It was a holiday week and, consequently, the small theater was packed with…you guessed it…mostly kids ranging from lap-babies to t’weeners and teens—and all of them jamming the concession lines with grandparents and young mothers in tow—kids trying to maximize a week’s worth of sugar-and-fat loading, while grandma’s tried not to break the bank— tough to do with $8 popcorn tubs of saturated fat calories, $5 thirst-busters and $12 popcorn-n-drink combos, $5 milk duds, m & m’s, and salty snacks of every description—all to satisfy the addicts we have become!

Before the feature film started, I sat in the dimly lit theater, enduring the insanely loud music that pounded through the opening ads, which kept repeating…’let’s go out to the lobby, let’s go out to the lobby…" as if the little screamers all around me hadn’t already concentrated enough salt and sugar-laced saturated fat into their prepubescent blood steams to get them to fever pitch—I realized too late that I was in the minority—maybe a minority of one—probably the oldest guy in the place but surely the only person who had arrived with good hearing senses in tact. Not for long, though. All those high calorie gut-loading kids soon had my senses totally trashed. I soon realized that all those gigantic sodas and copious amounts of M & M’s, Whoppers, Reese’s Pieces, and/or 10 gallon-sized-fat-and-salt-laden popcorn tubs were going to keep the crowd in a state of agitation for the remaining two hours.

But, I managed to endure the high-decibel pain and sat through the final credits, watching the amped-up crowd pushing and shoving their way out of the theater, observing behavior that had been induced by 2+ hours of junk food loading—even though I had considered leaving earlier, after a couple of toddlers held a competition to see who could cry (scream?) loudest and longest—but, I managed to get through it. By the time everyone had finally gone (and after the ringing in my ears began to subside), I watched as the ushers brought in huge trash cans to collect all the trash and spilled remnants of the junk food orgy I’d just endured, and that’s when it hit me:

The pulsating crowd I’d witnessed in the theater that afternoon had behaved just like you would expect any gathering where drugs were being mainlined—all those sodium-saturated fats and sugar-shots delivered in 32 ounce slugs of caffeinated soda dumped directly into thirsty bloodstreams had left their little brain cells begging for more, more, more—just like drug junkies at a rave—which mom and grandma gladly provided, just to give them a little ‘treat’ for their day at the movies.

When I think of all of the efforts that EH&S professionals have gone through to protect our children from toxins in the environment and the many routes of exposure we try diligently to minimize, its totally bizarre to know that we’ve raised a generation of parents who didn’t get the message diabetes is rampant in our children and, obesity begins in adolescence! And, sugar loading has the same effect as any addiction, even diet sugars like aspartame and saccharine are additive. Just ask a mother who drinks a six pack of diet soda every day to stop and see what reaction you get. Is this how we are raising our kids today? How sustainable is that?

In two and a half hours, I had witnessed the consequences of a generation of kids who have been spoon-fed sodas before they were old enough to drink water from a glass—kids who had their first taste of chocolate about the same time they got their first solid baby food who are now juicing with mega-sugar loads on a daily basis. And, their mother’s who don’t get what they are doing to them, are right there with them.

Take a look at the sugar content, saturated fat, and calories in the theater data I got from Cinemark, AMC, and Regal (below). And, although this space is too small to include these, there are similar lists for popcorn (depending on tub size: 590-1,030 calories, 20+ grams of saturated fat w/o butter—add 20 more with; add 0.4 grams LDL trans fats, and 1,500 mg sodium!)—and for sodas (regular 32 oz: 400 calories, 30 teaspoons sugar; or Diet soda: 300 aspartame-saccharine loaded calories).

Isn’t it time to we get the message out to all those young mothers who haven’t gotten it yet? The many ways we use to protect our kiddies from toxins in the environment, in our professional lives, will pale in importance to what the long-term effects will be if we continue making them into junk-food addicts. If we don’t get the word out now, we are absolutely guaranteeing a future with a poorer quality of life for our children’s, children’s, children.