A teenage boy with epilepsy and autism behaviors switched to a ketogenic diet and saw life-changing results. Seizures stopped, and autism behaviors improved within weeks. Inspired, psychiatrist Dr. Albert Danan offered the diet to 31 patients with chronic, severe, "treatment-resistant" mental illnesses.
The results? Extraordinary.
100% of patients who stuck to the plan improved.
43% achieved full remission.
64% discharged on less psychiatric medication.
Weight loss and metabolic health improvements across the board, despite antipsychotic medications.
These outcomes were so unexpected that Dr. Danan and I collaborated with Duke University obesity medicine researcher
and University of Michigan behavioral medicine researcher Dr. Laura Saslow to publish them in June of 2022.
As a co‑author of this paper, naturally, I view its findings in a positive light, but having practiced psychiatry for more than 25 year,s I can tell you that we never see results like this with standard psychiatric treatments.
Clinical remission is rare, most people leave psychiatric hospitals on more medication, and metabolic side effects such as weight gain are common.
In this case, the remission rate was high, and instead of side effects, people were enjoying side benefits: healthy reductions in weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, liver enzymes, and triglycerides.
This wasn’t a randomized controlled trial, so we can’t be certain that the #ketogenic diet itself was responsible for the unprecedented improvements we reported.
However, we believe it contributed considerably to these outcomes, as they would otherwise be difficult to explain.
These patients had previously benefited very little from attentive outpatient care, multiple medications, and psychiatric hospitalization— the only difference between this hospitalization and previous hospitalizations was the ketogenic diet.
These observations offer tremendous hope, because they suggest that a ketogenic diet could bring significant relief to people with serious mental illnesses, regardless of the nature or duration of their symptoms.
Ready to learn more? My new CME course on metabolic #psychiatry is now available for FREE and is accredited for physicians, nurses, and psychologists, all thanks to
