Objective: To determine whether cooking classes offered by the Cooperative Extension Service improved nutrient intake patterns in people with type 2 diabetes. Design: Quasi-experimental using pretest, posttest comparisons. Setting: Community locations including schools, churches, and senior centers. Participants: One hundred seventeen people with type 2 diabetes, from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Intervention: Series of classes for people with type 2 diabetes and their family members that incorporated Social Cognitive Theory tenets. The classes featured current nutrition recommendations for people with type 2 diabetes and hands-on cooking, where participants prepared and ate a meal together. Main Outcome Measures: Three-day food records, completed prior to attending cooking schools and 1 month after, were used to measure changes in energy intake and selected nutrients. Analysis: Program efficacy was assessed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to compare differences between pre-training and post-training variables. ANCOVA was used to determine whether program efficacy was affected by sociodemographics. Results: Participants decreased (P less than 0.05) intakes of energy, fat grams, percentage of calories from fat, saturated fat grams, cholesterol (mg), sodium (mg), and carbohydrate grams. Conclusions and Implications: Nutrition education incorporating hands-on cooking can improve nutrient intake in people with type 2 diabetes from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. (Contains 2 tables.)