Last Sunday, investigative reporter for the New York Times Michael Moss took a hard look at a hamburger contaminated with e. coli, following the elaborate path it took from multiple cows and slaughterhouses and through various processes to one of the victim's plates, a 22-year old dance instructor, now paralyzed, named Stephanie Smith. The piece was a shocker because it showed just how unaccountable these companies have become in the face of an often powerless and conflicted USDA. The piece is still on the most-emailed list of the NYT website as of this writing, it pushed Tyson into a deal with Costco over testing, and it is even being discussed in Washington, according to a follow-up piece featured today by Moss.

If you pinned a map of the United States to a dartboard, Kansas would be the bull's-eye. Smack dab in the center of the country, the Sunflower State is one of America's most productive agricultural hotbeds - the fifth-biggest producer of crops and livestock in the country. More than 90 percent of the state consists of farmland endowed thousands of years ago with rich glacial loam. This fertile topsoil is no longer as robust as it once was, having offered up its nutrients season after season, decade after decade, century after century, to produce great bounties of wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, hay, and sunflowers. I could almost sense the exhaustion of the land as I drove through the back roads of northeastern Kansas one chilly November morning - past sagging wooden farmhouses silvered by age and weather, barbed-wire fences with listing wooden posts, general stores and swinging-door saloons, a Native American heritage museum commemorating the Kansa tribes that once roamed and tilled these prairies, and mile after desolate mile of denuded farmland.

Our reporter went looking for the farms that produce the raw materials for junk food and found that they take up almost half of the cropland in Ontario

Follow the flow of food. That's what any farmer will tell you. Because apples don't grow in supermarkets.

So to get to the root of the exploding obesity epidemic, I went in search of a junk food farm.

Such farms are not so easy to spot. No fields of Dorito bags waving in the breeze, no orchards blooming with soda pop, no soil bursting with 99-cent burgers.

What you do see are vast operations growing the raw materials for junk food: soybeans and corn.

The two crops go into the production of many things: pharmaceuticals, industrial products, animal feed - and inexpensive calories.

'Immediacy bias' means large-scale problems take back burner

A University of Colorado professor who studies emotions found that it's human nature to be more concerned about headline-grabbing dangers, such as an impending terrorist attack, than large-scale, prolonged problems like global warming.

CU psychology professor Leaf Van Boven calls it an "immediacy bias." His newly released study shows people tend to view their immediate emotions as more intense and important than their previous emotions.

Van Boven said the research could be of interest to policymakers and the media, given today's 24-hour news cycle that focuses on the threat of the day and can exacerbate the human trait of focusing on immediate emotions.

If a child is accidentally hit in the head with a baseball or kicked in the forehead during roughhousing, it can be scary for the youngster and the parents, too. After all, traumatic brain injuries are sometimes serious. They result in about 7,400 deaths a year to American kids 18 years old and younger. So it makes sense to have children checked out for a concussion or other signs of brain injury if they've experienced head trauma, especially if they were knocked unconscious. But far too many kids with knocks to their "noggins" are being routinely treated as if they had serious brain injuries -- even if they don't have significant symptoms of a neurological problem -- and given unnecessary, radiation-loaded computerized tomography (CT) scans.

That's the conclusion of a study just published online and slated for an upcoming edition of the print version of the medical journal the Lancet. Nathan Kuppermann, of the University of California at Davis Departments of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics, and colleagues found there are validated ways doctors can identify children at very low risk of clinically important traumatic brain injuries (ciTBIs). That's important because these simple, non-invasive findings on an exam should keep the vast majority of youngsters with head trauma from having CT scans which expose them to potentially cancer-causing radiation.

The study investigated the records of more than 42,000 children, including CT scans that had been performed on 35 percent of them. About 25 percent of the youngsters were under the age of two, and the others were three to 18 years old. Out of this group, ciTBIs had occurred in only 376 (one percent) and just 60 (0.1 percent) underwent neurosurgery for their injuries.

According to new research from the Monell Center and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, certain common herbicides and lipid-lowering fibrate drugs act in humans to block T1R3, a nutrient-sensing taste receptor also present in intestine and pancreas.

Commonly used in agriculture and medicine, these chemical compounds were not previously known to act on the T1R3 receptor.

The T1R3 receptor is a critical component of both the sweet taste receptor and the umami (amino acid) taste receptor. First identified on the tongue, emerging evidence indicates that T1R3 and related taste receptors also are located on hormone-producing cells in the intestine and pancreas.

Individuals who follow the Mediterranean dietary pattern - rich in vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains and fish - appear less likely to develop depression, according to a report of the University of Navarra, published in the October issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

The lifetime prevalence of mental disorders has been found to be lower in Mediterranean than Northern European countries, according to background information in the article. One plausible explanation is that the diet commonly followed in the region may be protective against depression. Previous research has suggested that the monounsaturated fatty acids in olive oil - used abundantly in the Mediterranean diet - may be associated with a lower risk of severe depressive symptoms.

The researchers studied 10,094 healthy Spanish participants who completed an initial questionnaire between 1999 and 2005. Participants reported their dietary intake on a food frequency questionnaire, and the researchers calculated their adherence to the Mediterranean diet based on nine components (high ratio of monounsaturated fatty acids to saturated fatty acids; moderate intake of alcohol and dairy products; low intake of meat; and high intake of legumes, fruit and nuts, cereals, vegetables and fish).

Children with functional abdominal pain who used audio recordings of guided imagery at home in addition to standard medical treatment were almost three times as likely to improve their pain problem, compared to children who received standard treatment alone.

And those benefits were maintained six months after treatment ended, a new study by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University Medical Center researchers has found.

The study is published in the November 2009 issue of the journal Pediatrics. The lead author is Miranda van Tilburg, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the UNC School of Medicine and a member of the UNC Center for Functional GI & Motility Disorders.

"What is especially exciting about our study is that children can clearly reduce their abdominal pain a lot on their own with guidance from audio recordings, and they get much better results that way than from medical care alone," said van Tilburg. "Such self-administered treatment is, of course, very inexpensive and can be used in addition to other treatments, which potentially opens the door for easily enhancing treatment outcomes for a lot of children suffering from frequent stomach aches."

Buyer beware

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) officials are almost ready for their PR company to unleash a sophisticated, powerful H1N1 'swine flu' vaccine multimedia marketing campaign to dupe doctors and exploit society's most vulnerable through what social scientists call mind control that aims for behavior control.

In this case, the desired behavior is to accept a toxic spray or injection by obediently obeying the mind control marketing ploy, even against personal better judgment.

Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null reported today that Peter Doshi first brought public attention to a CDC public relations influenza strategy known as the Seven Step Recipe.

California public health officials are investigating medical errors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in which 206 patients were exposed to high doses of radiation during CT brain scans.

The report came as the FDA issued an alert to hospitals nationwide, warning them to review their safety procedures for CT scans. But the alert did not specifically name Cedars-Sinai.

"The magnitude of these overdoses and their impact on the affected patients were significant," the FDA said, warning that undetected overdoses put "patients at increased risk for long-term radiation effects."