People with very high blood pressure who ate the Rice Diet were about 72% likely to live at least 5 years, while those with lower blood pressure were over 93% likely to live that long — suggesting that how high your blood pressure was at the start might affect how long you live, even if you eat this special diet.

People who ate only rice for a while lost weight—on average, their body mass index dropped by 4 points—no matter if they had high blood pressure or not, meaning it worked well even for those who were otherwise healthy.

Eating almost no salt—less than a pinch a day—while following the Rice Diet didn’t seem to make people with high or normal blood pressure die any sooner, and most of them lived at least five years. So maybe cutting salt this much is okay even for healthy people.