Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made waves in February when he opined that changing your diet can “cure” schizophrenia. His comment sparked a wave of backlash from researchers who called the secretary’s remarks “unfounded.” 

While the current scientific consensus suggests that schizophrenia cannot be cured through diet, Kennedy’s interests in nutrition and diet as tools to treat mental illness are shared by some researchers and clinicians eager to find alternatives for conditions like schizophrenia that lack good treatment options. A person’s mental health, they say, is not solely determined by neurotransmitters bouncing around inside their brain, but also by other bodily pathways.

Stanford University researcher Shebani Sethi has been at the vanguard of this group, a field she calls “metabolic psychiatry.” Her work has caught the interest of leaders in the Make America Healthy Again movement, including physician Mark Hyman, a longtime friend of Kennedy. 

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