Food Giants Turn To Big Tobacco's Playbook To Defend Addictive Products

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

So Farron, the same players that we had to fight back on tobacco, the same folks that were killing people by the tens of thousands, have now moved to, a lot of them moved to the food industry. And so the case that we've brought along with Morgan & Morgan and a couple of other firms around the country is that the food additives, there's no guesswork anymore. They don't have to guess, is this killing kids? Is it causing problems? Is it causing diabetes? Is it causing weight issues? The statistics are alarming. Pediatricians are seeing 8-year-old kids with fatty liver. The amount of obesity in an eight to 10-year-old child is over the top. The issues, the physical issues that are related to diabetes, so many, whether it's eyes or just a whole connection, a constellation of illnesses that relate to diabetes are showing up in kids that are eight to 10 years old. There's never been that in American history.

In human history, at all.

Yeah, you're right. You're exactly right. So we brought a lawsuit, and of course, everybody starts out the same way that they did with tobacco. John Morgan, it's impossible. Papantonio, it's impossible. No, it's not. And it's the same thing we fought when we brought the opioid case. Oh my God, that's so overreaching. It's so big. Well, yeah, it is. Or the PFAS case, we always hear the same naysayers every time we file a case like this. This is a big case. We're going to win this case. It's going to be a long fight. What's your take?

Alright, so this particular lawsuit, the very first plaintiff that they've got here is a man who developed type two diabetes when he was 16 years old. And he says, listen, I'm eating these foods. These foods became addictive. So this caused my health problems. So you're the lawyer, I'm a member of a jury and I've just heard the defense. The defense is sitting here telling me, well, people know that eating sugary, fatty foods is going to cause health problems. This man made these choices to do that. So I'm sitting here on the jury and I'm like, well, you got a valid argument there. He did. We've known the science has obviously been out for a long time, we're talking decades, that overconsumption caused these problems. So why would I say that this corporation's responsible instead of this being personal choice?

You would be parroting exactly the argument that we heard in tobacco. Exactly the argument we heard in opioids. You'd be parroting. See, these arguments are generated like that and there's no effort to say, yeah, well, it might be out there, but the real truth, an 8-year-old doesn't make a choice. An 8-year-old eats whatever the parents feed them, right? The 8-year-old is the client. Now this is an exceptional case. Most of the cases you see are going to be the children cases and most pediatricians would say they have never in their career seen the numbers of illnesses directly related to these addictive foods. By the way, Post, Pepsi, General Mills, Nestle, Kellogg, these are some of the people, Conagra, these are people we're suing. And what we're seeing already, Farron, it's really interesting. We're seeing the same PR firms that worked on tobacco work with these people. The same argument you just made, we're seeing surface with these people. The same Madison Avenue folks that have spun this with tobacco are with these people. It's a complete utter repeat of what we saw with the tobacco litigation. And I'm telling you, synthesized artificial additives that are addictive, we're going to break some eggs on this case.

So, again, just as a member of the jury here, how do you overcome that argument? Because that is absolutely what the defense will use. The reason I even brought it up is because obviously that was the big tobacco thing.

Right.

It was these people made the personal choice. And even in the case of, okay, it's a kid, the parent makes the choice, but the parent still made that choice. Now maybe the parent's just a bad parent.