In the Trump administration’s campaign to promote healthy eating, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not stopped at his slogan urging people to “eat real food” to prevent disease.
In recent speeches and podcast appearances, the nation’s health secretary also has claimed that diet can “cure” schizophrenia and diabetes and allow people to rid themselves of bipolar disorder diagnoses. Researchers say the comments overstate current evidence about the real and promising role that food can play in managing illness.
“Food is medicine, and you can heal yourself with a good diet,” Kennedy said on comedian Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast in February.
The talking point aligns with an idea from Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” allies that has gotten some bipartisan support: The role of food in health deserves more attention.
Scientists agree that diet can contribute to some diseases and also can be valuable in treating them. But public health advocates say Kennedy’s exaggerations are part of a pattern in which he cherry-picks and misrepresents scientific research, a tendency that he has regularly applied to vaccine science, enraging doctors.
It is the latest example of Kennedy being “incredibly careless and irresponsible” in talking about health issues, said Kayla Hancock, director of a public health project at the advocacy group Protect Our Care.
Dr. Theresa Miskimen Rivera, president of the American Psychiatric Association, fears the language could drive patients to self-medicate with food alone.
“The concern always is that people can have hope and they might interpret that as, ‘Well, I don’t need medication. I do not need treatment. I just need to follow the diet,’” Rivera said.
In an early February speech at the Tennessee Capitol, Kennedy cited the work of Dr. Christopher Palmer, a Harvard Medical School researcher who in 2019 wrote about two patients with schizophrenia who experienced remission of their symptoms following a high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet.
Kennedy said that Palmer had “cured schizophrenia using keto diets.”
Palmer has called that inaccurate. He told The Associated Press that “as much as I wish we had cures for mental illness or other chronic diseases, it is important that we use more precise language.” Palmer prefers the word “remission.”
During the same speech, and later on Joe Rogan's podcast, Kennedy referred to studies “where people lose their bipolar diagnosis by changing their diet.” He said “there’s a big paper about to come out" showing results.
Kennedy spokesman Andrew Nixon said those comments referred to a “growing body of research” on the issue, including a University of California, Los Angeles, study investigating the effect of a keto diet on teenagers with bipolar disorder.
That study is still recruiting patients and will not be completed until March 2027, according to a posting on a federal website. Any publication would come months after that.
Rivera, of the American Psychiatric Association, said Kennedy’s claims exaggerate the evidence. Studies testing the role of the ketogenic diet on mental health conditions have been small, anecdotal or pilot studies, she said. Many did not include a control group of patients following a regular diet.
“At this point, it’s premature. We cannot draw definitive conclusions,” Rivera said. “There is not enough evidence to recommend a specific diet or as a standalone, without medication such as antipsychotics or mood stabilizers.”
It is true that research into the effects of ketogenic and other diets on psychiatric disorders is accelerating, Palmer said. He said 20 controlled clinical trials using the keto diet for severe mental illness are underway, with results of two trials set for publication within the next year.
Palmer said he is “very enthusiastic” about diet as a promising therapy for serious psychiatric disorders, but that patients with mental illness should still talk with their doctors.
“I want to implore patients: Please do not stop your medications on your own,” he said. “Please do not even try a ketogenic diet on your own as a treatment for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.”
Kennedy’s comments on Von’s podcast that “most diabetes can be cured through diet” also have been scrutinized. Some experts say the health secretary overstated the role of diet.
Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder, cannot be cured by diet alone, said Dr. Willa Hsueh, an Ohio State University endocrinologist and researcher. A healthy diet and exercise are keys to managing Type 2 diabetes, but it can be difficult to use those tools alone to reverse the disorder, she said.
“The secretary is not wrong that it can work," Hsueh said. "But it’s not common for people to cure themselves ... by diet alone.”
Others defended Kennedy’s claims about the disease that affects 40 million people in the United States.
Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, said a healthy diet could help “most individuals” with Type 2 diabetes lower their blood sugar levels, reverse symptoms and allow them to stop taking medications for the condition.
“Whether you consider that a cure or remission, that’s medical speak, right?” Mozaffarian said.
He acknowledged that Kennedy is not “always perfectly precise in the terminology and there could be risks to that.” But he welcomed the high-level focus on the role of diet in improving chronic disease.
“I’d rather exaggerate and get some attention and action than keep doing what we’re doing, which is have millions of Americans suffering from diet-related diseases,” Mozaffarian said.
Mark Gorton, president of the Kennedy-aligned MAHA Institute, said he was not familiar with the studies Kennedy referenced, but that nutrition has been “an incredibly overlooked area in our medical system for decades.”
“I think to the extent that it is possible, we should be prioritizing focusing on diet and getting back to living healthy rather than taking sick people and medicating them forever, which is the current way our system works,” Gorton said.
Kody Green, a mental health advocate with schizophrenia, said that he supports healthy eating, but that he needed psychiatric medications. He worries that Kennedy's comments could deter schizophrenia patients from trying drugs that are already stigmatized.
“For some people, maybe food can help with the issues they have, but schizophrenia is a very serious mental illness,” Green said. "Until further research is done, making claims like that can be really dangerous to people in my community.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE - Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrives before President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 22, 2026--
Blair Health, a clinical infrastructure company that enables generalist healthcare providers to deliver specialist-level care, has raised CAD $4.24 million in pre-seed financing, marking the company's first institutional round and bringing total capital raised to date to CAD $4.5 million. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Business Development Bank of Canada's (BDC) Thrive Venture Fund, Accelia Capital, and Ogaei, with participation from Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI) through its Life Sciences Innovation Fund (LSIF), and angel investors.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260922407114/en/
Blair will use the funding to accelerate engineering and product development, expand its commercial presence across Canada and into the U.S., and invest in the clinical operations, provider network, team and infrastructure required to scale the business. This includes growing its employer channel in Canada, collaborating with public-sector health systems, and expanding its U.S. employer business.
“The fundamental problem in healthcare today is that the traditional model for delivering specialist care doesn’t scale,” said Madge Rumman, co-founder and CEO of Blair Health. “We’ve spent the last year proving that specialist knowledge can be encoded into technology without removing the clinician from care, and that the same architecture can be applied across specialties. The clinical infrastructure we are building enables specialist expertise to reach far more patients, particularly in areas of medicine where backlogs are greatest and subspecialists are scarce.”
A clinical model built to scale access to specialist care
Blair's clinical infrastructure is built with medical subspecialists, encoding their assessment logic, guideline-informed treatment protocols, escalation triggers, and follow-up pathways into software. That infrastructure enables Blair's in-house nurse practitioners and family physicians to deliver specialist-level care, with subspecialists providing oversight and support for complex cases. It is also why patients can see a provider within days instead of waiting months or years for an appointment.
Blair is also built around what happens between appointments. Patients track their symptoms over time, and those trends feed back into the care plan so treatment is adjusted based on evidence. Each patient receives guidance personalized to their own assessments and clinical diagnoses, and can message their provider between visits.
“Expanding access to specialized care is a significant opportunity to improve outcomes for women while building innovative healthcare businesses,” said Roxanne Turcotte, SVP, Inclusive and Government Funds, BDC. “This investment reflects our fund's commitment to backing women-led companies with strong growth potential and BDC's mandate to help Canadian innovators scale and create lasting economic impact.”
From clinical validation to national scale
Blair proved its model in menopause, one of the largest specialist backlogs in Canadian healthcare, where women can wait up to two years for an appointment. The menopause pathway was built with Blair co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Lindsay Shirreff, one of the few fellowship-trained menopause subspecialists practising in Canada, and was clinically validated against Blair's own clinical data set ahead of commercial launch in May 2025.
“The menopause pathway performs at 98.7% clinical accuracy, and we can train a provider to deliver it in under four hours,” adds Dr. Shirreff.
Blair also established that the architecture behind its clinical model extends across specialties. Working with leading specialists, the company has built new verticals in urology and pelvic health, led by urologist Dr. Sarah Peltz, and in clinical nutrition and weight management, led by Dr. Pooja Singhal, a board-certified gastroenterologist and obesity medicine physician. Each new vertical runs on the same technology stack.
Blair launched direct-to-consumer in May 2025 and has since grown to more than 2,300 users in Canada. Between 55 and 65 percent of steady-state visits are follow-ups, which reflects a longitudinal care model rather than one-off consultations.
Blair is available to women in every Canadian province, with French-language provider matching, and in six U.S. states, with more to come.
Employer pilots converting into annual workplace benefit contracts
In the U.S., employers are absorbing healthcare costs that rise every year without producing answers. Women cycle through appointments, referrals, and tests and still leave without a diagnosis or a treatment plan, and the employer pays for every step. When offered as a workplace benefit, Blair gives employees direct access to specialist-level assessment and treatment, so plan spend goes toward resolving a condition.
Blair piloted its employer offering in Canada with leading organizations across professional services, hospitality, and financial services, and those pilots have converted into recurring annual contracts. The employer channel went from close to zero a year ago to roughly half of Blair's revenue in the first half of 2026.
Fairmont Royal York introduced Blair to colleagues through an onsite education session before moving to a paid pilot. “Even employers with strong health and wellness programs can have gaps when it comes to supporting women’s health needs across different stages of life,” said Ian McLaren, Health & Wellness Manager at Fairmont Royal York. “Working with Blair Health has shown us how important it is to give colleagues timely access to specialist care and resources that meet those needs. When employees feel their health is understood and supported, it can have a meaningful impact on their wellbeing, confidence and how they experience work.”
“Women's health remains one of the largest underserved opportunities in healthcare, and Blair Health is tackling this gap with a fundamentally different approach,” said Catherine Poulin-Filion, Partner at Accelia Capital. “What stood out to us was the team's ability to rethink how care can be delivered rather than simply digitizing an existing model. Blair has paired a significant market need with a strong clinical foundation and a clear vision for building a new category of healthcare company.”
About Blair Health
Blair Health is a clinical infrastructure company building technology that scales specialist medical knowledge. Its proprietary clinical models encode specialist-designed assessments, clinical pathways, treatment protocols, guardrails and escalation rules into software that enables generalist healthcare providers to deliver specialist-level care with continuous clinical oversight. Blair currently provides specialist-designed care across menopause and perimenopause, urology and pelvic health, and clinical nutrition and weight management, across Canada and in a growing number of U.S. states. For more information, visit Blair Health online.
Blair was co-founded in December 2024 by Madge Rumman, Chief Executive Officer and Dr. Lindsay Shirreff, Chief Medical Officer
