Cold, bland, low-fat foods are your best bet when nausea strikes. Bananas, plain rice, crackers, broth, and dry toast are all gentle enough to stay down, while ginger and peppermint can actively reduce the queasy feeling itself. The key is choosing foods that are easy to digest, low in odor, and unlikely to irritate an already sensitive stomach.
Ginger: The Strongest Food-Based Option
Ginger is the most studied natural remedy for nausea, with evidence supporting its use for motion sickness, pregnancy-related nausea, and post-surgical queasiness. The root contains compounds that speed up stomach emptying and calm contractions in the digestive tract, both of which directly counter the sluggish digestion that often triggers nausea.
You can get the benefit from several forms: fresh ginger steeped in hot water as tea, ginger chews, ginger ale made with real ginger (check the label, since many brands use artificial flavoring), or even crystallized ginger candy. If you’re too nauseous to eat or drink much, start with small sips of ginger tea and work up from there.
Peppermint Works Two Ways
Peppermint contains menthol and menthone, two active compounds that relax the muscles lining your digestive tract. That muscle relaxation eases the spasms and tightness that contribute to feeling sick. Peppermint also stimulates bile flow, which improves digestion and reduces the bloated, heavy sensation that can accompany nausea after meals.
You don’t even need to swallow it. Simply inhaling peppermint oil has been shown to significantly reduce nausea severity in chemotherapy patients and pregnant women. The scent travels through your olfactory system directly to brain regions that regulate nausea and emotion, providing fast relief without any metabolic processing. So if drinking peppermint tea feels like too much, placing a drop of peppermint essential oil on a tissue and breathing it in can help on its own. Warm peppermint tea has the added benefit of relaxing your digestive muscles from the inside.
Lemon Scent and Citrus
Lemon works through a similar olfactory pathway as peppermint. The key compound is limonene, which stimulates smell receptors that send calming signals to the brain areas responsible for nausea. In a study of pregnant women, inhaling lemon essential oil reduced nausea severity scores by roughly 38%, dropping from an average of 8.7 out of 13 to 5.4 on a standardized scale. The effect was statistically significant and kicked in quickly because the inhalation route bypasses digestion entirely.
Sipping lemon water or sucking on a lemon wedge can help too, though the scent alone may be enough. Some people keep a cut lemon nearby while eating to counteract food odors that might trigger queasiness.
Bland Foods That Stay Down
The classic BRAT diet (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast) has been a go-to recommendation for decades, and it’s still a reasonable starting point for the first day or two of acute nausea from stomach flu, food poisoning, or traveler’s diarrhea. These foods are low in fat, low in fiber, and gentle on your stomach. But there’s no research showing BRAT is superior to other bland options, and restricting yourself to just four foods limits your nutrition unnecessarily.
Other foods that are equally easy to digest include:
- Brothy soups (chicken, beef, or vegetable broth)
- Plain oatmeal
- Boiled or baked potatoes (without butter or heavy toppings)
- Unsweetened dry cereal
- Plain crackers
Once your stomach starts settling, you can add more nutritious options like cooked squash, carrots, sweet potatoes without skin, avocado, skinless chicken or turkey, fish, and eggs. The goal is to graduate from the blandest foods to a more balanced diet as quickly as your stomach allows.
Why Cold Food Is Often Easier to Tolerate
If the smell of cooking makes you queasy, you’re not imagining it. Hot food releases more aromatic compounds into the air, and those odors can trigger or worsen nausea through the same olfactory pathways that make peppermint and lemon helpful. Serving food cold or at room temperature dramatically reduces those airborne scent molecules. Cold applesauce, chilled broth, room-temperature crackers, and frozen fruit pops are all practical choices when even the thought of a warm meal feels overwhelming.
Foods and Drinks to Avoid
Some foods actively make nausea worse. While your stomach is unsettled, steer clear of fried or greasy foods, dairy products (milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream), sugary desserts, spicy dishes, and acidic foods like tomato sauce and citrus fruits. That last one might seem contradictory since lemon scent helps, but actually swallowing acidic juice on an irritated stomach is a different story. Foods high in insoluble fiber, like leafy greens, popcorn, nuts, seeds, and beans, are also harder to digest when your system is struggling.
Caffeine from coffee, tea, and energy drinks can irritate the stomach lining and worsen dehydration. Alcohol has the same effect.
Staying Hydrated When You Can’t Eat
Dehydration is the biggest practical risk when nausea keeps you from eating and drinking normally. The signs to watch for are excessive thirst, dark urine, dry mouth, infrequent urination, and dizziness when you stand up.
Small, frequent sips work better than trying to drink a full glass at once. Your best options are plain water, clear broth, ice chips, and oral rehydration solutions like Pedialyte. These solutions contain a specific balance of sugar, salt, and water that helps your body absorb fluid more efficiently than water alone. You can make a simple version at home by mixing four cups of water with six teaspoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt.
Sports drinks like Gatorade and Powerade aren’t ideal despite their reputation. They contain too much sugar and not enough salt to match what your body actually needs when it’s losing fluids from vomiting. Coconut water has the same imbalance. Stick with oral rehydration solutions or plain broth until you’re keeping fluids down consistently.
Vitamin B6 for Pregnancy Nausea
Vitamin B6 is one of the first-line treatments for morning sickness and is often recommended before prescription medications. It’s available over the counter and is also combined with an antihistamine in prescription formulations specifically approved for nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Foods naturally rich in B6 include chickpeas, bananas, potatoes, poultry, and fish, though the amounts in food alone are typically lower than what’s used therapeutically. If you’re pregnant and dealing with persistent nausea, your provider can recommend a specific supplemental dose.
Warning Signs That Need Medical Attention
Most nausea resolves on its own within a day or two with dietary changes and rest. But certain combinations of symptoms signal something more serious. Vomit that contains blood, looks like coffee grounds, or is green requires urgent medical attention. The same goes for nausea paired with severe headache (especially a new type you haven’t experienced before), signs of dehydration that aren’t improving with fluids, or severe abdominal pain.
For adults, vomiting that lasts more than two days warrants a call to your doctor. For children under two, the threshold is 24 hours, and for infants, 12 hours. Nausea that recurs in bouts over more than a month, or that comes with unexplained weight loss, also deserves evaluation.