HOUSTON (The Houston Chronicle) -- For Callie Pettway, the revelation hit in a department store.

She was searching for a dress her daughter, Meaghan, could wear to her fifth-grade graduation ceremony. She reached for a size 24.

"I thought, `Something is desperately wrong here."'

For Meaghan and millions of other children, a public health crisis has come home. Thirteen percent of American children are seriously overweight, more than triple the number from 30 years ago.

Children are developing life-threatening diseases once found almost exclusively in adults: hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, sleep problems, liver and gall bladder disease. Ten-year-olds have high blood pressure. Kids need hip replacements.

Children are at risk of dying decades earlier than they should.

Consider the statistics:

-Thirteen percent of children ages 6-11 and 14 percent of those 12-19 were seriously overweight in 1999.

The rates are highest among Hispanic children.

Compare that with 1971, when 4 percent of U.S. kids ages 6-11 were seriously overweight, as were 6 percent of kids ages 12-19. (The government doesn't use the term "obese" for children, although other researchers do, based upon the same criteria.)

-In Houston, 19 percent of school-age children are seriously overweight. Another 37 percent, or 365,000, weigh at least 20 percent more than their ideal weights, according to a 2000 study in the Houston Independent School District.

Three of four overweight adolescents become overweight adults. That, said Dr. William Klish, chief of gastroenterology and nutrition at Texas Children's Hospital, may shorten their lives by decades.

The numbers have roused a complacent nation.

A coalition of national lawmakers last month proposed a $256 million program to fight obesity, with almost half the money used for a youth awareness campaign.

Hospitals offer weight-loss programs, and fitness groups run programs especially for kids. Texas elementary school students are supposed to spend at least 30 minutes daily, more than two hours a week, in calorie-burning activities.

"If we don't solve this problem," Klish said, "I think American society as we know it today is going to start crumbling.

"We're not going to be able to support the problems that this obesity epidemic is going to bring us." Klish is professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and chairman of the Texas Department of Health Obesity Task Force.

@Texas Children's Hospital recently admitted five boys - four teenagers and a 5-year-old - within a two-week period for sleep apnea, a common complication. Obesity prevents the chest wall from expanding, making it hard to breathe. That steals sleep and leaves children exhausted during the day. Untreated, it can kill.

Blame modern life.

Where previous generations of kids rode bikes and played kickball on the corner lot, today's children watch television and play video games. Families have traded leisurely home-cooked meals for high-fat fast food on the run.

Too often, parents don't recognize the problem. They may be blinded by love or wishful thinking, uncertain where love ends and harmful indulgence begins.

Or maybe they simply have grown accustomed to a super-sized nation.

As many as two-thirds of adults are overweight, defined as having a body-mass index of 25 or greater. (BMI is determined by dividing your weight in pounds by your height in inches. Divide that number again by height in inches and multiply by 703. Or try one of the online BMI calculators, including www.caloriecontrol.org/bmi.html. The same formula works for kids, but it has to be adjusted for age and gender.)

"Most parents, because they're overweight, feel that their overweight child is normal because (the child) is like them," Klish said.

Meaghan fit right in, even as she packed more than 200 pounds onto her 5-foot-3-inch frame. Her mother was not alarmed.

"There were other kids that were overweight, too," Callie Pettway said. "No one really made an issue of it."

A single mother, Pettway blames herself for buying high-calorie treats instead of fruits and vegetables. Meaghan seldom exercised.

"We were barely getting to school on time, then doing homework and getting to bed at 8:30. I wasn't thinking about it," Pettway said.

Genetics matters, doctors say. But mostly kids eat too much and exercise too little.

Earlier this month, the parents of two New York teenagers sued McDonald's, claiming Big Macs made their children obese. And that's just one manifestation of our belt-busting lifestyle.

"The last 20 years in the United States have been accompanied by really very substantial changes in the way we live, the way we eat, the way we interact as a family," said Dr. William Dietz, director of the National Center for Chronic Disease and Health Promotion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

"Mothers don't have the hour they had 20 years ago to prepare dinner," he said. So they dial out for pizza.

In an era of endless warnings about diet, nutrition and exercise, too many people still make bad choices.

Kids watch more television; 35 percent tune in for five hours or more a day, Dietz said. That can be prompted by love as much as laziness. "Parents want a safe place for their children, and one safe place is usually in front of the television set," he added.

In school cafeterias, fruit salads and baked chicken compete against pizza and chocolate cake for a child's lunch money.

Cultural factors may come into play, especially to explain the higher obesity rates among minorities, said Deanna Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas at Houston School of Public Health.

Ethnic and racial breakdowns of the CDC's latest survey haven't been released yet, but 1994 figures found that while 11.8 percent of all boys ages 6-11 were seriously overweight, it increased to 12.3 percent of African-American boys and 17.7 percent of Hispanic boys.

The figures were similar for girls and older children.

Economic status may play a role, too.

The school district survey found higher rates among low-income children, said lead researcher William Wong, a scientist at the Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor.

That includes children in neighborhoods such as the one where 14-year-old Evelyn Sanchez has lived since she was a baby. Outside her north Houston apartment, there is a patch of grass, but no real place to play. She couldn't ride a bicycle until she was 11.

Instead she watched television and ate.

Evelyn weighed 260 pounds by the fifth grade, trapped in a relentless cycle: Other kids teased her, so she went home and ate.

"I'd watch cartoons and movies - a whole lot," said Sanchez, who has since lost 80 pounds. "And that would make me hungry, too."

Consequences are often disastrous.

At age 11, Erica Cruz weighs 150 pounds and has high cholesterol and liver damage.

The liver disease, called steatohepatitis, has only recently shown up in children. Already, Erica's liver shows signs of fibrosis, or scarring.

Dr. Ruben Quiros, medical director of the liver-transplant program at Texas Children's Hospital, uses vitamin E to treat Erica and other children and recommends that they lose weight. Quiros monitors Erica's 9-year-old brother, Carlos, who weighs 117 pounds and has high cholesterol.

The diagnosis shocked their mother, Maria Cruz, a native of El Salvador, where overweight children are rare.

"I felt very bad," said Cruz, who lives with her children in South Houston. "I thought, `How can she have this? She's so little. ... And what can I do?"'

The obesity epidemic is costing more than children's health. A study by the CDC's Dietz and researcher Guijing Wang published earlier this year in the journal Pediatrics found obesity-associated annual hospital costs for children have more than tripled in the past two decades, from $35 million in 1979 to $127 million in 1999.

Doctors first noticed the health impact of childhood obesity as more kids developed Type 2 diabetes, said the CDC's Mary Kay Sones.

Both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes can cause serious complications, including blindness, kidney disease, nerve damage, heart disease and circulatory problems that can lead to amputations. The earlier Type 2 diabetes develops, the earlier the risk of complications, said Hoelscher.

More dramatically, children who develop Type 2 diabetes and remain overweight will die an average of 17-27 years earlier than children who do not develop the disease, Klish said.

Meaghan weighed 230 pounds, enough for a doctor to classify her as "morbidly obese."

That scared her mother into action.

Meaghan began a weight-loss program at Texas Children's Hospital last March.

She has lost 30 pounds and hopes to lose 50 more. Her mother has lost 10 pounds, with 10 to go.

Copyright 2002 The Houston Chronicle. All rights reserved.