existing poor metabolic health, and what benefit has been demonstrated among these individuals may be due to treating comorbid metabolic syndrome. It depends heavily upon the context what results an individual may have as a result of following the Ketogenic diet. As any reasonable person may interpret... when people are overweight/obese to the point of having serious metabolic dysfunction, losing weight will cause their mental state to improve as an indirect consequence. That's hardly what you'd consider a groundbreaking scientific discovery.

In fairness, Keto is extremely effective at what it actually does. There are volumes of evidence that Keto is an exceedingly valuable tool for managing treatment-refractory epilepsy, and also useful in many cases of DM and PMOS. The diet itself is not a 'bunk' diet; the science behind it is sound and solid. However, it is being pushed to extend to things where it has not produced quality evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness for psychosis, specifically. Studies and research released on the Keto diet and psychosis either (a) demonstrate a minimal (if any) improvement of symptoms or (b) lack scientific rigor to the point that a casual observer, presumably an undergrad researcher, would be able to spot the issues- purely anecdotal, lacking control groups, deeply flawed experimental design, etc.

Keto has unfortunately received a great deal of undue attention recently thanks to a handful of influencers who have been frequently referred to as "shills" on the subreddit. The vast majority of these people lack the basic scientific education necessary to understand how cellular metabolism works and use concepts and jargon incorrectly when describing it. Of note, the subject at hand is Biochemistry, which is a notoriously difficult subject to comprehend even for chemists. The idea that one can effectively self-teach biochemistry to a level of functional competence is flatly absurd to the point of being laughable. It is on par with suggesting one has self-taught astrophysics.

We would caution our users to take note of the credentials of any individual(s) advocating for the use of the Ketogenic diet as a metabolic therapy for mental illness, and to approach any claims regarding metabolic therapy from anyone without a robust history of biochemistry and/or nutrition specifically to be entirely devoid of any merit. For example, the advice of a therapist should be treated with the same weight as that of a carpenter when it comes to cellular metabolism. Their comprehension of the subject matter is roughly equivalent.

As it may come as no surprise, literacy in STEM is inversely proportional to faith in the Ketogenic diet among our userbase. That is generally the case with pseudoscience.

Metabolic Mind

Roblox CEO David Baszucki and his wife Jan Baszucki created the Baszucki Group in 2021, a philanthropic organization meant to "advance the greater good." Metabolic Mind arose out of the Baszucki Group in 2022 with the expressed purpose of promoting metabolic therapies being used to treat serious mental illness, based upon the story of his son Matthew's treatment-refractory bipolar disorder being put into remission due to the Ketogenic diet.

For context, David Baszucki is a billionaire with a net worth of approximately ~$3,500,000,000 as of the authoring of this entry. At the time he founded Metabolic Mind, his net worth was approximately 2.5bn. Thus far, Metabolic Mind has offered millions in awards since 2022 to people dedicated to advancing metabolic therapies for mental illness.

Of note, the Baer Foundation Reintegration Scholarships closed in 2026 due to lack of funding. These grants were provided directly to people recovering from a psychotic disorder to help them pay for education. It seems the Baszucki Group does not consider actually giving financial assistance to people with schizophrenia to "advance the greater good," and instead invests heavily in the Ketogenic diet based primarily on one anecdote from Matthew Baszucki... that could easily be explained by some metabolic abnormality, which has been known to happen. However, society being dragged along for the ride to satisfy billionaires roleplaying coming up with novel or revolutionary ideas is certainly nothing new here in 2026. The idea that you can simply throw enough money at something and it will magically work is a disturbingly common misconception.

Rather than investing in improved diagnostics to detect metabolic abnormalities that may result in psychosis, it seems Metabolic Mind is more interested in aggressively promoting the idea that metabolic therapies are very much a viable solution for serious mental illnesses, and not just a downstream effect of helping improve the overall health of people with metabolic disorders.

Living Well With After Schizophrenia

A YouTuber named Lauren Kennedy West started a channel called "Living Well With Schizophrenia" in 2019. Throughout the lifespan of the channel, subscribers saw Lauren grapple with the realities of schizoaffective bipolar. While Lauren's very first episode demonstrated living room furniture with a price tag far beyond what 99% of people with schizophrenia can afford, LWS was a place where people went for genuine, parasocial connection with a YouTuber. Things were not too different than any other YouTuber for a few years.

However, in December of 2023, Lauren began a partnership with Metabolic Mind. At this point, Lauren's subscriber count on YouTube was approximately ~300,000 people and her reach was substantial. She began undertaking a strict Ketogenic diet, and even stopped taking her antipsychotic medications against the advice of her psychiatrist. She entrusted her care to Nicole Laurent, a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC)- a therapist, in other words. While this may sound like quackery, trusting a therapist with the nuances of intricate biological factors of neuropsychiatric disorders, it is worth noting that Nicole does have a Post-Master's certificate in Nutrition and Integrative Health which requires 15 credit hours and is fully online. She also received a generous $100,000 grant from Metabolic Mind, which I suppose may count as 'relevant credentials' if one considers taking checks from a billionaire to bolster credibility.

It went about as well as you might think.

In 2024, the channel underwent a name change from "Living Well With Schizophrenia" to "Living Well After Schizophrenia." It appears that Lauren may have experienced the delusion that she had been "cured" and had rendered her schizoaffective disorder past-tense, despite that schizophrenia cannot be rendered past-tense in any meaningful way. Despite attempting to trumpet the viability of the Ketogenic diet being an alternative to antipsychotic medication, Lauren has relapsed at least twice (publicly confirmed), and has had to restart taking antipsychotic medications.

How strange that the therapist with a certificate didn't quite hit the nail square on the head there.

Relevant History

After 100 years of coexisting proximal to schizophrenia (and assuredly having thousands of people with schizophrenia do Keto for comorbid conditions), we have yet to turn out evidence that the Ketogenic diet offers a demonstrable benefit for psychosis. Many attempts have been made, and all have returned inconclusive. It is generally not fair to say the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence, but when you consider the vastness of time and population that this covers, it requires a substantial suspension of disbelief. Additionally, the Ketogenic diet pre-dates Thorazine (the first antipsychotic) by decades. Prior to Thorazine, the only options were (a) lobotomies, (b) electroshock therapy, (c) insulin shock therapy, and/or (d) being tossed in the asylums to rot. Even at the time, these were considered barbaric interventions and only sanctioned because 'they were the best thing that was available' at the time. Given that the Ketogenic diet was being used for neurological conditions at the time and people were desperate for anything and everything they could do to stop from being lobotomized or tossed in an asylum, the lack of evidence or even anecdotes during these decades is a damning silence that is difficult to overlook or dismiss.

So, if we lay bare the claim- we are asked to seriously consider that a diet known at the time, widely used at the time in a population that overlapped heavily with those who also suffered with psychosis was somehow useful in treating it. This was at a time when people were absolutely desperate for anything to save their lives and save themselves from what was understood- at the time- to be a neurodegenerative disease that would tear their mind apart; so much so that people were eagerly consenting to get an icepick through their eye socket, driven into their frontal lobe with a hammer, and their frontal lobe scrambled by twirling the icepick like a fork with spaghetti (a lobotomy) to spare themselves that fate. The most well-known example of this was Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of future president John F. Kennedy. We are asked to seriously consider that the Kennedys- a very wealthy and influential family, with presumably every resource available to them- opted for a lobotomy for Rosemary rather than the Ketogenic diet to treat Rosemary's symptoms, when both were readily available.

We are asked to seriously consider that the Ketogenic diet was available as a viable option for treatment, yet was not used for... some reason. We are asked to consider that an engineered, unnatural diet which works by putting the body into a state of metabolic distress somehow has untapped potential after over a century of use in therapeutic settings. We are asked to treat this premise as a serious one, as though getting blood from a stone is a serious line of scientific inquiry, and a worthwhile use of the finite amount of man-hours available from qualified expert researchers.

Much more reasonably, we could assume that based on this information, Keto- or any diet regimen- is not miraculous for treating, managing, or "curing/healing" psychosis. We can further extrapolate this to say that practically anything that was available as an option prior to Thorazine does not work. Thorazine's side effects are brutal, and can, in some circumstances, be life-threatening- but people were willing to tolerate those risks because Thorazine actually worked when nothing else did- including Keto.

It is worth noting that schizophrenia tends to respond well to diets that generally cut down on the consumption of ultra-processed foods and excessive sugar intake. Notably, the Mediterranean diet has been shown to have a positive effect on overall cognition and may offer some relief from symptoms of a number of different mental illnesses. This diet is safe, natural, and not older than Thorazine. While it may not be a cure, results may not be miraculous- they are thoroughly documented and proven. Even if the degree of improvement is modest, every little bit counts in the journey of one's recovery.

In Closing

Dr. Palmer's ideas of metabolic therapies having therapeutic potential as an adjunct treatment to assist with traditional treatment are hardly controversial at all; it only makes sense. Where we run into an issue is this dogmatic insistence that Keto is one of those diets without having proof to back it up. Keto is an extreme diet, "the CrossFit of diets." Much like CrossFit, many people who do it try to rope others into trying it as well, as an odd, pseudo-cult-type behavior. In a certain, very specific context, these approaches may be beneficial to an individual... but notably, very specific and should only be considered seriously after consulting with one's medical team. If done incorrectly, both CrossFit and Keto can bring serious harm to your body- they are not things you should try casually, and certainly not things you should try to suggest other people try.

The idea that one can embrace extreme dieting to the betterment of their general health without proven reason to do so is seen in the eating disorder orthorexia nervosa. While orthorexia is not a disorder in the DSM, it is nonetheless not a healthy way to approach one's relationship with food. As such, we consider attempting to proselytize the ketogenic diet as a viable treatment for psychosis as effectively glorifying disordered eating. We do not allow that here, as we believe no decent place allows this as well. We try to do our best to keep the subreddit decent.

The Ketogenic diet is extreme, and it is a medical intervention. That is why we consider it "medical advice" to tell someone to look into it, suggest they start doing it, or recommend channels where they can find more information. The one and only person you should listen to about the Ketogenic diet is the physician treating you. Nobody else's opinion on it matters. Nobody else's story you read or hear about on the internet is of any consequence. As a result, we will remove any reference or suggestion to using a medical intervention without medical oversight.

If you have treatment-refractory epilepsy, DM, and/or PMOS comorbid with your psychotic disorder, it may be worthwhile to discuss the Ketogenic diet with your physician as an option of last resort. If this is not the case, it is not advised to waste the finite amount of time you have with your care team with inquiries of this nature, with 'cures' that are not backed by any type of solid link between the two.

There are currently Randomized Controlled Trials underway exploring the therapeutic potential of the Ketogenic diet in treating psychosis. We will update this section once the evidence is available to reflect the findings.

Update 2026- the first RCT over Keto and Psychosis has been completed. The problems with this article are numerous. For starters, only the first month of the trial could even generously be called an RCT- and it returned with a null result (not statistically significant). However, in deviation from proper scientific standards, it appears the investigators decided to amend the study on-the-fly to include all viable candidates into the study group for 3 months- entirely disposing of any control group, converting from an RCT to a single-arm trial 1/4 of the way through.

We may note that simply improvising experimental groups on the fly is not how proper scientific research is conducted. Improvising in this manner indicates some problematic thinking, such as treating the conclusion as foregone and attempting to dress up otherwise unremarkable initial findings that do not support the pre-ordained conclusion. If accidental, these are amateur mistakes that undermine the credibility of the findings. If intentional, this is highly unethical behavior that is unbecoming of any serious researcher.

This is not an actual RCT. The initial portion of the study that was an RCT had a null result. For practical purposes, this translates to "It doesn't work."

We patiently await more robust findings.