Lithium is an essential element which has no RDA and has not made it on the radar screen of nutrition. The growing data on lithium suggests that it is a necessary nutrient in managing stress,  including both physiological stress (virus, toxin) and psycho-spiritual stress.  It is essential for autophagy, a process where a cell cleans it’s inner machinery of clutter and debris. Overcrowding of cellular contents is a cusal mechanism of Alzheimers and other degenerative diseases; lithium is essential to prevent and reverse this process via autophagy.

Lithium is excluded from most multi-vitamin and mineral products because of its bad rap. However, it is helpful, and possibly essential, to help defend against and even reverse neurological damage after head trauma and in several neuro-degenerative conditions including dementia.

Most people have only heard of lithium as a drug for psychiatric diseases such as bipolar or manic-depression. However, at these pharmaceutical doses, it damages the thyroid, kidneys and brain. Most patients can not take it for long-term use due to these complications. The dose used in psychiatry is 10-300 times the nutritional dose.  It’s equivalent to drinking 20-600 quarts of water per day, rather than 2. That much water is toxic, as is lithium at the doses used.

As you can see in the links below (start from the top articles), lithium is intimately involved in brain health. It not only can protect the brain, it can even help reverse Alzheimers and other neurodegenerative diseases due to its ability to induce autophagy.