When you have diarrhea, the best foods are bland, low-fiber, and easy to digest: white rice, bananas, plain toast, boiled potatoes, broth-based soups, applesauce, eggs, and skinless chicken. You don’t need to fast or limit yourself to just a few items. The goal is to give your gut simple foods that won’t pull extra water into your intestines or speed up contractions, while still providing enough nutrition to help you recover.
The BRAT Diet Is a Start, Not a Plan
You’ve probably heard of the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast. It’s fine for the first day or two, but it’s too restrictive to follow for longer. Those four foods lack adequate protein, fat, and micronutrients, which your body needs to heal. Harvard Health recommends expanding beyond BRAT as soon as your stomach can handle it, adding foods like boiled potatoes, oatmeal, crackers, unsweetened dry cereals, and brothy soups.
Once things start settling, you can layer in more nutritious options: skinless chicken or turkey, fish, eggs, cooked carrots, sweet potatoes without skin, cooked squash (butternut or pumpkin), and avocado. These are all bland and easy to digest but give you the protein and vitamins that plain rice and toast can’t.
Foods That Help Firm Things Up
Not all fiber is the same, and understanding the difference matters here. Soluble fiber dissolves in water and forms a gel-like material in your stomach that slows digestion. It acts like a sponge, absorbing excess liquid in your intestines and helping solidify loose stools. You’ll find soluble fiber in bananas, applesauce, oatmeal, and white potatoes.
Insoluble fiber does the opposite. It doesn’t dissolve in water and works by pushing material through your digestive system faster, which is the last thing you want during diarrhea. Raw vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and fruit skins are high in insoluble fiber. Save those for after you’ve recovered.
Here’s a practical grocery list of foods that are gentle on an irritated gut:
- Starches: White rice, white bread, saltines, graham crackers, plain pasta, oatmeal
- Proteins: Eggs, skinless chicken or turkey, fish, tofu, creamy peanut butter
- Fruits: Bananas, applesauce, canned peaches (no skin), melon
- Vegetables: Well-cooked carrots, boiled potatoes, cooked green beans, plain tomato sauce
- Liquids: Clear broth, water, diluted fruit juice, electrolyte drinks
Foods and Drinks to Avoid
Some foods actively make diarrhea worse by pulling extra water into your colon or stimulating your intestines to contract faster. Cutting these out, even temporarily, can make a real difference in how quickly you recover.
High-fat foods are a major trigger. Fried foods, cream sauces, gravies, butter, and fatty deli meats like bologna and salami are all harder for an irritated gut to process and can worsen loose stools. Keep added fats to a minimum until you’re back to normal.
Dairy is another common problem during a bout of diarrhea. When your intestines are inflamed, they may temporarily lose the ability to break down lactose, the sugar in milk. This can cause gas, cramping, and more watery stools even if you normally tolerate dairy fine. Milk, soft cheeses (cream cheese, feta, brie), ice cream, sour cream, and sherbet are the main culprits. Yogurt is generally better tolerated because the fermentation process breaks down some of the lactose.
Sugar alcohols, found in sugar-free gum and candies, are poorly absorbed and draw water into the intestines. Look out for ingredients ending in “-ol” on labels: sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol. Even small amounts can trigger watery stools when your gut is already compromised.
Coffee and other caffeinated drinks stimulate muscle contractions throughout your digestive tract. Caffeine speeds up gut motility on its own, and coffee contains additional compounds that trigger the release of a stomach hormone called gastrin, which further accelerates things. Alcohol has a similar effect and also contributes to dehydration.
Hydration Matters More Than Food
The biggest immediate risk from diarrhea isn’t nutritional. It’s fluid loss. Every loose stool pulls water and electrolytes out of your body, and dehydration can set in faster than most people expect. Signs to watch for include excessive thirst, dry mouth, dark-colored urine, dizziness, and lightheadedness. In children, look for a dry mouth or tongue, no wet diaper in three or more hours, crying without tears, or unusual sleepiness.
Water alone doesn’t replace the sodium and potassium you’re losing. Oral rehydration solutions or electrolyte drinks are the most efficient option. Clear broths also help because they provide both fluid and sodium. Sip steadily throughout the day rather than drinking large amounts at once, which can trigger nausea.
You Don’t Need to Wait to Eat
An older approach to diarrhea involved fasting for a period and then slowly reintroducing food. Research has moved past this. A Cochrane review comparing early refeeding (within 12 hours) to delayed refeeding (20 to 48 hours) found no evidence that eating sooner increases the risk of complications, vomiting, or prolonged diarrhea. In other words, if you feel up to eating, go ahead.
Start with the bland, low-fiber foods listed above and eat in smaller portions. You don’t need to force yourself, but there’s no benefit to waiting it out on an empty stomach. Your intestinal lining actually recovers faster when it has nutrients to work with.
What About Kids?
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children return to a normal, age-appropriate diet within 24 hours of getting sick. That diet should include fruits, vegetables, meat, yogurt, and complex carbohydrates. There’s no need to restrict children to a special bland diet for days.
Breastfeeding should continue throughout the illness. Formula and cow’s milk are also generally fine to keep giving, but if your child seems bloated or gassy after drinking them, it may be worth pausing cow’s milk temporarily. Some children lose the ability to digest lactose during the illness, though it typically comes back once the gut heals. The key priority for kids is preventing dehydration, since their smaller bodies have less reserve.
What About Probiotics?
Probiotics are widely recommended for diarrhea, but the evidence is less clear-cut than marketing suggests. A large Cochrane review examining probiotics for acute infectious diarrhea, including well-known strains like Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG and Saccharomyces boulardii, concluded that probiotics probably make little or no difference to the number of people whose diarrhea lasts 48 hours or longer. The reviewers were uncertain whether probiotics meaningfully reduce diarrhea duration overall. Yogurt with live cultures is unlikely to hurt and provides easy-to-digest protein, but don’t count on a probiotic supplement to speed your recovery significantly.
Warning Signs That Need Attention
Most diarrhea resolves on its own within a few days. But certain symptoms signal something more serious. For adults, seek medical care if diarrhea lasts more than two days without any improvement, if you develop a fever above 102°F, if you see blood or black stools, or if you develop signs of dehydration like severe weakness, little or no urination, or persistent dizziness. For children, the threshold is shorter: diarrhea that doesn’t improve after 24 hours warrants a call to the pediatrician, along with any signs of dehydration like sunken eyes, skin that doesn’t flatten when pinched, or unusual irritability.