4. Discussion
To our surprise this adequately powered RCT testing a culturally adapted internet intervention with innovative behavior change procedures (i.e., story or narrative, implementation intentions and dietary self-schemas) did not have the desired or expected effects on the quality of the children’s dietary intake. This is consistent with the findings of other children’s dietary intake change [Children were from households with generally well-educated parents who had lower incomes. The families tended to eat at fast food or buffet-type restaurants once or more times per week, where families have less control of the foods served and the methods of preparation. In the overall models controlling for demographics, weekdays were associated with higher diet quality for every component score. This suggests that family meals at home enhanced diet quality, as opposed to meals eaten on weekends when eating out was more likely. Others have found a positive association between home food preparation and diet quality [The tailoring of the intervention to one ethnic group should have simplified the design of the intervention. This should have avoided giving possible conflicting messages to the children, while the involvement of stakeholders should have ensured the use of culturally appropriate normative messages and procedures [The age of the participants (8–10 years old) has been associated with lower accuracy in self-completed dietary intake self-reporting [The HEI may have limited variability [The HEI-2015 scores in our sample (total HEI-2015 = 52.77 to 53) were somewhat lower than those detected in Spain (total HEI-2015 = 59.2 +/− 8.5) [The primary strengths of this study included the adequately powered sample, strict block randomization design, theory-specified intervention techniques informed by stakeholders, state-of-the-art measures, sophisticated statistical analyses, high engagement, and high retention rates. The limitations include the possible inaccuracy of the reported dietary intake in this age group (which should have been minimized using dietitian conducted 24-HDR with the NDSR) and the possible representational biases associated with the use of a non-randomly selected sample. Further, the study was conducted from November 2012–May 2015. Therefore, some of the participant characteristics, such as type, availability, use of technology and other screentime characteristics (i.e., television in their bedroom) may be different from those of a more contemporary sample.