Pilot Study Shows Ketogenic Diet Improves Severe Mental Illness
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For people living with serious mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, standard treatment with antipsychotic medications can be a double-edged sword. While these drugs help regulate brain chemistry, they often cause metabolic side effects such as insulin resistance and obesity, which are distressing enough that many patients stop taking the medications. Now, a pilot study led by Stanford Medicine researchers has found that a ketogenic diet not only restores metabolic health in these patients as they continue their medications, but it further improves their psychiatric conditions. The results, published March 27 in Psychiatry Research, suggest that a dietary intervention can be a powerful aid in treating mental illness. Shebani Sethi, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and Supraketo the first author of the new paper. Sethi, who is board certified in obesity and psychiatry, remembers when she first noticed the connection. As a medical student working in an obesity clinic, she saw a patient with treatment-resistant schizophrenia whose auditory hallucinations quieted on a ketogenic diet.
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That prompted her to dig into the medical literature. 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. A few years later, Sethi coined the term metabolic psychiatry, a new field that approaches mental health from an energy conversion perspective. In the four-month pilot trial, Sethi's team followed 21 adult participants who were diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, taking antipsychotic medications, and had a metabolic abnormality - such as weight gain, insulin resistance, hypertriglyceridemia, dyslipidemia or impaired glucose tolerance. The participants were instructed to follow a ketogenic diet, with approximately 10% of the calories from carbohydrates, 30% from protein and 60% from fat. They were not told to count calories. Sethi, who shared keto-friendly meal ideas with the participants. The research team tracked how well the participants followed the diet through weekly measures of blood ketone levels.


By the end of the trial, 14 patients had been fully adherent, six were semi-adherent and only one was non-adherent. The participants underwent a variety of psychiatric and Supraketo Supplement metabolic assessments throughout the trial. Before the trial, 29% of the participants met the criteria for metabolic syndrome, defined as having at least three of five conditions: abdominal obesity, elevated triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, elevated blood pressure and elevated fasting glucose levels. After four months on a ketogenic diet, none of the participants had metabolic syndrome. On average, the participants lost 10% of their body weight