Sudhir Gadh

Sudhir Gadh did not arrive in water through engineering or utilities. He is a board-certified psychiatrist who has run a private practice in New York City since 2007, after an MD from St. George’s University and, before that, a political-science degree at NYU. He is also a Commander in the US Navy Reserve Medical Corps, and he describes his own career as a blend of warrior, physician and innovator. And after two decades of treating people one at a time for trauma, addiction and severe mental illness, he started looking for something that could help many people at once, which is how a psychiatrist ended up talking about tap water.

Sudhir Gadh’s whole argument turns on a distinction most of us never make. The lithium you may have heard of is the psychiatric drug, prescribed at hundreds of milligrams to treat bipolar disorder, and that is not what he is talking about. He researches low-dose lithium, the trace amounts (we are talking micrograms, not milligrams) that occur naturally in mineral springs and in the water under places like northern France, Sardinia and the Italian Dolomites. His claim, and it is a claim he is careful to frame as research rather than settled fact, is that those tiny amounts are good for us, and that modern treated water has been stripped of them. As he puts it, why can’t we have not just clean water but enhanced water?

Third Element Water is the company Sudhir Gadh built to turn that research into something you can actually buy, and you can see it on the company’s own site. The product is disarmingly simple: a small packet of powder, with a patented trace-lithium formula plus a blend of other minerals, that you drop into a litre of water to, in his words, supercharge it. The company sells it direct to consumers today, marketed as a trace-lithium supplement and certified for sport, and it also bottles naturally lithiated water sourced from West Texas. The bigger ambition sits one layer up: Sudhir wants to move from the glass to the mains, the way fluoride was once added to public water. He calls the leap from the individual to the population going from one-on-one to one-on-many.

Sudhir Gadh is not a lone voice on this. He was, by his own account, one of the first people to publish papers on low-dose lithium back when the term barely existed, and he now researches it formally, as a principal investigator on a lithium-and-inflammation study at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and with a research team in Galicia, Spain. His published work spans lithium in addiction recovery and lithium’s anti-inflammatory effect in severe COVID. The honest part, which to his credit he does not hide, is that this is an under-investigated and genuinely contested area: lithium is not regulated in any drinking-water standard, and much of the supporting evidence is associative, the correlation-not-causation kind. That is exactly why I spent a chunk of my own episode pressure-testing his claims rather than simply repeating them, and it is the honest frame for anyone reading this: Sudhir Gadh is making a serious, credentialed argument, not delivering a medical verdict.

“Why can’t we just have not just clean water but enhanced water, the same as in some of the best places in the world where spring water comes from? Let’s recreate that municipally.”

Sudhir Gadh is the rare guest who makes you check your own assumptions about what tap water is even for, and whether clean is the ceiling or just the floor.