Family Fare

Photograph by Duncan Garrett

In Healdsburg, Calif., many of the young patients who have been seeking help from the Alliance Medical Center, a nonprofit health-care center that serves mostly low-income Latino families, are overweight. A few of the youngsters neared 200 pounds even before they became teenagers.

The clinic’s officials soon discovered that what they were seeing at their clinic was part of a national trend. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of children who are obese has more than doubled in the last two decades, with the highest rates occurring among Latino youths.

With a $25,000 grant from the Community Foundation Sonoma County and aid from other grant makers, the Alliance Medical Center has started an obesity-prevention project that seeks to help not just children, but also their entire families. Janeth Pinel, a health educator at the clinic, says that while children often learn about nutrition in school, they don’t necessarily share what they learn with their parents, who are cooking family meals.

As part of the prevention program, Ms. Pinel conducts weekly cooking and health-counseling classes in Spanish for 46 children and their families.

The program places less emphasis on losing weight than on developing a healthy way of life, she says.

“Even if they lose only one pound, that’s fine. Our goal is to teach them to get healthy eating habits, little by little,” says Ms. Pinel.

Here, a family participates in the clinic’s cooking classes.