When your stomach is upset, the best things to eat are plain, low-fiber starches and simple proteins: white rice, toast, crackers, bananas, broth-based soups, boiled potatoes, and applesauce. These foods are easy to break down and unlikely to make nausea, cramping, or diarrhea worse. Just as important as what you eat is what you drink, since dehydration is the biggest risk during a bout of vomiting or diarrhea.
Why Bland Foods Work
Your digestive system breaks down simple starches quickly using enzymes already present in the lining of your small intestine. When those starches are fully absorbed, they don’t pull extra water into your gut or feed bacteria in your colon. Complex, fiber-rich foods do the opposite. Undigested carbohydrates draw water and electrolytes into your bowel, which can cause watery diarrhea. Bacteria in your colon then ferment what’s left over, producing hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane, leading to gas, bloating, and cramping.
That’s the logic behind reaching for white rice instead of brown rice, plain toast instead of whole-grain bread, and peeled potatoes instead of ones with the skin on. You’re giving your gut the least amount of work to do while it heals.
The Best Foods to Start With
You’ve probably heard of the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast. It’s a fine starting point, but there’s no clinical evidence that you need to limit yourself to only those four foods. Harvard Health notes that brothy soups, oatmeal, boiled potatoes, crackers, and unsweetened dry cereals are equally easy to digest.
Stick with these kinds of foods for the first day or two, then gradually add more nutritious options as your stomach settles. Good next steps include cooked carrots, butternut or pumpkin squash, sweet potatoes without the skin, avocado, skinless chicken or turkey, eggs, and fish. These are still bland and gentle, but they provide the protein and vitamins your body needs to actually recover, not just survive on crackers.
Hydration Matters More Than Food
If you’re vomiting or having diarrhea, replacing lost fluids and electrolytes is your top priority. Plain water helps, but it doesn’t replace the sodium and potassium you’re losing. A simple homemade rehydration drink works well: 4 cups of water, half a teaspoon of table salt, and 2 tablespoons of sugar. That combination helps your intestines absorb fluid more efficiently than water alone.
Bone broth and regular chicken broth are also solid choices. They provide small amounts of sodium, potassium, and amino acids that may help reduce gut inflammation. If you’re using store-bought broth, pick a version that isn’t low-sodium, since you actually need the salt right now. You can also dilute fruit juices (like cranberry or apple juice) with water to get some sugar and electrolytes without overwhelming your stomach with concentrated sweetness.
Oral rehydration solutions like Pedialyte are designed specifically for this situation and contain a more precise balance of sugar and minerals than sports drinks. Sports drinks tend to have too much sugar relative to sodium for true rehydration.
Foods and Drinks to Avoid
Fatty and greasy foods are the worst choice when your stomach is already struggling. Fat triggers the release of hormones that slow down gastric emptying, meaning food sits in your stomach longer. That delay can intensify nausea, bloating, and discomfort. Skip fried food, cheese, creamy sauces, and fatty cuts of meat until you’re feeling better.
Other things to steer clear of:
- Dairy products. A stomach infection can temporarily damage the lining of your small intestine, reducing your ability to digest lactose. This temporary lactose intolerance typically lasts three to four weeks after an infection resolves. Milk, ice cream, and soft cheese may cause bloating and diarrhea even if you normally tolerate them fine.
- Spicy foods. They can irritate an already inflamed stomach lining and worsen nausea.
- Caffeine and alcohol. Both increase stomach acid production and can contribute to dehydration.
- Raw vegetables and high-fiber grains. These require more digestive effort and can produce gas.
Ginger and Peppermint for Nausea
Ginger is one of the most studied natural remedies for nausea. It works by speeding up the movement of food through your digestive tract and by blocking some of the chemical signals in your gut and brain that trigger the urge to vomit. Clinical trials have used doses ranging from 250 mg to 2 grams per day, split into three or four servings, and found that 1 gram per day works about as well as higher doses. You can get this from ginger tea, ginger chews, or capsules.
Peppermint helps in a different way. It relaxes the smooth muscle in your digestive tract by blocking calcium channels in the gut wall, which can ease cramping and that tight, uncomfortable feeling in your abdomen. Peppermint tea is the simplest option. If you’re dealing with lower GI symptoms like bloating and intestinal cramps, enteric-coated peppermint oil capsules are designed to dissolve further down in your digestive system where they’re most useful.
Probiotics During Recovery
If your upset stomach involves diarrhea, probiotics can shorten the episode. A large review of clinical trials found that probiotics reduced the average duration of diarrhea by about 30 hours and significantly lowered the chance of diarrhea still continuing at the three-day mark. The strain with the most evidence behind it is Lactobacillus GG (often sold as LGG), which was particularly effective for viral stomach infections.
One important caveat: the evidence for probiotics helping with bacterial diarrhea is much weaker. Two trials testing Lactobacillus GG against confirmed bacterial infections found no benefit. So if your symptoms started after eating undercooked food or traveling somewhere with unsafe water, probiotics may not move the needle much.
You can find Lactobacillus GG in supplement form at most pharmacies. Yogurt contains some probiotic strains too, but since dairy can be hard on a recovering gut, a supplement is often the better route during the acute phase.
Warning Signs That Need Medical Attention
Most stomach bugs and bouts of food poisoning resolve on their own within a few days. But certain symptoms signal something more serious: blood in your stool or vomit, fever alongside gut symptoms, persistent vomiting that prevents you from keeping any fluids down, worsening abdominal pain, or symptoms that stretch beyond a couple of weeks. Sudden unintentional weight loss, difficulty swallowing, or night sweats paired with digestive problems also warrant a call to your doctor.