Nutritionists in Fiji say poor diets have caused up to half the population to suffer from anaemia.
The Fiji Nutrition Centre has begun marking its annual National Nutrition Month with the theme Act Against Anaemia.
A Senior Nutritionist Ateca Kama says a survey in 2004 concluded that half the population of 800,000 had anaemia, with one in every two children under the age of two and one in every three women suffering from it.
She says recent surveys have suggested some improvements, but poor diets still affect hundreds of thousands of people.
"We are not eating our traditional foods that we used to eat. There's a lot of dependence on processed foods, imported foods. There's a shift from eating traditional iron-rich foods and vegetables to more processed foods. And there's also a bit of eating the wrong kinds of foods."
Ateca Kama says another survey on the rate of anaemia will be carried out in 2014.
