Tucker Carlson interviews neurologist Dr. Michael Nehls on lithium deficiency, brain health, and Alzheimer's prevention
Tucker Carlson speaks with Dr. Michael Nehls, a molecular geneticist and neurologist, about lithium as an essential trace element, its role in brain health, and why it has been suppressed as a supplement.
Summary
Tucker Carlson interviews Dr. Michael Nehls, author of The Conspiracy Against Lithium and The Indoctrinated Brain, about the central role of the hippocampus in human mental functioning and the critical importance of lithium as a trace element. Dr. Nehls argues that lithium deficiency — caused by modern populations moving away from shellfish-rich coastal diets — underlies a spectrum of conditions from depression and anxiety to autism and Alzheimer's disease. He presents evidence that lithium at just one milligram per day can stabilize or even reverse early-stage Alzheimer's, and that a Harvard research team confirmed lithium orotate as the preferred lithium salt for brain health. Dr. Nehls also argues that the FDA effectively banned lithium as a supplement in 1949 to protect the pharmaceutical industry's market in chronic disease treatment, and that the European Union continues to enforce this ban today. He further contends that mRNA injections accelerate neuroinflammation and hippocampal shrinkage, and that lithium is the natural antidote to the cytokine storms that killed COVID patients — information he says was published in peer-reviewed literature as early as August 2020. Dr. Nehls also recounts how organizers at a World Economic Forum-linked conference in Basel attempted to censor his slides minutes before he was to deliver a keynote on what the brain needs to think peace, illustrating the suppression theme he describes throughout the conversation.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Dogs, oxytocin, and the hippocampus
Tucker Carlson: I'm really excited about this. We're going to talk about algae oil and lithium. We were just having a conversation off camera about dogs, and I was telling you my crackpot health theories, which are very sincere and firmly believed. One of them is that sleeping next to your dog in bed, having dogs in your life physically, kissing dogs — all of that is very important to your health. I feel that way strongly, but I never tell anybody because it's too crazy. But you just affirmed my belief. You said there might be some science behind it.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, there was a paper a few years ago in Science where they actually showed that dogs captured what we call the oxytocin system. Oxytocin is a hormone produced by your body. It's for bonding. Actually, the main purpose of oxytocin — it's a Greek word — is for easy birth. It activates the uterus and helps deliver the baby.
Tucker Carlson: Like Pitocin that they give to induce labor?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, exactly. Same stuff. And every time we look into the eyes of friends and feel happy, have companionship, oxytocin is produced in our body. Oxytocin has one important function beyond easy birth, and that is the bonding between the mother and the child. That bond is essential for the life of the child. If you can't remember the child, if you can't smell it, if you don't have a connection to the child, the child is lost. The love of the mother for the child has to persist for the whole life. And this is a function of our autobiographical memory center, which we call the hippocampus — a seahorse-shaped structure in the temporal lobe of our brain on both sides, about the size of a thumb. This is the memory center.
We will talk about this in depth because this memory center is important for whether we are able to think in peace, whether we actually act like humans — whether we reflect about things. And of course, if it doesn't function, one disease which we all know about, which I call hippocampal dementia, is Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's starts from the hippocampus. The main reason — I published this in 2016, I called it the unified theory of Alzheimer's — is that the hippocampus has the ability to grow new nerve cells every day. These are required so that we can accumulate a lifelong store of information, knowledge, and experiences that are valuable for our children and grandchildren. That is the main reason we get as old as we do.
So the hippocampus has to grow new cells, and one of the major fertilizers of this growth process is oxytocin. When a child is born, a lot of oxytocin is produced, and the mother actually has a better memory than at any other point in her whole life when the child is born. The same goes for prolactin, which is important for producing milk for the baby. So giving milk to the baby, the birth of the baby, produces hormones, and these hormones activate the growth of the hippocampus.
And the same goes for dogs. When a dog looks into your eyes — it was proven — the oxytocin level increases in your blood, but not only in your blood, also in the dog's blood. So there is a bonding between the two species based on the oxytocin system. The paper in Science about ten to fifteen years ago said that the oxytocin system was captured by the dogs so that they became our friendliest companions.
Tucker Carlson: What could possibly be the purpose of that?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Well, for the dogs it means they get the food they need every day. It's a species which survives that way. Evolution works in a way that you have to survive, and your children have to survive, and that is more likely if the wolf becomes a dog.
Tucker Carlson: The dog is dependent on you.
Dr. Michael Nehls: The dependence is guaranteed by the oxytocin system. But what would be the purpose for people? For people in the past, dogs were companions in hunting. They protected your space.
Tucker Carlson: So they were for safety reasons.
Dr. Michael Nehls: And meanwhile, I actually recommend them as a therapy against Alzheimer's, because they grow the hippocampus, and the bigger the hippocampus, the less likely you get Alzheimer's.
The hippocampus, neurogenesis, and what it means to be human
Tucker Carlson: So the way we live affects the risk of getting Alzheimer's?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Exactly. When we last talked here, about two years ago, we talked about my first book, The Indoctrinated Brain. There I showed that the growth of these new nerve cells is important for us to be open to new ideas, new memories, to learn, to reflect about things, and also to be curious. These new nerve cells are the neuronal correlate for curiosity. Human curiosity is dependent on the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus. So we are more curious when we have a dog because we produce more oxytocin.
What we talked about two years ago was that the spike protein produced by the mRNA that is injected in this program does just the opposite. The spike protein activates neuroinflammation in the brain — and we have to talk about neuroinflammation today because lithium is the antidote. If neuroinflammation occurs and it's chronic because the spike protein doesn't go away, then the neuroinflammatory process activates the production of interleukin-1, interleukin-6, TNF-alpha — all pro-inflammatory cytokines. Their main purpose is to signal the immune system that there's some damage in the brain, but a side effect — and this is physiological — is that they shut down the hippocampus. They shut down the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus.
In the short run, this is actually good, because it creates a behavior where you are not curious when you are sick. You want to go back. You don't want to socialize. That protects others if you're really sick.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, you're not curious when you're sick. That is true.
Dr. Michael Nehls: That is the result in the short term. But if it's chronic — if there is a chronic shutdown of the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus — then the consequences are depression, anxiety, and in the long run, Alzheimer's. They actually identified, after the mRNA injections, after a few months, that the Alzheimer's rate went up — in a study published in South Korea, I think published in 2023. And I predicted this already in my book, The Indoctrinated Brain, and said the mRNA injection will increase Alzheimer's. And it has. It was published in a Korean study. All the predictions were correct, unfortunately. Well, it was good for me because I like it when my predictions are correct, but it's not good for humanity.
So humanity hinges on the ability of the hippocampus to produce new nerve cells. That is the key to humanity. If we reduce it to one function of the brain — being human means that we are curious, that we can reflect, that we have what I call psychological resilience. Because even if you're curious but you fear going the new path, then it doesn't do any good. Curiosity has to be like two sides of a coin. On one side you have curiosity; on the other side you have psychological resilience. And this coin with these two sides is based neurologically on the production of new nerve cells.
So you need new nerve cells to be curious and to have resilience. Actually, all drugs that are on the market against depression have one key feature: they activate the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus. I'm not saying you have to take them, but this is their function. They are essentially anti-depressants based on the function of producing nerve cells in the hippocampus.
Being human, in my opinion, means that you are able to produce these cells, because then you are curious, you are interested in the opinion of other people, you can reflect on the opinion of other people. There's another feature these cells represent — I outlined it in my book — which I call rational compassion. When we are empathic, we immediately act on something we see. We see someone suffering and we act. But rational compassion is more. It's more like: if I do something, what does it mean for the other person? Maybe people who are not even in this room — people outside in other countries. What do my actions do to these people?
For this, empathy is not the right function in our brain. This is what Kahneman, who got a Nobel Prize, called system one and system two. A psychologist would call system one a reflex. Empathy is kind of a reflex. But rational compassion is something that requires thinking — thinking about putting yourself in the shoes of others, seeing the world out of the eyes of other people. And all these functions are based on the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus. So if you shut down the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, people lose essentially the ability to be human.
Tucker Carlson: They lose themselves.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, they lose themselves. And the ultimate losing of oneself is having Alzheimer's, which is the ultimate result of having a lifelong shutdown of the production of new nerve cells.
The mRNA injections, COVID, and lithium as antidote
Tucker Carlson: May I ask — so you're saying that mRNA injections cause this?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, absolutely.
Tucker Carlson: Are people still being injected with this?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Still happens. I was in Florida four to five months ago. Even though there's a ban on this — somehow it's politically realized how toxic the stuff is — but when my wife and I were in Key West, I think it was November 2025, there were still advertisements: "Here you get the injection, without any insurance problems," on the streets. I was astonished.
Tucker Carlson: One of the promises of the last election was we'd shut that down.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, it's still happening.
Tucker Carlson: It hasn't been shut down. And I wonder why.
Dr. Michael Nehls: I have no real clue. I mean, it almost becomes conspiracy reality. The reasons behind it I don't know — why it is not forbidden completely. I mean, this stuff is toxic.
I gave a talk at the Bundestag about five months ago in Germany. I was invited by the AfD, and I gave a one-and-a-half-hour lecture. About one hour of it was at the end about the origin of the virus. I said it's a bioweapon by all means. I'm a molecular geneticist. I used my molecular genetic skills, and that this virus could have evolved in nature is essentially impossible. The evidence I laid down — it was paid for by the Pentagon, by DARPA, money from the State Department who put money into EcoHealth Alliance, all these things that came together, all the labs in North Carolina. I put this all together in a lecture and said this is a bioweapon. And the real bioweapon is not the virus itself. It's the mRNA that people get injected — the modified mRNA that doesn't go away so easily because of the modifications.
And that's what I asked when I was on the credit commission. I asked the former secretary of health in Germany — Lauterbach — I asked him why he allowed that. He published a book, actually. The title of the book is We Have to Forgive Each Other. I was able to read it before I questioned him publicly. I read that he was informed in early 2020 that this might be coming from a bioweapon lab. So he knew, or at least he had to have this suspicion that it was a bioweapon, and still he insisted that children should be injected.
Tucker Carlson: So when he says "we have to forgive each other," what would he be forgiving the rest of us for?
Dr. Michael Nehls: He wanted, I think, forgiveness for himself. And when I asked him, his response was not "I didn't know" or whatever. No, he said the parents wanted it. And I thought — wow. The parents wanted it because you made them fear that the children might die when they get the infection. You produced that narrative. And then he said something very special which really made waves in Germany — unfortunately not in the main media, only in the alternative media. He said it was never the intention to save others. The injections were never intended to protect others, even though that was the main thing they told us.
Tucker Carlson: "If you love your grandparents, you'll take the shot."
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, that's what he told us. And in this commission, publicly, when I questioned him, he said it was never the intention of the mRNA to help others, to protect others.
Tucker Carlson: Then what was the purpose?
Dr. Michael Nehls: He never said. The problem is in this commission you have only five minutes to question somebody — five minutes for question and answer, and that's it. Then he is released and there's no repercussion.
Tucker Carlson: We just have to forgive him.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, we just have to forgive him. But when he was asked by my colleague Tom Lausen in the second five minutes he got — "Your book says we have to forgive each other. There are so many doctors now who refused to do the injections, who wanted to protect their patients. They are now incarcerated, in prison. Shouldn't we just let them free?" And he simply said no. No forgiveness for those who refused.
Tucker Carlson: They should be in prison for not injecting their patients with poison.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah. We're living in a strange world.
The strange thing is they also lied to us that the injection would help ourselves — that we might not get severe COVID, the kind where you end up with tubes and artificial respiration and die. In my book, The Conspiracy Against Lithium, I show the case that lithium protects our body against severe cytokine storms — the overproduction of cytokines. People died from COVID, or any other respiratory disease, when the immune system overreacts. One of the reasons it overreacts, and why all these diseases happen in winter, is vitamin D deficiency. But the cytokine storm can be ended immediately if you give people lithium. Lithium is a natural antidote against an overreacting immune system.
It was already published — case reports in August 2020 — that if patients have severe COVID and have to go to the hospital, if you give them lithium, the cytokine storm ends immediately and the people are saved.
Tucker Carlson: So that would have saved thousands of lives in the United States. It would have saved everybody, because nobody would have needed the injection. The whole mRNA program would have been for nothing.
Dr. Michael Nehls: When was this known? It was published — six case reports — in August 2020. And then the same group did a peer-reviewed randomized control trial, the standard pharmaceutical way to test drugs. In this case they used lithium. I think they gave the people two times 20 milligrams a day. The control group got standard treatment, and the intervention group got standard treatment plus lithium. The outcome was dramatic. They were out of the hospital in half the time. Nobody had to go to intensive care. Nobody died, compared to the control group.
And it was all known. The same goes for vitamin D. It was already published in September 2020 that if you had severe COVID, you had to raise the vitamin D level in your blood. The vitamin D in our blood that we measure is the vitamin D pro-hormone — 25-hydroxy vitamin D. That's the storage form, and it's also the form we measure in the blood. It immediately functions as a hormone in the cells, shutting down the cytokine storm. It's also important for fighting viruses.
A study was done in Córdoba — I think it was published in September 2020 — where they randomized a group of patients in hospital with severe COVID respiratory disease and cytokine storm. One group got the vitamin D pro-hormone — the 25-hydroxy vitamin D, not regular vitamin D — and the other group got standard treatment. The likelihood of having to go to intensive care was reduced 25-fold. 25-fold.
Tucker Carlson: That's incredible. And it was all known at the end of 2020, before the mRNA injection program rolled out.
How many people have been held accountable?
Tucker Carlson: How many people have gone to prison since February of 2020 for killing all these people?
Dr. Michael Nehls: I think it's close to zero, isn't it?
Tucker Carlson: Right around zero in that range. I don't think any of these governments have legitimacy at this point.
Dr. Michael Nehls: No. And lithium is very important in this case because the mechanism by which lithium works is a mechanism that is as old as life on this planet.
What is lithium, and why does it matter?
Tucker Carlson: Can you just stop right there? Lithium. Okay. So that's the main topic here. I'm interested in learning about lithium. I associate it with batteries. Are you talking about the same lithium?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah. Actually, the lithium you find in your mobile phone is pretty much the amount of lithium we need for one year as a human. My recommended daily allowance — recommended by me, it's provisional because usually you need a state or department to acknowledge the amount — is approximately one milligram per day. One thousandth of a gram. One milligram. You can hardly see it on a spoon, it's so little.
To start at the very beginning: lithium is an element. It's actually one of the first elements the universe produced — it co-developed with helium and hydrogen. Those were the three first elements ever produced in the universe. And that's why you find lithium everywhere. Lithium is everywhere. That's actually the reason it's called lithium — it comes from lithos, the Greek word for stone, because every stone people analyze contains lithium. Not much, maybe, but a little. It's the one element you find everywhere.
People realized at the end of the 19th century — when lithium was discovered as an element in the mid-19th century — that when there were springs somewhere where people went because they felt better drinking the water, the common factor of all these holy springs scattered around the world was lithium. The lithium content was higher than in other water. So when the lithium content is a little bit higher, you feel immediately that it helps your brain, because apparently you have a deficiency. Once the deficiency is resolved, your brain works better again.
And there were studies from the 1970s that concluded already that if you have the luck to live in an area — for example in Texas — where a little bit more lithium is in the tap water than in other areas, then the likelihood that you develop Alzheimer's is reduced. That you commit suicide is reduced. That you are admitted to a mental hospital is reduced. That you get killed is reduced. The murder rate depends directly on the level of lithium in the tap water.
Tucker Carlson: Really?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah. Because what I call the mental immune system, which resides in the hippocampus, is dependent on lithium.
The mental immune system and the history of lithium deficiency
Tucker Carlson: Do you think people are receiving less lithium than they once did?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, absolutely. In my book, I describe the origin of humanity. Humanity relies on our ability to think, to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to be social animals — to socialize, to want peace, to want the best for our kids. War is not good for our kids.
Tucker Carlson: I've noticed.
Dr. Michael Nehls: So we all have an immune system — what I call the physical immune system, which fights pathogenic microorganisms. But to this I added another immune system, a term I call the mental immune system. This one doesn't fight microorganisms — at least not directly. Indirectly, because maybe we think about measures to keep them away. But it fights pathogenic macroorganisms.
Tucker Carlson: Yes, I know some.
Dr. Michael Nehls: And that's what the mental immune system is for. That's why we have a mental immune system. And the mental immune system, as I was able to show, resides in the hippocampus — in the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus — because these are the neuronal correlate for curiosity, for the ability to change perspective, to find solutions which are not just sending weapons but actually diplomatic ways to solve problems. Not only on the political level but also in families, with friends. So what makes us human is the mental immune system.
The evolutionary origins of the mental immune system
Tucker Carlson: So when in the history of humans did the mental immune system evolve?
Dr. Michael Nehls: From the evolutionary perspective, it evolved when there was a drought in Africa — a drought spanning about 70,000 years — that started about 200,000 years ago. There was a very severe ice age lasting very long. Ice was accumulating at the north and south poles, and Africa went dry. Life in Africa on the mainland was essentially not possible. Only a few people survived. We believe maybe only a few hundred humans survived, at the coast in South Africa. The spot I describe very intensively in my book — The Algae Oil Revolution — became a World Heritage Site in 2024 for that reason.
Here they found what I call the fruits of the ocean — the fruits of wisdom. That's mussels. The shellfish were at the coast in abundance. If you check what mussels contain, they contain pretty much everything the human brain needs. They are just the perfect food. And they were there in quantities so great that these few hundred people couldn't even eat everything. They were growing faster than people could eat them.
So that completely changed the lifestyle and had an impact on the brain. They got all the omega-3 fatty acids in quantities, but also what they probably didn't get in inland Africa: lithium. Lithium is part of the mussel. Like iodine — iodine is very important for the brain. We know what happens when you have an iodine deficiency.
Tucker Carlson: It causes mental retardation, lower IQ.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Exactly. Actually, you don't develop a brain. You have a problem developing one. In geologically old areas — like the Alps, or mountains that are not volcanic — there is a lack of iodine because it was washed out over millions of years into the ocean. The soil doesn't contain much iodine. And the same happens with lithium. Lithium is also washed out. In ocean water you find 100 times higher levels of lithium than in fresh water. And mussels and shellfish accumulate lithium by three to fivefold. So if you eat the meat of mussels or shellfish, you have an intake of about one to two milligrams a day — I calculated this in the book. That was essentially our natural food for tens of thousands of years.
Tucker Carlson: And that was a time when the human brain — shellfish, not fish?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Shellfish. Fish also has lithium, of course. But shellfish especially.
Tucker Carlson: I'm bragging — I know nothing about health. I've always loved shellfish and dogs.
Dr. Michael Nehls: And you have just affirmed both of your choices. I'm very thankful that I did this.
Tucker Carlson: I love having my eccentric choices ratified by science.
Dr. Michael Nehls: The only problem with shellfish, of course, if you eat too much, is that it not only accumulates lithium — it accumulates everything that is in the ocean.
Tucker Carlson: Well, it's the dirtiest thing you can eat.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Exactly. And that's why I came up with an alternative, because there's not enough shellfish on this planet to feed everybody the quantity of lithium they need. The problem is that when nature gives you something for tens of thousands of years, the body starts to use what it gets, and at a certain time it starts to put its genetics around it. So what was somehow a free offer becomes a necessity after a certain time.
We have gotten used to having lithium in our diet, and now it's gone because we moved away from the coast. We are inland, in areas where there's less lithium. We don't recognize that there's a deficiency because all other people behave the same. Everybody is a little bit less friendly than they could be. Everybody is a little bit more irritable than they could be. Everybody has more of a risk of expressing anger. We are less able to find a peaceful way.
Actually, my strongest belief is that the written history of human culture for the last six, seven, eight, ten thousand years is the history of a lack of lithium — because people moved inside, had these cities, and didn't eat shellfish anymore. And if they were not lucky enough that lithium was in their groundwater, then they lived with a reduced amount of lithium. And if you have a reduced amount of lithium, that has severe consequences on your brain function, particularly on your mental immune system.
Tucker Carlson: It's interesting that you say that, because coastal cultures are famously and provably more evolved, flexible, cosmopolitan, prosperous than inland cultures. There was no real city at Riyadh 200 years ago. There was Jeddah on the coast. That's true in like every case. There are a lot of reasons for that, but do you think that's one of them?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, actually I rechecked one of my first books — it has not been translated into English yet — where I worked on Okinawa, why people get older there, why they have reduced levels of Alzheimer's. When I wrote that book, the term "blue zone" was not yet known. But meanwhile, the term blue zone means areas on our planet where people get old but also stay healthy when they age. I checked all the blue zones for my book The Conspiracy Against Lithium, and they are all lithium-rich areas.
I gave a talk about two years ago — I actually sent you an email with a link, and you wrote back saying it was great. I was invited by the foreign minister of Switzerland to the international cooperation forum, a conference where about 100 nations took part from all over the world. Of course, it's very closely linked to the World Economic Forum. So for me it was like walking into an area where I didn't feel very happy. My book The Exhausted Brain was the reason I was invited, because there I explained what the brain needs to think — and of course what it needs to think peace. So they invited me to give the keynote at this event. In 15 minutes I had to answer the question: what does the brain need to think peace?
Well, it was just a few weeks after I was here, and after our interview was published, they realized I had different ideas about what the brain needs — that I was not a friend of the mRNA injections and so forth. So they couldn't uninvite me again. But they tried to reduce the number of slides I was using. They actually came to me five minutes before my speech — because in the evening I had shut down the computer, sent them the slides, and shut down my mobile phone. I came very late to my talk. In the morning was the first talk, the keynote, and they came rushing to me: "Michael, you have to cut out 50% of the slides."
Because the slides contained information like the function of the brain — the mental immune system, which we require for thinking, and thinking is a prerequisite for thinking peace. You can't think peace if you can't think. Obviously. So if you want to be able to think — real thinking, type two thinking, system two thinking — we need the mental immune system. And the mental immune system doesn't work if you inject mRNA with a spike protein. This slide they didn't like.
I also showed that with vitamin D the problem would have been over. And one of my last slides was that I want to make it my goal to prove that lithium is essential for the mental immune system. At that moment I was a little bit fearful, because the meeting took place in Basel — essentially the center of the pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland. And I was there saying I want to show that lithium is essential.
The proof is now in my book, The Conspiracy Against Lithium. It's the first proof ever that lithium is an essential trace element — meaning that if you have a complete lack, you would not be able to live. If you reduce it in animals, it reduces their fertility. The newborns are smaller. Many don't survive the first few months if they have a lack of lithium — not a complete lack, just a reduction. A complete lack is very difficult to achieve because lithium is everywhere. But you can create an artificial deficiency in animals, and it has detrimental effects.
Tucker Carlson: How would you create a deficiency in people?
Dr. Michael Nehls: In people we already have a deficiency. We are already living in deficiency. If you assume you need one milligram of lithium a day — which is the dose where you have the lowest suicide rates and the highest longevity — and if your tap water has, let's say, 500 micrograms of lithium per liter, that's half a milligram per liter, about a quarter gallon of water. If you live in an area where this is the case, then you have a longer life with fewer diseases. You also have a much reduced risk of Alzheimer's. Longevity, Alzheimer's risk — all depend on the amount of lithium you have in your tap water. And this is only in certain areas of the world, not everywhere.
I assume 90 to 95% of the human population suffers from lithium deficiency. And this is severe, because the mental deficiency syndrome — which I termed the lithium deficiency disease, or mental immune deficiency syndrome — ends in Alzheimer's. But it starts with autism, attention deficit disorders, schizophrenia.
Actually, the first one who mentioned in the history of our culture that lithium might be essential was John Cade. He published in 1949 a paper where he treated people with high doses of lithium for bipolar disorder. He found that bipolar disorder is a mix of depression and mania, but that mania was primarily affected by giving lithium — it was reduced. And he assumed that the effect on mania and on bipolar disorder in general meant that a lack of lithium in childhood might be the cause of bipolar disorder. His conclusion in the 1949 paper was that lithium must be an essential trace element, because if it has effects on your brain when it's lacking, it must be essential.
The 1949 FDA ban on lithium supplementation
Tucker Carlson: And in the same year, 1949, the FDA made a prohibition on lithium as a supplement. You are not allowed to supplement with it anymore. Why?
Dr. Michael Nehls: On purpose. Actually, that's the conspiracy I'm talking about in the title. Three medical centers in the United States gave their patients — patients suffering from heart disease, congestive heart failure, very severely sick — they said, "You are not allowed to eat salt anymore. Salt is not good for your heart." So they removed sodium chloride from their diet. But of course, then the food doesn't taste very good. So instead of sodium chloride, they gave them lithium chloride.
Now, they didn't take one milligram of lithium — it has to taste salty, so they took grams of it. At the time it was already published in the Journal of the American Medical Association from 1913, by a self-test from a doctor, that these amounts of lithium are highly toxic. They can kill you. And that's what they did. They gave these patients high doses of lithium — not milligrams, but grams.
Think about water. Half a gallon of water might be healthy. You should drink water every day. But now make it a thousandfold. You die from drinking water.
Tucker Carlson: Oh yes, you can. You drown.
Dr. Michael Nehls: So everything you increase dramatically — everything that's good for you, you increase it, it becomes toxic. And the same goes for lithium. The lithium killed people at that time. They published in spring 1949 three papers back-to-back in the Journal of the American Medical Association — JAMA. They published three papers, apparently independent of each other. They called it in Time magazine "accidental food poisoning." But in the papers, when you read them — and I found them, and they are in the book — I found out that this was done purposely. These people were given what was essentially a clinical trial. They wanted to find out how much lithium people could accept. They monitored how these people died. And then the FDA said to Time magazine, "Oh, we wanted to actually shut down the supplementation of lithium as a trace element anyway, because we want to develop a drug with it."
And that happened in 1949. You might know 7UP, of course. 7UP has its name from lithium. It was lithiated soda. I think the formula came out in 1929. One glass of 7UP had exactly one milligram of lithium. The "7" stands for the atomic weight of lithium, which is seven, and "Up" means upregulation of the mood. So you drank your lithiated soda called 7UP and you had essentially an upregulation of the mood, because you remedied your deficiency. And that was of course a big thing — many followed, even Coca-Cola started putting lithium in their drink. But in 1949 that was prohibited and they had to change the formulation.
So from 1949 on, the whole world essentially banned lithium. In Europe there's still a ban on lithium as a supplement. Here in America, meanwhile, you can buy lithium, because there was a reform of the FDA where the F and the D separated somewhat. So there is more regulation on drugs than on food and supplementation. Supplements with lithium are food, and here the responsibility is for those who produce it. If you put it on the market and nobody dies, you are responsible. And nobody has died. So for the last 35 to 40 years, it has been possible to buy lithium as a supplement in America.
But the ban from the FDA from 1949 still persists in Europe. In all of Europe, it's not allowed to receive lithium as a supplement. You are not allowed to put it in a supplement. So I gave a speech about half a year ago — it was in June 2025 — at the European Parliament, to end this stupidity. Because I was able to prove in my book that about 90% of all diseases which we call chronic diseases — 90% of chronic disease, the major market of the pharmaceutical industry — is based on chronic inflammation. And the natural antidote of chronic inflammation is lithium in your food. So if you give people lithium, these chronic inflammations would reside, and the drug market would of course shut down. But this is not what the European Commission wants.
Tucker Carlson: Well, you're not the only one.
Dr. Michael Nehls: That was the main reason I came here to the United States. That's one of the main reasons I talk to you here, because the MAHA movement will only be really successful if everything that the brain needs is given to the people. People need enough omega-3 fatty acids. They need enough lithium. They need enough of all vitamins, all essential trace elements. Everything is needed.
The law of the minimum and the pharmaceutical industry
Dr. Michael Nehls: I call the requirement based on a law of nature. This law is quite simple. It's called the law of the minimum. It was discovered in 1828 by a German agricultural scientist. He discovered that when you want to grow vegetables on a field, the vegetables have some requirements, and if, for example, phosphate is missing, you can give the plant as much potassium as you want — it will not grow. You have to give the plant what it needs. And this is the law of the minimum.
It's a very important law because it tells people in agriculture that they don't waste material on their fields that the plant doesn't need — only give the plant exactly what is missing in the soil. Now, what is growing in our brain is the new cells in the hippocampus. So we can apply the same law there. The law of the minimum applies to every living being, in particular to our mental immune system. If something is missing, it will not work. You can eat as much meat or protein as you want — as long as there is no lithium in the brain, the brain will suffer. As long as there are not enough omega-3 fatty acids, the brain will suffer.
The ideal volume of the hippocampus, which gives you the best mental immune system with the best growth rate — the hippocampus can grow by a few percent each year by volume, because it has the ability to grow new nerve cells. But in modern societies there is not growth of the hippocampus — there is shrinkage. The shrinkage is on average 1.4% per year by volume. So after 30 to 40 years, your hippocampus is only half the size it was when you were 25.
Tucker Carlson: And what are the effects of that? How would you notice that in another person?
Dr. Michael Nehls: You notice it because he's mentally not as flexible anymore. He reiterates common phrases. You can say hello to him — he will respond, maybe friendly if he's a friendly person — but you realize very quickly that you cannot go into a discussion with him about anything, because he will shut down. His mental immune system is not functioning. He's caught in the past. And even this past will diminish, because the long-term consequence of a shrinking hippocampus is Alzheimer's. The smaller your hippocampus, the closer you are to developing the disease.
So we have a society already — not only the people who have Alzheimer's — where Alzheimer's starts in the age of 20. If your hippocampus is shrinking, actually even in kids they don't develop the hippocampus to the size they should. The deficiencies start already in the womb. They start when you are essentially conceived. You grow into an environment where things are missing.
Just to give you an example: if omega-3 fatty acids are missing, you cannot build synapses between your nerve cells. 50% of the fatty acids in your synapses — which are important for connecting your brain cells, important for our mental functioning — consist of omega-3 fatty acids. Now, what happens if you don't eat them? Our body can't produce them. The biggest hippocampal volume you have is when you have an omega-3 index of 11%. 11% is the ideal. This is what the placenta tries to give the child that is growing. 2% is the minimum required for life — below 2% was never measured anywhere in the world. But of course it's not a happy life. What do Americans have? 4%. Children may have only 2.5 to 3%.
Tucker Carlson: So what are the characteristics of a society in which most people have lithium deficiencies and stunted hippocampuses? How do people behave? What are the signs that your whole society is suffering from this?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Well, there's trained behavior. Of course, if you are trained to be a friendly person, say hello to everybody, you will do that. But practically speaking, your mental immune system is dysfunctional. And if it's dysfunctional, you are not as curious as you should be. You don't have the resilience that you should have. You are not as compassionate with others because you cannot put yourself into their shoes or see the world through their eyes, which makes it difficult to negotiate. So you're not as peaceful as you can be.
Tucker Carlson: I'm recognizing some of these signs, doctor.
Dr. Michael Nehls: I hope not by somebody close by.
Tucker Carlson: No, just — but if all of a sudden you look around and people are not interested in what just happened, like how can you not want to know how that happened? And if people seem like they have less love for each other and less compassion for each other and are not capable of seeing other people's perspectives — I've noticed that.
Dr. Michael Nehls: And this is a world I don't want to live in. And this is why I have made it my agenda to show the world that lithium is an essential trace element. And the biggest opponent I have is the pharmaceutical industry.
Tucker Carlson: Why? Why would they be opposed?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Well, all these diseases that follow this deficiency of lithium are their biggest markets.
Tucker Carlson: So what's their argument? If I were to have Albert Bourla on right now and I asked him about you and your pro-lithium agenda, what would he say? How would he criticize you?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Well, they have no real arguments. The arguments are simply not there. Every argument I can counter quickly, but they are not even open to discuss it. So maybe they have a lithium deficiency. I don't know.
Even if I asked ChatGPT — I gave it all the results of my research — the answer was: lithium fulfills all the criteria that were necessary for all the other trace elements when they were defined as essential. So if you have a complete lack, you have essentially dead animals. They are not fertile anymore.
We have a disease — actually, six weeks after my speech at the European Parliament, Nature published a study from Harvard University. They looked at the brains of Alzheimer's patients who died. They checked what trace elements they had in their brain and how the amount of each trace element linked to the disease stage. They found that from 27 or 28 different trace elements they checked, only one was significantly correlated to the disease — and that was the lack of lithium. That correlates completely to what we find in epidemiological studies: if you have a lack of lithium in your water, which is the main source of lithium, then you have a high risk of Alzheimer's and also a risk of dying of Alzheimer's.
And then they took mice and removed lithium, and they immediately developed Alzheimer's. The mice were genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer's — but they usually don't develop it if you treat them well. If you give them room to run around, if they are happy animals, they don't care if they have a human gene in their brain that actually causes Alzheimer's. This is actually what I published many years ago. There are mutations in genes that cause Alzheimer's, but they don't cause Alzheimer's — they accelerate it. What they accelerate is a state of deficiencies that we have in our body. If we remove those deficiencies, the mutations in these genes don't make any difference. So essentially, behavior trumps genetics. If we give the body what it needs, our brain doesn't care what kind of genes might cause Alzheimer's. You can overcome the genetic predisposition.
So anyway, these animals were genetically engineered to have a predisposition to Alzheimer's. They don't get Alzheimer's. But once you remove lithium from their diet, they develop the disease. And if you give the lithium back, the disease disappears.
Tucker Carlson: Do you think that if everyone in the United States got a milligram of lithium every day, what would be the effects?
Dr. Michael Nehls: It would be dramatic. And not only lithium by itself — lithium is just curing one deficiency. As I outlined in my book, there are many deficiencies that people suffer from. Omega-3 would be one, vitamin D might be another depending on diet, it might be vitamin B12 or whatever. So there are many deficiencies, and based on the law of the minimum, you have to get rid of all of them. But lithium is a really good start.
Actually, a friend of mine — he is a pediatrician — he gives lithium to all the children now. He did it for over 20 years before: he gave them vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, everything they needed. But he didn't know about lithium until he met me. So now he started giving them lithium. He's done it for two years. And since he did this, he said this is the most life-changing trace element he has ever experienced in 20 years. After a few days, children who are irritable are not irritable anymore. Children who refuse to go to school because they have a lot of anger, who don't socialize — it's gone. We reverse autism this way, in the early stages.
I have a friend whose son is 17 years old. We met several times. He didn't want to look in my eyes. He couldn't speak. She put it on YouTube after a few months of lithium — and of course everything else. After a few months, he actually sent me a message through YouTube, thanked me officially, looked into the camera and said, "My life has changed since I got lithium. It will change everything."
The law of the minimum as a blueprint for medicine
Dr. Michael Nehls: In chapter four of the book, I put together something that I would say would be a revolution in medicine. If you have the law of the minimum — which is a law of nature for everything that has to grow — it needs, based on its evolutionary history, the necessities. A cactus has a different necessity to grow than a fern tree. Every plant has a different requirement to grow. And the same goes for us. We have different requirements than a fish or a dog. Every species on this planet has specific requirements, but they are all defined by the law of the minimum.
The law of the minimum is also the law of the maximum. You shouldn't give anybody too much of something. And between these two you have the ability for what we call homeostasis — self-regulation. Self-regulation is impeded if something is missing — law of the minimum — or if something is too much — law of the maximum.
These two laws are not taught in medical school, at least not in Europe, at least not in Germany, Switzerland, or Austria, because I've talked to many doctors and I studied in medical school. This basic law is not taught. And why is it not taught? Because all chronic diseases are essentially a result of not obeying the law of the minimum and the maximum. If these laws are not obeyed, chronic disease will ensue.
Once you know that, and you know that if you have a deficiency in A you cannot cure it by giving B, then every drug that is prescribed by doctors loses its sense. Because if you have a deficiency in lithium and your brain develops Alzheimer's, what drug could help you? It must be lithium. Nothing else helps. So every drug that the pharmaceutical industry tries to develop is essentially a lithium mimic, a pure alternative to lithium. But at the same time, they have to make sure that nobody takes lithium, because their drugs would be worthless.
When I gave the talk at the European Parliament, I showed this for Alzheimer's. There are many reviews out now, meta-analyses, where they looked at studies where people with Alzheimer's got lithium. Lithium at a very low dose — 300 micrograms, that's not even a milligram, that's 0.3 milligrams — actually stabilized Alzheimer's patients for 15 months, while the control group went downhill. That was just a single molecule. If you do everything that's in the book, you can actually reverse Alzheimer's. And this is what I think should be the future of medicine — a preventive medicine that gives people everything they need based on the law of the minimum.
Tucker Carlson: When you say reverse Alzheimer's, give us a scenario where that would work. At what stage in the progression?
Dr. Michael Nehls: It's in the early stage. Like you can reverse type 2 diabetes, for example.
Tucker Carlson: I should say — that's taken for granted now, but people know that 15 to 20 years ago, if you said you could reverse type 2 diabetes, you would have been laughed at.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, I know. I was laughed at. 15 years ago, I already proclaimed that all these diseases can be reversed. But I took the most difficult path — I tried to convince people that it also works for Alzheimer's.
Tucker Carlson: That is not a conventional view right now.
Dr. Michael Nehls: No, it's not. But you can reverse it because Alzheimer's in the early stage — that's why I call it hippocampal dementia — starts in the hippocampus. When the hippocampus is affected, the first thing you lack is a sense of where you are and what you just experienced. And this is all driven by a lack of what I call index neurons. The index neurons are the nerve cells in the hippocampus that index essentially all the information you have learned during the day.
So we are sitting here, and if I want to remember our conversation in a few weeks or years, the index neurons get this information — the content of our discussion — from our brain, and they have to reconstruct it so it becomes conscious again. In order to do that, they require two pieces of information: when did the conversation take place, and where? For the "where," these are called space neurons — the Nobel Prize was given, I think it was 2014, for the discovery that the hippocampus has cells that memorize where something happened. In the same year, time neurons were discovered — the hippocampus also traces when something happened. And the "when" and "where" together form what I call an index. These are index neurons.
They have an index like a library. Every book contains some information — like the information we are exchanging here. This information is in a book, but you have to find this book in your brain again. And there you need an index for this book. The index is the time when the conversation happened and the place where the conversation happened. And the index neurons happen to be the ones that are produced every day. Index neurons are produced by adult hippocampal neurogenesis every day. So in order for our brain to store new books every day, lifelong, we have to produce new cells. That is what the index neurons are for. That is what neurogenesis is for.
Now, if you stop this production — because you don't obey the law of the maximum, you give the brain too many toxins, alcohol, whatever — it stops. If you have a lack of something — law of the minimum — it cannot go on. If you have a lack of lithium, production is not as good. For example, lithium is known to activate the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor is a growth factor for the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus. Lithium also shuts down severe inflammation. Inflammation shuts down neurogenesis. So lithium helps ensure that if you come under stress, you don't immediately have a complete shutdown by neuroinflammation of the production of new nerve cells in your brain.
Lithium, autophagy, and the oldest defense system in life
Dr. Michael Nehls: And lithium — that's maybe the oldest effect of lithium — I was able to show in the book that the first cell that ever existed on this planet, however it was created, had already a defense system which relied on lithium. The defense system is called autophagy — the ability of self-eating.
Autophagy is activated by inhibition of an enzyme called inositol monophosphatase. Complicated word — I call it IMPase. IMPase is an enzyme that is essentially activated by magnesium and inhibited by lithium. So it's like a gas pedal and a brake pedal. In order to drive a car safely, you have to brake and accelerate. You have to be able to do both. So homeostasis requires that you have both magnesium and lithium. But if you only have magnesium and no lithium, then autophagy is shut down.
Autophagy is required for the IMPase to activate the autophagy process. If you think about the fact that our brain has the ability to become 100 years old — it can only become 100 years old if, first, neurogenesis is taking place all the time in the hippocampus, otherwise you develop Alzheimer's and die. And the second thing is that all the other nerve cells — every nerve cell in your brain has to become 100 years old. Because a nerve cell you cannot replace. You cannot remove it and put another one in if it doesn't work properly anymore. It has to stay healthy from the day you are born up to the oldest age.
And the only way to stay healthy for 100 years is that this nerve cell has the ability for very active autophagy — self-eating of mitochondria that don't work anymore, of proteins that don't work anymore — so that they don't become just debris lying around and making the cell dysfunctional. We have to make sure that the cell is always active and functional. And the only way to do that is autophagy. So autophagy is probably the oldest process in all of the living kingdom.
Tucker Carlson: Fasting can spur autophagy. Is that correct?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Fasting is a very good way to do that, and lithium is a key that it actually works. So we all have a little bit of lithium in us, so we still have a little bit of autophagy. But it could be much better if we had the essential dose.
Tucker Carlson: To be totally clear, you're calling for about a milligram a day per person.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah. And I'm not the first one. There was actually a key scientist — also a German, but he had his own department at the University of San Diego — who published a paper in 2002 about the essentiality of lithium. Everything he knew at the time he put together in a review article. He was one of the leading experts in the world on trace elements and vitamins. He published that lithium is essential and you need one milligram. He published it, but nobody really took notice of that. And the problem was also he didn't really explain how he came to one milligram. And of course he didn't have all the information that 20 years later I got access to. So I could be more thorough in my book. The chain of evidence is complete now. And when I did my reasoning about how much we need, I also came to one milligram.
Safety, dosage, and practical recommendations
Tucker Carlson: Is there any downside? If I took a milligram of lithium every day for 24 years, would there be any negative effects?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Not that I know of. The deficiency is the problem. Lithium is probably the safest trace element of all essential trace elements. For example, iodine — if the recommended daily allowance is exceeded three, four, five times, it could become problematic. The same goes for selenium, for zinc, for many of these — magnesium — four, five, ten times more and it becomes dangerous. Lithium — the European Chemical Agency, which advises the European Commission, published a paper recently stating that you can go up to 85 milligrams of lithium a day without harm on the long run. 85 milligrams. I wouldn't recommend 85 milligrams, but this is 85-fold the recommended dose. So you are far away from any toxicity.
Tucker Carlson: Okay, so to the practical part of the conversation — what should the average person do every day to reap the benefits you describe?
Dr. Michael Nehls: I would take lithium — unless you are already living in an area where there's a lot of lithium in the tap water and you drink the tap water, maybe two liters or so. But I would recommend lithium orotate. And actually, that's what the Nature paper said — published on the 6th of August 2025 — that lithium has a physiological role in our brain that is important for keeping the brain healthy. It's essentially the natural antidote against Alzheimer's. Still, the European Union doesn't like it to be inaugurated as an essential trace element. But I need only one country to do that. But that's a different story.
The paper in Nature actually recommended the same salt of lithium that I recommend. Lithium chloride — which is what they used when they poisoned people with a thousandfold dose — is not good because the lithium is ionized very quickly. The same actually is true for lithium carbonate. Lithium carbonate is what people get for bipolar disorder. But the carbonate becomes essentially CO2 in your stomach and you have the pure lithium ion. Much better and more effective is what I recommend: lithium orotate. Orotate is the salt of orotic acid. This was formerly known as vitamin B13. About 20 years ago it was recognized as a vitamin, until researchers found out that orotic acid is produced by the female breast when producing milk. Breast milk contains orotic acid. It's a Greek word — orotic acid stands for milk. It was first discovered only in milk from cows and other animals, and it took a while to realize that humans can produce it too. Then it was said it's not a vitamin anymore because we can produce it.
It's a key component of nucleic acids. So if you need orotic acid to produce new cells — to double your DNA when you produce cells — it's very important for your body. And because it's so important, there are transport systems in your stomach, in your gut, and transport systems over the blood-brain barrier that try to deliver the orotic acid to the cells that are important for us, particularly nerve cells. And the lithium can hijack essentially this transport system because it forms a very stable complex. So lithium orotate is ideal.
The scientists from Harvard University actually tested different lithium salts, and I was very happy because the book was already out when they concluded that lithium orotate is the way to go.
So back to your question — what would I recommend? I would recommend one milligram of lithium every day in the form of lithium orotate.
Tucker Carlson: And what form is that? For the average person who doesn't have access to a science lab — can you just go on Amazon and buy that?
Dr. Michael Nehls: Yeah, you can go to a drugstore. In America it's no problem. In Europe it is a problem. Of course, you can also get it on Amazon. Because the import from the United States is allowed, you know. I actually talked to a lawyer, and she said to me that you can buy it in the United States and essentially request it to be shipped to you. But you're not allowed by European law to get it shipped for your whole family, because then you become a drug dealer — that's too much lithium for one person. It's only for personal consumption.
So we have this very stupid, strange situation where first, lithium is not acknowledged as an essential trace element even though it is, and on top of that we have a prohibition — it's forbidden for European companies to put lithium in supplements. Making it completely idiotic.
Tucker Carlson: Well — idiotic, or actually kind of brilliantly diabolical.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Absolutely.
Tucker Carlson: If you were trying to subdue and destroy a population, it seems like this would be a good way to do it.
Dr. Michael Nehls: If you want to make sure that people are willing to follow narratives — if you know that shutting down the mental immune system, taking away lithium or making it difficult to supplement it, even creating fear of lithium — because people are treated with lithium for bipolar disorder and they get hundreds of milligrams, very close to the toxic, essentially lethal dose. You have to monitor them pretty much every other week so they don't overdose. It's very toxic. Many people with bipolar disorder actually discontinue it based on the side effects they experience. And all these side effects — you can Google them. It says it harms your kidneys, it harms your thyroid, it harms many things. Because of course you are overdosing it essentially as a treatment. And people now fear lithium is toxic.
The problem in Germany — and all over Europe — is that since it is not allowed as a supplement, you have to have a prescription from a doctor for an essential amount. This is totally ridiculous, because now you have to convince a doctor to prescribe it to people. So people who read my book say, "Okay, I want to have lithium for myself, for my family, for my kids, but I can't go to a drugstore. I have to go to a doctor to write me a prescription." But a doctor who was well indoctrinated by medical school — by the dogma of the pharmaceutical industry that we are taught in medical school — it's quite simple. First of all, humans are a failure of nature, a misconstruction. They tend to all kinds of diseases. And third, only the pharmaceutical industry can save us.
Tucker Carlson: Sounds like a religion to me.
Dr. Michael Nehls: It's a religion. It's a dogma that we are taught, and we are not taught the law of the minimum, which would essentially make this sound stupid. Because the law of the minimum says: you get a chronic disease if you have a lack of something that is essential for you. Once I realized that, then as a doctor I would give every patient what he needs so that he doesn't get a disease. That would be preventive medicine. But preventive medicine requires the understanding of the law of the minimum, and this is not taught.
What is taught is: people get all kinds of diseases. When I left medical school, I essentially believed nature is playing a game with me. Either I end up with Alzheimer's, a stroke, a heart attack, or cancer. These are my choices. And I actually went into basic research, genetic research, to help the pharmaceutical industry solve these problems — until I realized by my own experience that maybe my lifestyle is a cause of a heart attack that I was prone to get when I was 40.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
Dr. Michael Nehls: So when I realized I just have to change my life a little to omit all these diseases, then I really became interested. Because I'm a researcher. So what happened? And then I discovered the law of the minimum — this law which applies to agriculture and to humans. When I realized that, everything changed. I realized now we need a completely new medical system. And MAHA is exactly that. My paper, the unified theory of Alzheimer's, is essentially a blueprint of MAHA. But it contains lithium and it contains algae oil. If these two components are added, MAHA will be a great success.
Tucker Carlson: I'm going to do everything I can to pass the word. Doctor, thank you for this.
Dr. Michael Nehls: I thank you. Thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure. It really was.