Mental Health and the Keto Diet

For those with serious mental illness, such as bipolar or schizophrenia, new research shows following a keto diet can have enormous benefits. A new study from Stanford Medicine found both improvement in mental health and improved weight management when patients went on a keto diet. Weight gain, unfortunately, is often a side effect of the antipsychotic medications used to control these mental illnesses. This weight gain sometimes leads to patients stopping their medication and a return of symptoms. The keto diet shows promise for both relieving symptoms and reducing waistlines.  Shebani Sethi, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the first author of the new paper, spearheaded research after one of her patients went on the keto diet and saw marked change in mental health and weight. Sethi wanted to see if these results would show up in other patients. They did. Patients who followed a keto diet had better management of both their mental illness and their weight.