If you have high blood pressure, eating more potassium might lower it more than it does for someone with normal blood pressure.

If you eat more potassium-rich foods, your blood pressure goes down in a straight-line way—more potassium means lower blood pressure, and this keeps happening all the way up to a pretty high amount, at least for people with high blood pressure.

If you eat less salt but add more potassium to it, your blood pressure might drop more if you usually don’t get much potassium in your diet—because your body gets a bigger boost from the potassium than it loses from the sodium.

Eating more potassium can lower blood pressure in people who already have high blood pressure, but it doesn’t help people with normal blood pressure — so it’s like a targeted fix just for those who need it.

When people who don’t eat much potassium switch to salt with extra potassium, their blood pressure drops mostly because they’re getting more potassium—not because they’re eating less salt, since they’re still eating plenty of salt.

For people with high blood pressure, eating more potassium-rich foods leads to higher potassium levels in their bodies after a year, as measured by food records and urine tests.