Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15) is a time to celebrate the traditions, languages, and stories that shape so many lives, including how we eat, gather, rest, and care for one another. At the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, we believe transforming health starts with understanding the whole person, and that includes culture.
This year, we're celebrating Hispanic and Latino members of the IIN community whose stories prove there's no single path to feeling well. (Want to meet even more voices from our community? Revisit our earlier spotlight on Latinx voices at IIN.)
Culture shapes nearly every part of how we experience health: the foods we eat, how we gather with family, and how we relate to our bodies, movement, rest, work, and asking for support. Hispanic and Latino Americans now make up 21% of the U.S. population, more than 70 million people (U.S. Census Bureau, 2026). And that community is anything but one-size-fits-all, with roots stretching across Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain, each with its own foods, traditions, and dialects.
That's where bio-individuality comes in. One of the foundational concepts in The Health Coach Training Program™, it's the idea that every person has different needs, circumstances, and definitions of well-being. For health coaches, curiosity and listening aren't extras. They're the work.
For many of us, culture is also where our first lessons about wellness begin. Family recipes, celebrations, and the ways we care for one another shape how we understand nourishment long before we ever hear a formal definition of health. Hungry for more? Explore traditional foods from around the world and their health benefits.
Ana was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, where she built her medical career. After moving to the United States, she started noticing how culture shapes everything from healthcare to family traditions, including how people celebrate the holidays.
In Venezuela, Christmas Eve means hallacas, pan de jamón, ensalada de gallina, and pernil, with family gathered late into the night. Over time, Ana has blended those traditions with the customs she found in the U.S., creating something that reflects both parts of her life.
That same awareness shapes her coaching. Food can mean love, family, and connection, while ideas about health and body image are often shaped by cultural expectations.
"The goal shouldn't be to impose one definition of a 'healthy lifestyle,'" Ana says, "but rather to find a way of caring for your health that makes sense within each person's reality and culture."
As an IIN Coaching Circle Coach, Ana also knows how much language matters. Research backs her up: a systematic review found that in most studies, patients with limited English proficiency had better outcomes when their physician spoke their language (Diamond et al., 2019). Coaching someone in Spanish can create more comfort when talking about personal health, while honoring that Spanish itself varies from country to country.
Her hope? That Spanish-speaking, Hispanic, and Latino members of the IIN community know there's a place for their language and culture here. For someone seeing themselves represented in wellness for the first time, that visibility sends a powerful message: "I can do this too."
Agustina is a Health Coach, Pilates instructor, yoga practitioner, Ayurveda student, and founder of RAÍZ. Born and based in Montevideo, Uruguay, with Italian and Jewish-Polish roots and experiences across Latin America, the U.S., and India, she sees her cultural identity less as a fixed point and more as an ongoing weaving together of many threads.
Some of her earliest wellness lessons came from her grandmother and the women in her family. Yoga, cooking, gathering around the table, and caring for others taught her that nourishment is about much more than food. In Agustina's words, nourishment became "love made practical."
Today, through PAUSA and RAÍZ, she brings together food, ritual, self-awareness, and community. Her approach reflects another core idea from The Health Coach Training Program: wellness is multidimensional, shaped by relationships, work, home, spirituality, and so much beyond the plate. Rather than treating the body as something to fix or optimize, Agustina encourages women to listen to what their bodies are telling them, a practice rooted in the mind-body connection.
Andrea was born in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, and grew up in nearby Tecate. For her, being Mexican is deeply tied to love, tradition, and food, not just as nourishment but as the way her family cared for one another.
When Andrea was four, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and began chemotherapy. That changed how the whole family thought about health: fresh foods, herbal teas made from her grandmother's recipes, and an everyday investment in well-being. "My mom always used to heal us with food," Andrea shares.
As a teenager, Andrea faced her own struggles with food and her body, including an eating disorder. Through therapy and her own healing, she came to see that her relationship with food couldn't be separated from her emotional and physical well-being.
That experience shapes how she thinks about health today. Something can be part of a healthy life without being "nutritious," she explains. An ice cream shared with a best friend may not be nutrient-dense, but the joy, connection, and laughter around it still count.
Andrea says The Health Coach Training Program complemented her university studies in nutrition and food science by pushing her to look beyond the science of food, toward the environments, stressors, routines, and relationships that shape how someone actually experiences health. That lesson even guided a big life decision: after noticing how the stress, traffic, and pace of city life were affecting her, she moved back to Baja California to be closer to the beach and her hometown.
She's seen the same principle play out with clients. One woman she worked with was following every wellness trend and training hard, yet still felt stressed and depleted. Instead of adding more exercise or cutting calories, Andrea helped her rethink her mornings, making time for journaling and a more complete breakfast. Curious how food and stress connect? Here are 7 foods that may help reduce cortisol levels.
Today, Andrea's work centers on women's hormonal health and wellness education, including conversations around breast cancer, eating disorders, and supporting hormone balance. Her Mexican heritage is at the heart of it all, especially the recipes and preventive practices passed down by Mexican grandmothers. "They didn't know science," she says, "but they knew their bodies and saw health with so much love and respect."
Private chef and IIN Health Coach Rosa Rodriguez learned to cook alongside her grandmother on a small farm, where she saw how the women in her family used food to express love and build community.
"Cooking was my first language of caring for people," Rosa says.
Health coaching gave her a way to connect two parts of herself that had always felt related. The Health Coach Training Program expanded her view beyond food to relationships, environment, stress, movement, rest, and self-care. Today, she brings all of it into personalized meals and wellness experiences built around each client's preferences, lifestyle, and needs.
For Rosa, culturally meaningful food belongs in a healthy life. Supporting someone's wellness doesn't mean separating them from the flavors and traditions that connect them to family and identity.
Born and raised in Argentina and now living in Mallorca, Spain, Maria identifies as Argentine and Latina, with Spanish and Italian family roots.
Growing up vegetarian in a country where meat is central to the food culture taught her early that personal choices don't always fit neatly into tradition. Later, her own experience with obesity showed her firsthand that a dietary label or body size never tells the whole story of someone's health.
Today, she helps women make room for the emotional, cultural, financial, and practical realities around food, rather than asking them to give up familiar foods or traditions. The Health Coach Training Program reinforced that whole-person view and shaped the compassionate, individualized approach she brings to her work.
The IIN community also includes educators who bring fresh perspectives to health, coaching, and human potential.
María José Flaqué: Building a Spanish-Speaking Wellness Community
IIN graduate, meditation teacher, bestselling author, and digital entrepreneur María José Flaqué founded Mujer Holística, a global wellness platform connecting women across Spanish-speaking communities in more than 20 countries. Her work shows how wellness education can cross languages and borders while still creating a real sense of belonging.
Michelle Maldonado: Leading with Presence & Empathy
A mindful leadership and human potential expert and founder of Lucenscia, Michelle brings another essential dimension to coaching: the relationship between coach and client. Her work centers on emotional intelligence, presence, empathy, and listening without assumptions, the skills that help someone feel truly heard.
That emphasis on curiosity over judgment is at the heart of the coaching skills taught in The Health Coach Training Program. Sometimes the most meaningful support starts not with having the right answer, but with being present enough to ask the right question.
A mindful leadership and human potential expert and founder of Lucenscia, Michelle brings another essential dimension to coaching: the relationship between coach and client. Her work centers on emotional intelligence, presence, empathy, and listening without assumptions, the skills that help someone feel truly heard.
There's no single Hispanic or Latino experience of health and wellness. Culture intersects with family, language, geography, generation, personal history, and access, and every one of those layers shapes what wellness looks like for each person.
That's why a whole-person approach matters. When people feel supported in ways that respect their lives and identities, the impact reaches far beyond a single coaching session, into their homes, relationships, work, and communities. Whether it's honoring family food traditions, coaching in someone's first language, or simply listening with more curiosity, each of these stories adds something meaningful to the wellness conversation.
Hispanic Heritage Month is a chance to celebrate the traditions and stories that shape how we understand health. At IIN, we're proud to learn from the graduates and educators who bring those perspectives into their work every day.
If you're curious about health coaching, The Health Coach Training Program is built on bio-individuality, multidimensional health, and the many factors that influence well-being. Whether you're exploring it for your own growth, to support the people you love, or to expand the work you already do, your perspective belongs here. With more than 210,000 students and graduates in over 180 countries, there's a global community ready to welcome you!
Diamond, L., Izquierdo, K., Canfield, D., Matsoukas, K., & Gany, F. (2019). A systematic review of the impact of patient–physician non-English language concordance on quality of care and outcomes. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 34(8), 1591–1606. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-019-04847-5
U.S. Census Bureau. (2026, August 11). National Hispanic Heritage Month: 2026. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2026/hispanic-heritage-month.html