Adult learners face the same health care challenges as fully literate adults-establishing a healthy diet, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, understanding new diseases and new therapies. For adult learners, the additional struggle is to do all of these tasks while lacking the necessary skills to find and understand health-related information. As a result, they often fail to engage in early detection and preventive health care practices and have difficulty understanding and complying with instructions from their doctors. A recent study found that 42 percent of adult respondents did not understand the instructions "take this medicine on an empty stomach." Complicating matters is the fact that most health promotion materials are written at the tenth grade reading level and the average adult in California reads at the seventh grade reading level.

Nearly 70 percent of the immigrants who have resided in California for ten or fewer years are functionally illiterate. To be functionally illiterate means to be unable to read the label on a medicine bottle, complete a medical history form, or find an intersection on a street map. Health Literacy empowers individuals and communities by improving their ability to access health information and their capacity to use it effectively.