Adapting a diet analysis program for an adolescent audience

With the expansion of nutrition education to the World Wide Web, nutrition educators will find ways to adapt existing programs for new audiences and save time and money. The Internet allows for mass distribution, which decreases reproduction costs, easy updating, and individual tailoring. Compared to developing a new application, adapting an existing diet analysis application to fit the needs of the EatFit intervention took a quarter of the cost and a third of the time. The process of adapting the application took 5 people working part time for approximately 1 year and might have taken less time had we fully anticipated some of the issues ahead of time. The 6 steps outlined here should save others valuable time and resources.