When your stomach is off, dinner should be simple: lean protein, plain starches, and well-cooked vegetables, served in a smaller portion than usual. The goal is to give your body enough fuel and nutrients to recover without making your digestive system work overtime. Sticking to bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast (the classic BRAT diet) is fine for a day or two, but a slightly wider range of bland foods will help you recover faster by providing the protein and vitamins your body actually needs.
Best Dinner Options for an Upset Stomach
The easiest dinners to digest are built from foods that are low in fat, low in fiber, and mild in flavor. Think of it as a stripped-down version of a normal meal. Good protein choices include skinless baked or broiled chicken or turkey, poached or broiled fish, eggs (scrambled or soft-boiled), and tender cuts of beef. For starches, stick with white rice, plain pasta or noodles, peeled boiled or baked potatoes, saltine crackers, or white bread. Round things out with well-cooked, tender vegetables like carrots, squash, or peeled sweet potatoes.
A few dinner ideas that check all the boxes:
- Chicken and rice: Skinless baked chicken breast over plain white rice, with a side of soft-cooked carrots.
- Brothy soup: Chicken broth with noodles or rice and small pieces of well-cooked vegetables. The liquid base empties from your stomach faster than solid food alone, and the broth replaces lost sodium.
- Eggs and toast: Scrambled eggs on white toast. Quick, gentle on the stomach, and surprisingly nutritious for how simple it is.
- Poached fish with potatoes: A mild white fish with peeled, boiled potatoes.
Harvard Health recommends expanding beyond the BRAT diet once your stomach has settled even slightly. Cooked butternut squash, pumpkin, avocado, and oatmeal are all easy to digest and add nutrients you won’t get from plain toast alone. Protein in particular helps your body recover, so don’t skip it just because you’re not feeling great.
Why Bland, Low-Fat Foods Work
Your stomach has to physically grind solid food into a liquid before passing it to the small intestine. After a typical solid meal, there’s a 20- to 30-minute lag before anything even starts moving out. Fat slows this process down significantly. A fatty meal sits in your stomach longer, increases pressure, and can push acid up toward your esophagus, causing heartburn on top of whatever you’re already dealing with.
Liquids, on the other hand, leave the stomach exponentially faster, especially low-nutrient liquids like water or clear broth. That’s why brothy soups and sipping fluids between bites tend to feel easier than a plate of heavy food. It’s also why eating a small amount feels better than eating a full portion: less volume means less distension and less work for your stomach muscles.
What to Skip Tonight
Some common dinner foods will reliably make an upset stomach worse. The main categories to avoid:
- Fatty or fried foods: Anything greasy, fried, or cooked in a lot of oil or butter. Dietary fats slow digestion and increase that uncomfortable fullness.
- Spicy foods: Capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers hot, can trigger indigestion and heartburn even in people who normally tolerate spice well.
- Dairy: Milk, cheese, and cream-based dishes can cause gas, bloating, cramping, and diarrhea, particularly if your digestive system is already struggling. Even people who aren’t normally lactose intolerant sometimes have trouble with dairy during a stomach illness.
- Alcohol: It irritates and inflames the stomach lining directly, and it relaxes the muscle that keeps stomach acid where it belongs.
- Caffeine: Coffee, tea, and cola stimulate the GI tract and speed up motility, which can worsen cramping, bloating, and diarrhea.
- High-fiber foods: Whole grains, raw vegetables, beans, lentils, and bran. Insoluble fiber (found in wheat bran and raw veggies) speeds food through the intestines and adds bulk to stool, which is the opposite of what you want if you’re dealing with diarrhea. Save the salad for when you’re feeling better.
Eat Less, More Often
Rather than sitting down to a normal-sized dinner, split your evening food into two or three smaller portions spaced an hour or so apart. People with GI symptoms like nausea, vomiting, or bloating tend to do better with six to ten small meals throughout the day instead of three large ones. A smaller meal puts less pressure on your stomach at any given time, which means less nausea, less bloating, and faster emptying.
If you’re not hungry at all, don’t force a full meal. Even a few bites of plain rice or a small bowl of broth is better than nothing, especially if you’ve been vomiting or having diarrhea and need to replace fluids and electrolytes.
What to Drink With Dinner
Staying hydrated matters more than what you eat when your stomach is upset, especially if you’ve been losing fluids. Water is the simplest option. Broth-based soups pull double duty as both food and hydration. Fruit juice and sports drinks can help replace electrolytes, though the sugar in juice may bother some people. If you’ve had significant diarrhea or vomiting, an oral rehydration solution (like Pedialyte) is more effective than water alone because it contains the right balance of glucose and electrolytes for absorption.
Sip fluids throughout your meal rather than drinking a large glass all at once. Large volumes of liquid do empty from the stomach faster, but gulping can increase that sloshy, nauseous feeling.
Ginger and Peppermint Tea
Ginger has genuine anti-nausea effects. Most clinical research has used 250 mg to 1 g of powdered ginger root, taken up to four times daily. In practical terms, that’s roughly a half-inch to one-inch piece of fresh ginger steeped in hot water. Grating some fresh ginger into your broth or sipping ginger tea alongside dinner can take the edge off nausea.
Peppermint tea is another common remedy, and it works through a different mechanism. The menthol in peppermint has antispasmodic effects, meaning it relaxes the muscles of the stomach and can calm cramping and improve fat digestion. There’s one important catch: peppermint also relaxes the muscle between your esophagus and stomach. If your “upset stomach” is actually heartburn or acid reflux, peppermint tea can make it worse by letting acid flow upward. If your main symptom is cramping or nausea without any burning sensation, peppermint is a good choice. If you feel burning in your chest or throat, skip it.
Fiber: Soluble vs. Insoluble
Not all fiber is created equal when your stomach is upset. Soluble fiber, found in oatmeal, bananas, and applesauce, absorbs water and turns into a gel during digestion. It slows things down, which is helpful if you’re dealing with loose stools. That’s part of why those BRAT diet staples work.
Insoluble fiber does the opposite. It speeds the passage of food through your intestines and adds bulk to stool. Wheat bran, raw vegetables, whole grain bread, and beans are all high in insoluble fiber. These are healthy foods on a normal day, but during an active stomach upset, they can make diarrhea and cramping worse. Stick with refined grains (white rice, white bread, plain pasta) until your digestion normalizes, then gradually reintroduce whole grains and raw produce over a few days.
Adding Probiotics During Recovery
If your upset stomach is caused by a stomach virus or food poisoning, taking a probiotic supplement both during and after the illness may help protect your gut microbiome from lasting disruption. Some research suggests that people who take probiotics during a stomach virus are less likely to develop ongoing digestive issues afterward. You can also get probiotics from plain yogurt if dairy doesn’t bother you, though during the worst of a stomach illness, a supplement in capsule form is usually easier to tolerate.