96 | People vs Processed Food

Order in the court. Put the industry on trial. Every label, every ad, every engineered child. This is not a theory, not a headline, not a fight online. This is evidence.And the record never lies.

Half an hour into the testimony, my blood was boiling. I could not. I couldn't pretend to be neutral.I am not going to pretend that sitting there, writing on the steno machine that I believed strongly to be lies in defense of people I believed to be guilty of something unspeakable.

Order in the court. Let the witnesses speak. Put the science on the stand and the profits underneath. They sold addiction as freedom, then called the damage our choice.But the record is awake now, and.

The people found their voice in our conversation. He told me something that I keep coming back to. He said, it turns out Big Sugar is Big Tobacco all over again.And then he described what he called the corporate playbook, a coordinated strategy used by the tobacco industry, the opioid industry, the alcohol industry, the petroleum industry, and the food industry.

This is the Mississippi moment. The case before the case, the trial before the trial, the reckoning before the ruling is somewhere in America. A courtroom is waiting.

But we're not just court reporters. We're people. We have voices, we have feelings. We have platforms. And there will always be cases that we care about too much to cover.When that happens, you will know the.

Real trial hasn't happened yet.

Have you ever been in the middle of a deposition, writing on your machine, and suddenly you just have this urge to get out of your booth or your seat and go to the witness stand and start testifying? Boldly, loudly. The kind of rage that makes your hands want to stab, stop.The kind of reach that makes you want to push back, flip over the table, walk up to the witness stand and just yell if you've ever felt that this episode is for you. Because that feeling, that burning, can't stay quiet feeling, that is the most important signal in our profession. And it means one thing.You need to leave the room. Welcome to the Court Reporter podcast.I'm Brynn Seymour, court reporter life coach, and today, apparently, someone who's about to tell you a lot more about herself than she planned to. This episode is definitely different. There's no guest. There's no interview. It's just me.Something I've been sitting with for a while, a story I've never told on this show, and a case that I learned about recently that I just can't stop thinking about. And a song I wrote about it before I even knew the case was real. So settle in, because this one goes deep.Let me start with something foundational, something they teach you early and that stays with you your entire career. Court reporters are officers of the court. That title carries weight. It means we are not advocates. We're not on anyone's side. We don't care who wins.We don't care who loses. We can't. Our job, our entire duty, is to create an accurate, verbatim, unbiased, official record of what was said. Nothing more and Nothing less.The NCRA's Code of Professional ethics is very clear about this. We are required to be completely neutral. No bias, no personal interest in the outcome, no stake in the case.And here's the thing, most of the time, that's not that hard. We show up, we write, we go home. Sometimes we're scarred a little bit for a few hours, sometimes longer.But it's not something that we have a stake in or a personal interest in. It's just like it becomes kind of routine. We have to build up that neutrality.The case is someone else's story, and you're just the person writing it down, making sure it gets recorded accurately.But sometimes, not often, but sometimes a case comes along where you realize you are not neutral, where something in the room just makes you feel things that have no place behind a steno machine. And when that happens, there's only one ethical choice. You recuse yourself. You disclose your conflict.If you can, you remove yourself from the proceedings. Not because you can't handle it. Actually, it is. In my case it was.But it's really because the integrity of the record matters more than our presence in the room. It's not a sacrifice. It is what makes the record the record. It's what makes us qualified to take it down.So I want to tell you about a time that this happened to me. I'm going to be upfront about this. I was assigned to cover cases involving clergy sexual abuse within the Catholic Church.I do personally have strong opinions and feelings about the Catholic Church, about its history, the institutional behavior, about the gap between what it preaches and what it does. I've talked about some of this on the show before. I talked about how Easter eggs and bunnies have roots in paganism.Easter, the name Easter comes from the pagan goddess of fertility. Estrangement. And the eggs and bunnies really have nothing to do with Jesus. So I question things.I tend to question things that a lot of people just kind of accept without question.I mean, in the past, I've accepted things without question for some time before I start really thinking about it and really like, really wondering why. Like, I don't want to just follow things mindlessly without knowing what the meaning is, where it comes from, and why it's important or why we do it.That's just part of who I am and part of what the show is. But this was so different. This wasn't history. This wasn't theology. This case, these cases I was covering, it was for the Albany Archdiocese.I mean, not for them. It was. That was the case, the people against them.This was like real testimony, real people, real victims sitting across from me in the deposition room, sitting next to me, actually telling the most painful stories of their lives. And I had to stay neutral. I kept writing because that's what those survivors deserved, an accurate, unimpeachable record of their truth.The best thing I could do for them was just be there and write it down without adding or taking anything away. And I was okay, right? I was okay because they were just telling their stories. But then came the other side to the stand, the priests.And I felt something so strong inside of me that I couldn't take it. Like, I tried, okay? I tried. I was assigned to the case, and I tried. Half an hour into the testimony, my blood was boiling. I could not.I couldn't pretend to be neutral.I am not going to pretend that sitting there writing on the steno machine that I believed strongly to be lies in defense of people I believed to be guilty of something unspeakable. And I'm not going to pretend that that felt normal, that. That felt like any other case that I could just remove myself from.My blood was boiling, and I knew it. I knew what it meant. So I stopped. I called the court reporter that had me covering for her, right? I called the company and I removed myself.She tried to convince me that it doesn't really matter. Like, as long as you write everything down accurately and you don't disclose your personal feelings or bias.But I did not find that to be very comforting. And if you can remove yourself from your own bias, then that's fine. I tried. I'm telling you, I tried.And the feeling was just such a strong sense of rage, and it was just out of control. I just couldn't stay. I've never had that happen before. Never. So why did I remove myself?Because what I've learned is that the moment you care about who wins and the moment that you really care with your whole body, you are no longer the right person to hold that record. And I cared with everything I had. So I left.Now, here's something I want to say for anyone listening who might be struggling with what I just said, I'm not attacking anyone's faith. I'm not saying the Catholic Church has no value or that the millions of people who find meaning and community and genuine happiness in it are wrong.But what I am saying and what the record says to the tune of over $5 billion in settlements as of this year, is that an institution for decades protected abusers, silenced victims, moved predators to new parishes, and prioritized its own reputation over the safety of children. That is not faith. That is institutional behavior or misbehavior. And institutional behavior can be documented.And eventually it will be held accountable. The Archdiocese of New York just proposed an $800 million settlement. New Orleans, $230 million. Camden, 180 million. Albany, 148 million.It's happening painfully slowly, but it's happening because the law found the same thing that broke Big Tobacco.Look, back windows, temporary suspensions of the statute of limitations that let decades old cases finally be heard state by state, diocese by diocese. The walls are coming down. Same playbook, different institution, same outcome. Eventually. Which brings me to why I'm telling you all of this today.Because I found another case. A different institution, a different playbook. Excep. It's not different at all. And I did not go looking for it.I invited a scientist onto my podcast to talk about sugar and the metabolism and health, specifically for us, for court reporters who write medical testimony, who need to understand the terms we're capturing in real time, and who want to take care of ourselves. So his name is Dr. Robert Lustig. He was featured in episode 86.And what he told me in that conversation, I just haven't been able to stop thinking about it. So I want to play you a clip.

We have an epidemic of obese newborns here in America.If you look at the secular trend in birth weight in Russia, South Africa, Israel, United States over the last 25 years, there's been a 200 gram, half a pound increase in birth weight over those 25 years. So what are those 200 grams when you stick babies in a DEXA scanner? Turns out it's all fat. So babies are being born fat. They don't diet or exercise.How are they being born fat? If you want to proffer a cause of obesity, like gluttony and sloth, it has to explain the newborn, and you can't explain it.And the reason is because it's not gluttony and sloth. It's a biochemical process.

Babies Born fat, not because of anything they ate, not because of anything their parents did, because of something in the food supply that's changing human biochemistry before birth. That's not a theory. That's a dexa scan.And Dr. Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF, someone who has testified as an expert witness in actual food industry lawsuits, has been saying this for 20 years. He's appeared on 67 podcasts. He does not stop. He will not stop.Let me tell you who Dr. Robert Lustig is, because if you haven't heard of him, you need to know. He is a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.He has been researching the effects of sugar and ultra processed foods on human metabolism for over two decades. He has a YouTube lecture that has been watched over 25 million times. He's written multiple best selling books.He's testified as an expert witness countless times. And in March of this year, 2026, he published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine titled Corporations as Vectors of Chronic Disease.That title is not subtle. In our conversation, he told me something that I keep coming back to. He said, it turns out Big Sugar is Big Tobacco all over again.And then he described what he called the corporate playbook, a coordinated strategy used by the tobacco industry, the opioid industry, the alcohol industry, the petroleum industry, and the food industry. It's the same playbook, but different logos. At UCSF, there's something called the Industry Documents Library.There are 15 million documents digitized by Google, publicly accessible letters, memos, internal research strategy documents from all five industries showing in their own words what they knew, when they knew it, and what they chose to do about it. So even though he's a doctor, when he started noticing the babies being born fat and he started investigating, he could not believe what he found.He was so shocked, so angry.So he decided to go to law school only for one year specifically, purposely, not to become a lawyer, but to understand exactly how industries like this protect themselves legally so he could understand the weapon well enough to fight back. And he's been fighting, fighting back in every way available to him for 20 years.Publishing papers, writing books, giving lectures, testifying in depositions, going on podcasts. 67 Of them that I can find, probably even more, saying the same thing over and over and over and over to whoever will listen.Because his only weapon is public understanding.Every person who gets it is one more person who might vote differently, who might feed their kids differently, who might become the attorney or the city council member who finally does something he's not doing 67 podcasts because he loves the sound of his own voice or because he has nothing else to do. He's a busy man. He's doing it because he's in a race against chronic disease and he will not stop.After I recorded that episode with Dr. Lustig, something happened.I couldn't stop thinking about what he said about big tobacco and about the Mississippi moment, the specific legal breakthrough that finally brought the industry down. It wasn't the 845 individual lawsuits that the tobacco industry won.Every single one of it was when the Mississippi attorney general sued on behalf of the entire state, not on behalf of individual citizens. That clearly didn't work. The state wasn't saying, this cigarette gave this person cancer.It was saying, your industry cost our state billions of dollars in health care. That legal theory bypassed the individual causation problem entirely. And it broke big tobacco.And Dr. Lustig said, that moment is coming for the food industry. We just haven't found our Mississippi yet. I couldn't get that out of my head. So I did something kind of ridiculous. I made a song about it.And I know I'm a court reporter and not a songwriter, but from a young age, I've always loved writing songs. But even though I'm not technically a songwriter, that's not like what I do.But something about this case, about the scale of it, about the weight of it, about the feeling that something historic is happening. I just had to do something with it. So I wrote the song And I sent Dr. Lustig the episode link and I mentioned the idea.Why don't we at least create a mock trial of it and make a documentary of what findings Dr. Lustig has found. Not a real trial, a mock trial, a rehearsal for the case that's coming. He wrote back almost immediately.He said, look into the court of citizens of the world. So I did a deep dive. While I was doing that research, I found something I did not expect.That on December 2, 2025, San Francisco City Attorney David Chu filed a first of its kind lawsuit against the country's largest manufacturers of ultra processed foods on behalf of the people of the state of California. And just so happens to be San Francisco. Who's in San Francisco? Dr. Lustig. So who's behind it, Dr. Lustig? Who are the defendants?Kraft, Heinz Mandelas, Post holdings, Coca Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle, Kellogg, Mars, ConAgra. The legal theory. The food industry knew their products were making people sick, but they continued anyway.They engineered increasingly addictive products and Then they blamed the consumers. Does that sound familiar? And here's the detail that stopped me cold.In the actual court filing, there's a reference to the tobacco industry's acquisition of food companies. RJ Reynolds purchased Hawaiian Punch, Nabisco, Del Monte, Philip Morris acquired General Foods, and Kraft.And a Philip Morris executive once said, and I want you to hear this. Listen, you can now have a complete meal of Philip Morris foods and beverages, followed, of course, by one of our cigarettes.The tobacco playbook didn't just inspire the food industry. In some cases, it literally became the food industry.Dr. Lustig pointed me to the Court of Citizens of the World, a people's tribunal that holds formal legal proceedings for cases that the world isn't ready to try yet. They held a tribunal on Putin Xi Jinping a trial on social media platforms. They've never done a food industry case, at least not that I'm aware of.They've never held a proceeding on US Soil, and they've never had a stenographic court reporter in the room. I don't think his email reply was an accident. I think he's been waiting for someone to show up and help document the story properly.And I think that person might be me. I am not neutral about this case. I will not be the court reporter covering.I care about the outcome, which means by the same standard I held myself to in that deposition room years ago, I cannot be the court reporter in these proceedings. That's not to say that when you're in a trial or in a deposition or in a proceeding that's really intense, that you don't naturally develop feelings.I mean, we are only human. We will naturally develop some feelings about, like, who we think is guilty, who we think we want to win. That's not a crime. It's just being human.And we don't let it affect how we're taking the testimony down. If it does happen. It's not something where, like, your blood is boiling and you can't take it because you're so biased. Right?It's just, like, normal feelings. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you will know. Like, if you can't take a case, you. Your body will let you know.It'll be like, you'll just get sick. You'll get so sick that you can't continue. So don't worry about, like, trying to be extra righteous or extra cautious about that. So we'll see.I mean, if I ever get asked to cover one of those, I will definitely try if my body doesn't tell me that I need to stop, I'll try my best until I get the signal to stop. Even if I can't be the court reporter in those proceedings, I can be the producer. I can be the platform.I can be the person who makes sure the story gets told. That's not a consolidation prize. That's exactly what I can do. All right. Ready for the song?I wrote this before I knew the San Francisco case existed, Before I knew about the December filing, before Dr. Celestic pointed me anywhere. I already wrote it because something he said in that recording session just wouldn't leave me alone. It's called the People versus the Food Industry.And I think it's the most important thing I've ever made.

Why hasn't anyone sued? This is not entertainment. This is a rehearsal. They said, trust the label. Everything in moderation.But somewhere in a boardroom, profit beat prevention, and the paperwork survived. 15 Million documents buried in a digital grave to back tobacco, opioids, sugar. Different logos, same playbook.And they learned from the cigarette smoke how to hide behind the science. How to turn doubt into defense. How to make the victims blame themselves. Order in the court. Put the injured industry on trial.Every label, every ad, every engineer child. This is not a theory, not a headline, not a fight online. This is evidence. And the record never lies. Never lies. Objection. Correlation. Objection.Personal choice. Meanwhile, the hospitals overflow, and it's become the norm. Babies born metabolically broken, parents drowning in guilt. And what do they hear?You did this to yourself. But then came the question that tobacco couldn't survive. What if the victim isn't one person? What if the victim is everyone?This is the Mississippi moment. The case before the case. The trial before the trial, the reckoning before the ruling. Somewhere in America, a courtroom is waiting.No narrator, no edit, no safety net. Just cross examination under oath, in real time. Every answer, every pause, every contradiction captured forever. Order in the court.Let the witnesses speak. Put the science on the stand and the profits underneath. They sold addiction as freedom. Then called the damage our choice. But the record is awake now.And the people found their voice. This is the official record. The real trial hasn't happened yet. The real trial. The real trial hasn't happened yet.

The record is awake now. And the people found their voice. You know the. The line that really gets me the most is babies born metabolically broken, parents drowning in guilt.And what do they hear? You did this to yourself. I didn't know what I was writing when I wrote that. I just knew something needed to be said.Here's what I want to leave you with.We chose a profession that requires us to be silent when it matters the most, to sit in rooms where history is being made and to keep our opinions to ourselves. To write the words of people we admire and people we may despise with equal precision. That discipline, that neutrality, is not limitation.It's the most powerful thing about us. The record we create is trusted precisely because we have no stake in it. But we're not just court reporters. We are people.We have voices, we have feelings. We have platforms. And there will always be cases that we care about too much to cover.When that happens, you will know the ethical thing is to step back from the machine. I mean, you. You'll know you won't even be able to stay. So don't worry. The Catholic Church covered of abuse for decades.The tobacco industry knew cigarettes killed people for decades, too. The food industry has documented in their own words, in 15 million archived files what their products do to human bodies.And in each case, the thing that finally moved the needle wasn't one dramatic moment. It was accumulation.It was enough people saying enough, loudly enough, for long enough that eventually a lawyer in the right jurisdiction, with the right legal theory, with the right backing, would file the right case. David Chu filed that case in December. Dr. Lustig has been building the science behind it for 20 years.And I have a podcast, a song, and a steno machine that I'm choosing not to bring to this particular courtroom. Episode 86 with Dr. Robert Lustig is in the feed. Go back and listen to it with everything I just told you in mind.The UCSF Industry Documents Library is publicly accessible, IDL ucsf.edu. The San Francisco case is a matter of public record. And as you know, as I mentioned, I'm working on something bigger.I'll tell you more when there's more to tell, but until then, stay neutral. On the record and off it. Say everything.