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Iron deficiency is an important nutritional problem that affects approximately 20 percent of world's population and especially infants. The aim of this paper is to determine the iron bioavailability by using in vitro method in commercial infant cereals.

The ferrous iron dialyzability relative to total iron and phytic acid contents of six commercial infant cereals commonly consumed in Turkey were analyzed.

Dialyzable ferrous iron was determined in samples 4, 5, and 6 as 2.51 ± 0.38, 4.12 ± 1.52, and 0.50 ± 0.08 percent, respectively (p < 0.05). Phytic acid contents of the samples ranged from 118 to 161 mg/100 g. For all the samples calculated phytate:iron molar ratios were equal to or higher than 1 (ranged from 1.0 to 9.89).

The phytate:iron molar ratio was not found as the major inhibitory factor on iron bioavailability. Other possible factors such as type of iron fortificant and possible interactions of iron with other ingredients in the formula can affect iron bioavailability. Therefore, at the formulation step amounts of all ingredients and their proportions to each other should be considered to reach optimum iron bioavailability.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Turkish consumers’ attitudes toward grammatical styles of the same nutrition message affect persuasiveness; to determine the consumers’ ability to comply with the nutrition messages and to know possible health benefits of them; and to examine nutrient claims on food packages with information that will help consumers to make healthy diet choices.

A questionnaire, comprising eight different grammatical styles of a nutrition message for each kind of food or food products, is applied to randomly to 207 subjects. Another questionnaire is designed including nutritional messages. Subjects (n = 200) are asked about their frequency of compliance and how this behavior is beneficial to health. In total, 5,200 food products are scanned for nutrition labels on packages in four hypermarkets. All the nutrient claims found are recorded as well as the wording.

There are significant effects of grammatical style on persuasiveness, except for meat products. Subjects report that rhetorical question using “how about” in the third message provokes them most. High proportions of subjects have heard of the written nutrition recommendations before. However subjects’ frequencies of compliance with recommendations are low. The relation between compliance and knowledge scores for message 1, 2, 3 and 4 are significant (p < 0.01 and p < 0.05). Of 5,200 foods scanned, 266 foods are recorded for nutrient claims. Fat claims are the most frequent type of nutrient claims; 71 foods have numerical claims; 179 foods have adjectival claims and 16 have both claims.

There have not been any studies on frequency of application of nutrition labeling, consumer attitudes and knowledge of nutrition messages regarding Turkey.