Our primary outcome was brachial artery FMD measured on Day 10 of each condition. Secondary outcomes included TSI reperfusion slope and TSI AUC acquired from the NIRS‐VOT. An a priori power analysis determined that a sample size of 21 participants provided 95% power to detect a difference in FMD of at least 1% (effect size 0.83) at the end of the two arms using a paired samples t‐test with an alpha of 0.05 (G* Power). This difference in FMD was based on our results demonstrating that dietary potassium attenuated the effect of sodium (Smiljanec et al., 2020 (link)). An improvement of 1% in FMD is clinically significant based on a recent meta‐analysis that found a 1% improvement in FMD was associated with a decrease of 8%–10% in overall CVD risk over 4 years (Ras et al., 2013 (link)). Comparisons between the two conditions for all variables were assessed using paired t‐tests. Although not powered to detect sex differences, an exploratory analysis was conducted to examine potential differences between men and women in their response to the two conditions. Therefore, the difference score was calculated for the primary outcomes for men and women and was compared using an unpaired t‐test. Data were assessed for normality prior to analysis. JMP Pro 16.0.0 (SAS, Cary, NC) was used to carry out the analysis. Significance was set at p < 0.05.
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