Making the right food choices can help you keep your high blood pressure under control. That's the take-home message in a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The authors - both Harvard experts - offer an example of a typical person with high blood pressure. She's 57, carries too much weight on her 5'5" frame, doesn't get enough exercise, and eats a lot of white bread, processed meat, and sugary and salty snacks.

The experts point out that making diet changes to manage high blood pressure - also called hypertension - is a good idea for everyone with hypertension. Even people with prehypertension, which is elevated blood pressure that doesn't meet the criteria for hypertension, should make these changes, too. And people taking medications to bring down their high blood pressure still need to eat a blood pressure-friendly diet, they say.

In terms of food choices, their basic advice is to:

• Get protein from poultry, fish, nuts and legumes more often than from red meat.
• Buy low-fat or fat-free dairy foods instead of full-fat dairy.
• Eat fruit instead of sugary snacks and desserts (and eat whole fruit instead of drinking juice)
• Choose bread and pasta made of whole grains instead of white flour
• Use polyunsaturated and monounsaturated cooking oils like olive and canola oil instead of butter

In addition, most of your shopping time should be spent along the outside edge of the supermarket, where you find the fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy foods, and fresh meats. Cut back on the foods that are processed or canned, which you'll tend to find on the inner aisles of the store. It's important for people with high blood pressure to cut back on the sodium in their foods, and processed foods are often high in sodium. However, after enjoying salty foods for years, a low-sodium diet may seem unappealing at first.

So while you're shopping, pick up fresh herbs and spices, vinegar, and citrus fruits (a splash of juice or bit of peel from the fruit can add zing) to flavor your food with less salt, the experts recommend. In addition, it's wise to only eat in restaurants once a week at most. Restaurant meals may contain a substantial amount of sodium.

Finally, the authors of the article recommend that people record all the foods they eat for a week or two and discuss their eating habits with a dietitian. The dietitian can help plan meals that appeal to you, which may make you happier to stick with a low-sodium diet.

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