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Personal

As I wrote about the other day, it was during college when I went on antidepressants. Each day was getting harder than the next. The sky was growing darker and darker. It was a major struggle just to survive.

I was overwhelmed with a variety of responsibilities — school work, in which I seemed to be drowning; the tennis team, which occupied several hours of my time per day, not including constant traveling to other schools for matches and tournaments; and my fraternity, something in which I was very actively involved.

With my voice becoming more heavy during each phone conversation, my parents suggested that I go visit a local psychiatrist to see if he could help. More specifically, they thought that antidepressants were the answer. After a brief chat with the doctor, he diagnosed me with a mild case of depression and believed that Prozac would indeed improve my situation.

Living Maxwell

Personal

I put up a post last week about a date I had recently and it generated a good number of responses. During this date, the woman asked if it bothers me to be with someone who drinks.

In that post, one of the things that I said was that I would “deal with it” if all of the other aspects of the relationship were good and that the drinking was kept to a minimum. This response of saying that I would “deal with it” brought an interesting comment from Tancie, and I thought it was worth addressing in its own blog post here.

Tancie stated that the phrase “dealing with it” would bring up resentment and that I should avoid all women who drink if it makes me that uncomfortable.

For me, drinking is a very complicated issue and is not so cut and dry, especially given the fact that I feel so strongly about other things as well — organic food being one of them.

Living Maxwell

Better Choices

As I have written about many times before, I am a water fanatic. I like clean, ultra-purified water and have a four-stage filter (with a .015 micron filter on filter #2) in my apartment.

When I go to work, there is a Poland Spring cooler but I refuse to drink from it. Why?

The water tastes very, very off and is not purified.

So, I bring my own bottles of water to work each day. This may sound crazy to some people but drinking high quality water is essential to staying healthy.

Given that I take so much effort to drink good water, the type of bottle that I use is also of great importance.

I used to drink from a BPA-free plastic bottle. The problem with that is that it is still plastic and is leaching other chemicals into the water.

Organic Insider

Company Stories

Based on what we have seen from the current administration’s USDA — the scrapping of the organic animal welfare rules, allowing hydroponics in organic even though it is a complete violation of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, and turning a blind eye to ‘organic factory farms’ – should anyone be the least bit surprised that the recently released GMO-labeling rules completely fail the American consumer?

Organic Insider

Company Stories

A few months after the DARK Act passed, which many in the industry called a massive betrayal of organic by the Organic Trade Association, the fallout continues.

As I shared the news on Facebook recently, Dr. Bronner’s, one of the leading and most vocal GMO-labeling advocates in the country, has quit the Organic Trade Association in protest.

Living Maxwell

Better Choices

For several years, the local food movement has been gaining some serious momentum. Supermarkets are pushing locally-grown food and restaurants insert “local” into their menus as often as possible.

I have a good friend of mine who proudly and constantly tells me that he is eating local food all of the time. When I hear this, I just kind of shake my head. Why do I have this reaction?

While this issue is very complicated and the circumstances of every single piece food is vastly different, there is a lot more to this than many people realize and “local” isn’t necessarily better.

Yes, local food means that it has traveled a lot less (within 150 miles seems to be the accepted range) than something that has been shipped across the country.

Living Maxwell

Company Stories

Natural Products Expo West, the largest organic trade show in the U.S. was back for the first time since 2019, as the last two years were canceled because of COVID.

Prior to this year’s show, I had one CEO tell me that he thought this would be the best year for innovation anytime in the past decade, given that brands had such pent-up demand over the last 24 months and would be particularly eager to show buyers their most forward-thinking products. Based on what I saw at last week’s Expo West, I believe he was correct. The innovation that I saw was outstanding.