TGIF: Nutrition & Health News

The Good

Medical revolutions often start with anecdotes: A physician stumbles on a therapy for an intractable disorder and publishes a “case report.” Other such reports follow, and if the therapy continues to work, then it’s time for clinical trials, to weigh any benefits against potential harms as well as the existing standard of care. If the intervention is a drug, the pharmaceutical industry will cover the expenses. If it’s a diet, we hope to have benefactors.

The ketogenic diet for serious mental illness is now on that track, and we’re fascinated to see how far it goes. First there were several case studies¹ showing that depression and schizophrenia could be reversed using a ketogenic diet; then, in 2022, a pilot trial with very promising results. Now, Harvard’s McLean Hospital has announced that it will be running a clinical trial testing the effect of ketogenic diet therapy on bipolar or schizoaffective disorder. Some 50 newly diagnosed patients will be randomized to drug therapy plus a ketogenic diet or drug therapy and a diet based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The patients will be tracked for 12 weeks to see how the diets affect their metabolism and, of course, their mental state. Some $2 million in funding for the trial is coming from the Baszucki Group, an entity created by the Roblox founder David Baszucki and his wife, Jan, whose son with bipolar disorder was considered “treatment resistant” for years until a ketogenic diet was recommended–and, amazingly, reversed his condition. This story was the subject of a lengthy Today Show segment this week. Details of the new trial can be found on Clinicaltrials.gov. 

The Bad

Can the technique of Medelian Randomization (MR) replace the need for clinical trials? That’s the proposition presented in a recent paper, “Red and Processed Meat Intake and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease: A Two-sample Mendelian Randomization Study” (Similar papers have made the rounds on Twitter/X.)