When you have diarrhea, the best foods to eat are bland, low-fiber, and easy to digest: white rice, bananas, plain toast, boiled potatoes, brothy soups, oatmeal, crackers, and simple proteins like chicken breast or eggs. You don’t need to starve yourself or stick to an extremely limited list. The goal is to give your gut easy work while replacing the nutrients and fluids you’re losing.
The BRAT Diet Is a Starting Point, Not the Whole Plan
You’ve probably heard of the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast. It’s been the go-to recommendation for decades, and those four foods are genuinely gentle on a recovering gut. But there’s no clinical research showing BRAT works better than a broader bland diet, and limiting yourself to just four foods for days means you’re missing out on protein, fat, and calories your body needs to recover.
A more practical approach is to use BRAT as a foundation and add other well-tolerated foods around it. Brothy soups, oatmeal, boiled potatoes, crackers, unsweetened dry cereals, noodles, cottage cheese, smooth yogurt, and soft tofu all fall into the same category of foods your stomach can handle without much strain. You can eat these from the start of your symptoms. A Cochrane review of refeeding after acute diarrhea found no evidence that eating early (within 12 hours of starting rehydration) increases the risk of complications or prolongs symptoms compared to waiting a day or two.
Starches That Help Firm Things Up
Starchy foods do more than just sit gently in your stomach. Some contain resistant starch, a type of starch that isn’t fully broken down in the small intestine. It absorbs water and adds bulk to stool, which is exactly what you want when things are too loose. Green bananas and plantains are particularly high in resistant starch. As bananas ripen and turn yellow, their resistant starch converts to regular sugar, so less-ripe bananas are actually more helpful for diarrhea than fully ripe ones.
White rice is another strong option, and here’s a useful trick: rice that has been cooked and then cooled in the refrigerator develops more resistant starch than freshly cooked rice. You can reheat it without losing that benefit. The same applies to potatoes. Red and yellow potatoes actually increase in resistant starch after being cooked, chilled, and reheated. So leftover rice and potatoes from the fridge are working slightly harder for you than a fresh batch.
Good Protein Choices During Recovery
Your body needs protein to heal, and skipping it slows recovery. The key is choosing lean sources prepared without much added fat. Chicken breast, white fish, eggs, and soft tofu are all well tolerated. Cook them simply: baked, boiled, steamed, or poached. Scrambled eggs with a small amount of butter are fine for most people.
What you want to avoid is anything fatty, greasy, or heavily processed. Fried chicken, bacon, sausage, hot dogs, and fatty deli meats like salami or bologna are all harder on your digestive system. Whole nuts and chunky nut butters can also be irritating. Save those for when you’re feeling better.
Vegetables and Fruits That Work
Raw vegetables are tough on an irritated gut because of their insoluble fiber content, the rough, scratchy kind that speeds things through your intestines. But cooked vegetables in soft, mushy form are a different story. Canned or well-cooked potatoes, carrots, and green beans are all reasonable choices. Plain tomato sauce is also fine.
For fruit, stick with bananas, applesauce, and peeled, cooked fruits. Apples and bananas are naturally higher in soluble fiber, the kind that dissolves in water and forms a gel-like material in your digestive tract. Soluble fiber actually absorbs water and helps add bulk to watery stool. Oats, carrots, and barley are also good sources of soluble fiber. You’re not trying to eat a high-fiber diet right now, but small amounts of soluble fiber from these foods can genuinely help.
Foods and Drinks to Avoid
Some foods actively make diarrhea worse. Knowing what to skip matters as much as knowing what to eat.
- Dairy products. A bout of diarrhea, especially from a stomach bug, can temporarily damage the lining of your intestines where the enzyme that digests lactose is produced. This creates a short-term lactose intolerance that typically lasts three to four weeks until the lining heals. During that window, milk, ice cream, and soft cheeses may trigger more cramping and loose stools. Yogurt is often better tolerated because the fermentation process breaks down some of the lactose.
- Greasy and fried foods. Fat stimulates contractions in your digestive tract, which is the last thing you need when things are already moving too fast.
- Sugar-free gums and candies. These often contain sugar alcohols like xylitol or sorbitol, which pull water into the intestines through osmosis. In healthy adults, as little as 20 to 30 grams of xylitol can trigger diarrhea on its own. When your gut is already irritated, even smaller amounts may cause problems. Check labels for anything ending in “-ol.”
- Caffeine and alcohol. Both are mild gut stimulants that speed up transit time and can worsen dehydration.
- Spicy foods. Capsaicin irritates the intestinal lining and can increase cramping.
- Raw vegetables and high-fiber cereals. Insoluble fiber adds roughage that an inflamed gut can’t handle comfortably right now.
Hydration Matters More Than Food
The biggest risk from diarrhea isn’t missing a few meals. It’s losing water and electrolytes. Every loose stool pulls sodium, potassium, and fluid out of your body. Drinking plain water helps, but it doesn’t replace those electrolytes. Broth-based soups are one of the best options because they provide sodium, potassium, and fluid in one package. Oral rehydration solutions (available at any pharmacy) are designed for exactly this purpose. Diluted fruit juice and coconut water can also contribute electrolytes.
Sip fluids steadily throughout the day rather than drinking large amounts at once, which can trigger more cramping. If you’re urinating less frequently than normal or your urine is dark yellow, you need to increase your fluid intake.
Probiotics Can Shorten Recovery
Certain probiotic strains help restore the balance of bacteria in your gut after it’s been disrupted by infection. The strain with the most evidence behind it for acute diarrhea is a beneficial yeast called Saccharomyces boulardii, available over the counter in most pharmacies. A meta-analysis of five trials involving over 600 children found it reduced the duration of diarrhea when taken for four to six days alongside rehydration. Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG is another well-studied strain. Yogurt with live active cultures provides some probiotic benefit and is one of the few dairy products most people tolerate well during a bout of diarrhea.
Transitioning Back to Normal Eating
You don’t need to wait for a specific number of symptom-free days before reintroducing regular foods. The evidence supports eating as soon as you feel able to, starting with the bland options above and gradually adding back more variety as your stools firm up. Most people can return to their normal diet within a few days of symptom improvement.
Reintroduce dairy products slowly, since the temporary lactose intolerance from gut lining damage can linger for three to four weeks even after the diarrhea itself has stopped. If milk or cheese triggers symptoms again, give it more time. High-fat foods, raw vegetables, and whole grains are worth easing back in over several days rather than jumping straight to a large salad or a bowl of bran cereal.