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• Posted February 6, 2026

Keto Diet A Potential Treatment For Depression, Trial Shows

The keto diet might help ease depression in people who aren’t responding to antidepressants, a new study reports.

People prescribed a keto diet had slightly lower symptoms of depression after six weeks compared to others encouraged to eat more plant-based foods, researchers reported Feb. 4 in JAMA Psychiatry.

“A ketogenic diet had antidepressant benefits compared with a well-matched control diet at 6 weeks,” concluded the research team led by Min Gao, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

“This randomized clinical trial suggests that ketogenic diets may be effective as an adjunctive treatment for treatment-resistant depression,” the researchers wrote.

Keto diets are heavy in fats and strict on carbohydrates, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The idea is to switch a person’s body so its main source of energy is no longer glucose provided by carbs, but ketones provided by fats.

The switch, called ketosis, amps up a person’s metabolism, decreases their hunger and increases muscle mass, the Cleveland Clinic says.

But previous studies have also suggested that ketosis might have brain benefits as well.

Ketosis can stabilize neurons, reduce inflammation in the brain and cause other changes that should help a person’s mental health, according to Stanford Medicine.

To see whether this might help with depression, researchers recruited 88 people with depression that had not responded to treatment with medication.

Half were randomly assigned to a keto diet in which they ate less than 30 grams of carbs per day, while the other half were provided incentives to eat more veggies and replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats.

By six weeks, people on the keto diet had achieved a 10.5-point improvement on a 27-point depression scale, versus an 8.3-point improvement among those eating more veggies.

The results provide “preliminary evidence that adherence to a ketogenic diet may have small antidepressant benefits in people with treatment-resistant depression,” the research team concluded.

"It's a pretty well-thought-out study that was aiming to determine the value of a ketogenic diet in the treatment of major depression," said Dr. Raphael Braga, physician in charge of the Center for Treatment and Research in Bipolar Disorder at Northwell Health's Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York.

"The strengths of the study lie in its design,” said Braga, who reviewed the findings. “The main take away message from the study basically is that the ketogenic diet might have some value when well done.”

However, it’s not an easy diet to stick with. After the trial ended, only 9% of people in the keto group reported continuing with their strict diet, researchers reported.

“The thing to remember is something like the ketogenic diet is a very hard diet to maintain,” Braga said. “It’s very restricted.”

Similar results might come from healthy lifestyle choices like good diet and regular exercise, Braga said.

"Most good psychiatrists at this stage would be suggesting things like weight management or exercise,” Braga said. “All those things are part of a good treatment for depression. This is listed in most guidelines. None of this is specifically new.”

The trial results might also have been influenced by the heavy support that people received during the study, Braga added.

“One of the possible reasons why patients throughout the study got better, either through the ketogenic diet or the control diet that the study used, it's probably because they had a lot of support, a lot of people helping them, helping with diet, helping with measurements, all that stuff,” Braga said. 

“The more we can do to help patients engage socially with family and friends or programs — anything like that — this is always the one of the key things that we do for depression,” he said.

More information

Stanford Medicine has more on keto therapy and mental illness.

SOURCES: JAMA Psychiatry, Feb. 4, 2026; Dr. Raphael Braga, physician in charge, Center for Treatment and Research in Bipolar Disorder, Northwell Health Zucker Hillside Hospital