Pam Tyler-Bodrick, right, of Washington, D.C., grieves last month at a service for her goddaughter, Jacqueline Flanagan. Overweight since seventh grade, she died at 31. Her sister Justina is at left.

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THE WASHINGTON POST / CAROL GUZY

WASHINGTON — An epidemic of obesity is compromising the lives of millions of American children, with burgeoning problems that reveal how much more vulnerable young bodies are to the toxic effects of fat.

In ways only beginning to be understood, being overweight at a young age appears to be far more destructive to well-being than adding excess pounds later in life. Virtually every major organ is at risk. The greater damage is probably irreversible.

Doctors are seeing confirmation of this daily: boys and girls in elementary school suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol and painful joint conditions; a soaring incidence of type 2 diabetes, once a rarity in pediatricians’ offices; even a spike in child gallstones, also once a singularly adult affliction. Minority youth are most severely affected, because so many are pushing the scales into the most dangerous territory.

With one in three children in this country overweight or worse, the future health and productivity of an entire generation — and a nation — could be in jeopardy.

“There’s a huge burden of disease that we can anticipate from the growing obesity in kids,” said William H. Dietz, director of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “This is a wave that is just moving through the population.”

The trouble is a quarter-century of unprecedented growth in girth. Although the rest of the nation is much heavier, too, among those ages 6 to 19 the rate of obesity has not just doubled, as with their parents and grandparents, but has more than tripled.

Because studies indicate that many will never overcome their overweight — up to 80 percent of obese teens become obese adults — experts fear an exponential increase in heart disease, strokes, cancer and other health problems as the children move into their 20s and beyond.

The cumulative effect could be the country’s first generation destined to have a shorter life span than its predecessor. A 2005 analysis by a team of scientists forecast a two- to five-year drop in life expectancy unless aggressive action manages to reverse obesity rates. Since then, children have only gotten fatter.

“Five years might be an underestimate,” lead author S. Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, acknowledged recently.

The epidemic is expected to add billions of dollars to the U.S. health-care bill. Treating a child with obesity is three times more costly than treating the average child, according to a study by Thomson Reuters.

Ultimately, the economic calculations will climb higher. No one has yet looked ahead 30 years to project this group’s long-term disability and lost earnings.

Childhood obesity is nothing less than “a national catastrophe,” acting U.S. Surgeon General Steven Galson has declared. The individual toll is equally tragic. “Many of these kids may never escape the corrosive health, psychosocial and economic costs of their obesity,” said Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has committed at least $500 million over five years to the problem.

The cycle of obesity and disease seems to begin before birth: Women who are overweight are more likely to give birth to bigger babies, who are more likely to become obese. “And so you build it up over generations,” said Matthew Gillman, associate professor of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Medical School. “You get an intergenerational vicious cycle of obesity and disease.”

In-utero exposure is just part of an exceedingly complex picture. Patterns of eating and activity, often set during early childhood, are influenced by government and education policies, cultural factors and environmental changes. Income and ethnicity are implicated, though these days virtually every community has a problem.

In affluent Loudoun County, more than a third of 2- to 5-year-olds are overweight. In some lower-income wards in the district, almost half of all schoolchildren and preadolescents fit that label. In middle-class Prince George’s County, nearly a quarter of all children through age 17 are overweight.

The extra pounds appear to weigh more heavily on bodies that are still forming. Fat cells, researchers have found, pump out a host of hormones and other chemicals that might permanently rewire metabolism.

“A child is not just a little adult. They are still developing and changing. Their systems are still in a process of maturing and being fine-tuned,” said David S. Ludwig, an obesity expert at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

The internal damage does not always take medical testing to diagnose. It is visible as a child laboriously climbs a flight of stairs or tries to sit at a classroom desk, much less rise out of it.

On a playground, obesity exerts a cruel price. “It robs them of their childhood, really,” said Melinda S. Sothern, of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. “They’re robbed of the natural enjoyment of being a kid — being able to play outside, run. If they have high blood pressure, they have a constant risk of stroke."

Physical therapist Brian H. Wrotniak, who works with overweight youth at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, hears resignation more than anger in his patients’ voices. “They complain of simple things like tying their shoes. They can’t bend down and tie their shoes because excess fat gets in the way,” he said.

Their usual solution: Velcro sneakers.

“Obese children are victimized and bullied,” said Jeffrey B. Schwimmer, a pediatric gastroenterologist at the University of California at San Diego and Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego.

Only within this decade, as studies started to corroborate what doctors were seeing firsthand, has child obesity been recognized as a critical public health concern. For the longest time, the signs were all there, in plain view but largely ignored.

Ludwig compares the situation to global warming.

“We don’t have all the data yet, but by the time all the data comes in it’s going to be too late,” he said. “You don’t want to see the water rising on the Potomac before deciding global warming is a problem.”

THE PROBLEM AT first was that the problem was ignored: For almost two decades, young people in the United States got fatter and fatter — ate more, sat more — and nobody seemed to notice. Not parents or schools, not medical groups or the government.

But since the alarm was finally sounded in the late 1990s, the problem has been the country’s reaction: a fragmented, inchoate response that critics say has suffered particularly from inadequate direction and dollars at the federal level.

“The sense of this as a national health priority just doesn’t come through,” said Jeffrey P. Koplan, of Emory University, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and chairman of the Institute of Medicine’s 2004 study of childhood obesity.

Contrast the U.S. response with the offensive mounted in European countries: France mandated health warnings on televised food ads. Spanish officials reached agreement with industry leaders on tighter product labeling and marketing as well as reducing fat, salt and sugar in processed foods.

Britain has gone the farthest, restricting food ads on TV programs catering predominantly to children and pulling sweets and sweetened drinks from schools. Eighty-five percent of all grades have at least two hours of physical education a week. The 2011 goal is five hours.

“The whole of the government has signed up,” Will Cavendish, director of health and well-being, said at a conference in Washington last month. Britain’s Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives program is backed by $600 million over three years.

There’s no question that the U.S. epidemic won’t be reversed by federal fiat alone; responsibility lies also with individuals, the health community, corporations, local governments and others. Still, health experts insist that strong leadership from the top is crucial. They see the Bush administration falling short of expectations and few real champions in Congress.

The first signs of trouble appeared in the late 1970s as rates of overweight that had been relatively stable for years started to rise. In retrospect, they were reflecting societal, technological and policy shifts that would turn the youngest generation into the heaviest to date.

For starters, with more women working outside the home, families were eating more takeout or processed food. Spurred by the profit margins of volume production, fast-food restaurants pushed larger portions. Gadgets such as remote TV controls and video games meant children were planted for longer periods in front of televisions and computers. And on and on.

Through the 1990s, the waistline expansion accelerated. On campuses, once-rare vending machines multiplied as administrators signed exclusive contracts giving their schools a share of sales. Soon, soda and chips were a ubiquitous part of millions of students’ days.

Federal officials defend their record, saying they have worked “resolutely and steadily” in the past eight years to combat obesity. They calculate that the Department of Health and Human Services has spent $4.5 billion on prevention, treatment and research since fiscal 2003, although programs that broadly address chronic disease are part of the total.

Acting Surgeon General Steven K. Galson declared childhood obesity his main priority upon taking office last year and began traveling this spring to highlight jurisdictions that have been especially engaged.

A White House spokeswoman said President Bush is equally concerned. Emily Lawrimore noted his speeches about fitness and the need for parents to be role models.

Yet the president has proceeded on often contradictory tracks. Although he launched an expansive HealthierUS project in 2002, he has tried to kill or cut some prominent federal efforts aimed at overweight children and teens. His 2009 budget, for example, would end a $75-million program to help schools and communities expand physical-education offerings and purchase equipment.

Critics say the White House has not pushed the issue much beyond personal responsibility.

Only in December did the U.S. Department of Agriculture modify the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program to assist low-income families in buying fresh fruits and produce. The addition was blocked for a decade by politics and by industry sectors worried that WIC’s food packages would contain less milk, eggs and cheese.

And the USDA’s school breakfast and lunch program continues to sell whole milk and sweetened flavored milk. Mexico has eliminated both from its poverty programs and intends to do the same in schools.

Into the breach have stepped foundations committing hundreds of millions of dollars. State and local governments have also stepped up, passing myriad measures since 2005 to strengthen school nutrition standards and add recess and physical-education requirements. From churches and community centers to Scout troops, organizations large and small are trying to again get children moving or to teach them about better eating.

Influential groups have worked with food companies to limit marketing and availability of certain products to younger children. In the first major pact, the beverage industry acceded to removing many soft drinks from campus vending machines by the 2009-’10 school year. “They understand they’re under siege,” said Kenneth R. Stanton, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Baltimore. Stanton has become known for the UB Obesity Report Card, which he and colleagues first released in 2003.

But advocates say the limited power of persuasion and lesser state and local resources make forceful federal measures imperative. Congress has paid tepid attention to childhood obesity and repeatedly has rejected efforts of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, to establish national standards for what is sold in schools outside of USDA-regulated hot meals. And a measure by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., to create a federal commission on childhood obesity prevention, among other actions, wasn’t even debated.