Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Amy Whitsel, 9, of the Holy Trinity High Flyers of Ligonier, jumps rope during an event called "Bounce" at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown yesterday.

While healthcare providers, teachers and urban planners yesterday pondered strategies to prevent obesity among children, down the hall the kids took action by playing badminton, bowling and hula-hooping.

Nearly 400 professionals attended the Highmark Childhood Obesity Summit and more than 5,000 children and parents learned about healthy lifestyles at its sister event, Bounce, according to a Highmark spokesman. Both were held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown.

Frances McQuaide took her granddaughter, 9-year-old Corinna McQuaide, to Bounce to get tips on how to help her eat better and exercise more. The girl's parents, who are divorced, and her little sister were there, too.

"We have to get together and work on it to help her lose the weight," Ms. McQuaide said. "I got all kinds of packets of paper to read. So my next thing is to go home and read all these things and try to weed out the bad things in my refrigerator and cupboards."

Corinna, who lives with her grandmother, weighs about 15 pounds more than she should for her height, and a body fat measurement done at Bounce confirmed that she needed to trim down. Her doctor hasn't been concerned, but her family fear it could cause problems later.

"I'm still overweight [and] my daughter just lost a lot of weight," Ms. McQuaide said. "It runs in our family."

Since 1980, obesity has doubled among children and tripled in adolescents, according to data presented in the professional meeting.

Speaker Elizabeth Majestic, of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that one of every three children born in 2002 is expected to develop Type II diabetes, once known as an adult-onset disease.

"Folks, this is an absolutely staggering projection that we are making," she said. "If we don't get a handle on prevention of childhood [obesity], we are setting our children up for an even more devastating condition."

In some communities, half of new diabetes diagnoses are made in young people. Also, 60 percent of overweight 5- to 10-year-olds already have risk factors for heart disease, compared to 27 percent among healthy-weight children, Ms. Majestic said.

Kids are eating too many sugary, high-fat foods and not enough fruits and vegetables, and they are too inactive, she said.

Real estate developments often don't have sidewalks or places to go, she said, and new buildings are designed so that elevators are highly visible and stairways are hidden, discouraging walking.

The point, Ms. Majestic said, is, "we really need to pay attention to all kinds of environmental approaches to address this epidemic."

A multidisciplinary, coordinated and sustained approach is needed, but "the lion's share of the efforts to address obesity are underfunded," she noted. "They're small, they're fragmented."

National polls show that 84 percent of adults consider childhood obesity to be a major problem, and about three-quarters of parents of children 12 and younger would describe it that way. Many seem to blame parents for not addressing the issue.

"Yes, there is a personal responsibility element to it," Ms. Majestic said. But "because of the magnitude of the epidemic, there has to be some societal solutions that are also brought to bear on this problem."

The professional meeting included presentations about helping primary care physicians incorporate pediatric obesity counseling into their practices and a tour of a Hill District neighborhood for a "mobile workshop" in which designers brainstormed ways to identify and link new activity centers.