If you eat less salt—about 2.3 grams less per day—your blood pressure will likely go down by about 5.6 points for the top number and 2.3 points for the bottom number, no matter if you're already taking blood pressure medicine.

If you eat much less salt, your blood pressure will go down—lower salt means lower blood pressure, and the less salt you eat, the more your pressure drops, with no point where cutting more salt stops helping.

If you cut down how much salt you eat from a lot to very little, your blood pressure will go down—by about 15 points for the top number and 10 points for the bottom number—and this works best if you already have high blood pressure.

Cutting back on salt in your diet lowers your blood pressure—on average, by about 4 points for the top number and 2 points for the bottom number.

Cutting down on salt lowers blood pressure more for people who already have high blood pressure than for those with normal blood pressure—about 2.5 times more.

If you cut down on salt, your blood pressure drops more if you already have high blood pressure than if you don’t—and the drop is about 6.5 mm Hg higher for every 100 mmol of salt you reduce.