If you have heart disease and eat more salt, your blood pressure tends to go up — for every extra gram of salt you excrete in urine, your top blood pressure number goes up by about 1.3 points and your bottom number by about 0.5 points.

People who pee out more salt tend to have higher blood pressure, and this pattern shows up in lots of different groups of people around the world.

For people who already have heart disease, eating just the right amount of salt — not too little and not too much — seems to be linked to the lowest chance of heart problems or dying from any cause. Too little or too much salt might actually be riskier.

People who pee out more salt tend to have higher blood pressure, and their blood pressure tends to rise faster as they get older—but in whole populations, the average blood pressure and how many people have high blood pressure don’t seem to change based on salt levels.

Even though people urinate out more salt after drinking this mineral water, their blood pressure doesn’t go up — meaning the body’s salt removal system works fine without raising BP.

In people with high blood pressure in Shanxi Province, those who excrete more sodium in their urine tend to have higher blood pressure—even when you account for things like age, weight, diabetes, and cholesterol—and this link is even stronger in women.