If you’ve been following the Comer Bien series--a project of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy group in the U.S.--you know by now that Latino kids are going hungry at unacceptable rates and, at the same time, experiencing record levels of overweight and obesity. At the heart of both Latino child obesity and hunger is poor access to healthy foods. This means that economic and environmental factors—often called “social determinants of health” in the public health and policy world—make it difficult for Hispanics and other underserved Americans to regularly afford enough healthy foods for everyone in the family to eat nutritious meals.

So what are we going to do to change these outcomes for our children?

With NCLR's first Twitter chat series, #NCLRChats, on Tuesday, October 6 at 4:00 p.m. EDT, we invite you to join the conversation about how social determinants of health are affecting the nutrition of our children and to bring this message to policymakers. As Janet Murguía, our President and CEO, explained, “We as a nation must understand Latino nutritional experiences in order to craft meaningful solutions for improving the health and well-being of Latino children and families.” We want to hear from you about how these factors affect your community’s access to healthy foods—and we need your help sharing that message with policymakers to make sure that solutions take all of these factors into consideration.

Consider that many Hispanics live in food deserts, where fresh, healthy food is not available or retail food outlets are absent altogether. Transportation and community safety also play a role when Latino families must travel far from home to shop for food or walk home with heavy bags through unsafe settings. And job and income insecurity, often exacerbated in an economic downturn, means that many families are making the best food choices they can on a limited budget once the rent, utilities, and other nondiscretionary expenses have been paid. Worse, many Hispanic families are not just dealing with one social determinant at a time; a low-income parent struggling with job insecurity is likely to lack affordable health care, live in an area where healthy food is scarce, and make trade-offs at the grocery store between buying inexpensive, calorie-dense foods that will fill everyone’s stomachs or purchasing nutritious foods, such as fresh produce, that tend to be more expensive and spoil quicker.

Take the example of Emily of San Antonio, who takes four or more hours out of her weekend to do her grocery shopping in another part of town at a store that stocks healthier foods than her neighborhood chain. Or consider Geanette of El Paso, who is able to give her daughters healthy dinners thanks to nutritious school meals and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), despite a busy schedule of work and higher education. These mothers are juggling a number of factors that together create an uphill battle when it comes to buying and preparing the healthy meals that they want to give to their children.

So on October 6, join our experts and other advocates to ask questions and share your own thoughts, experiences, and ideas for action. You can send your questions and contributions in advance to news@nclr.org, post on our Facebook wall, or send us a tweet using the #NCLRChats hashtag. We’ll be publishing the chat transcript and distributing it to decision-makers, so make your voice heard!

And, if you haven't checked out Comer Bien yet, watch the video below. When you're finished, click here to view the entire video series.

This post originally appeared at the NCLR blog.  To receive updates from NCLR about the chat, as well as health and nutrition alerts, sign up here.