On February 4, 2026, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK) made false and misleading statements about mental health and eating habits during a stop on his national tour promoting the updated federal dietary guidelines. In his remarks, RFK claimed that “we now know that the things that you eat are driving mental illness in this country,” that a ketogenic diet could “cure” schizophrenia, and that “people lose their bipolar diagnosis by changing their diet.” The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that forces the body to burn fat rather than carbohydrates.
RFK appeared to be referring to a 2019 paper co-authored by Dr. Christopher Palmer, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, that described two patients who followed the ketogenic diet and experienced long-term remission of their schizophrenia symptoms. In an interview after RFK’s remarks, Dr. Palmer refuted the claim that he had described the diet as a “cure,” calling it an oversimplification that could lead a patient to attempt the keto diet while stopping medication, potentially leading to serious mental health emergencies. According to Dr. Palmer, “'[c]ure’ implies that you can do the treatment for a short time, stop the treatment, and your illness never comes back. That’s not at all what I’ve seen in patients with severe mental illness.”