After diarrhea, the best thing to drink is a solution that contains both sugar and salt, because your small intestine needs both to pull water back into your body. Plain water helps, but it doesn’t replace the sodium and potassium you lost. A proper oral rehydration solution, or even a simple homemade version, restores fluid far more effectively than water alone.
Why Water Alone Isn’t Enough
Diarrhea doesn’t just drain water from your body. It pulls out sodium, potassium, and chloride along with it. Drinking plain water dilutes the electrolytes you have left without replacing the ones you lost, which can leave you feeling weak and foggy even after you’ve had plenty to drink.
The key discovery behind modern rehydration therapy is simple: when glucose and sodium arrive in the small intestine together, they trigger a transport mechanism that rapidly pulls water through the intestinal wall and into your bloodstream. Adding glucose to salt water makes it dramatically more effective at replacing lost fluid. This is the principle behind every oral rehydration solution on the market.
The Best Options for Rehydration
Oral Rehydration Solutions
Products like Pedialyte are the gold standard. The WHO-recommended formula contains 75 millimoles per liter each of glucose and sodium, with a total osmolarity of 245 milliosmoles per kilogram. You don’t need to memorize those numbers. What matters is that these solutions are carefully balanced so your gut absorbs fluid as efficiently as possible. They’re available at any pharmacy without a prescription.
If you don’t have a commercial product on hand, you can make a basic version at home: mix six level teaspoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt into one liter of clean water. It won’t taste great, but it works.
Coconut Water
Coconut water is a reasonable natural alternative. It’s rich in potassium and magnesium, and its electrolyte profile is close enough to human plasma that it has historically been used for emergency hydration in tropical regions. Compared to sports drinks, it provides hydration without artificial additives or excessive sugar. The main limitation is that coconut water is relatively low in sodium, so if your diarrhea was severe or prolonged, you may want to add a small pinch of salt or pair it with salty foods.
Broth and Clear Soups
Chicken broth, miso soup, or vegetable broth provides sodium in a form that’s gentle on a recovering gut. Warm broth also tends to be easier to sip slowly, which helps if you’re still feeling nauseous. It won’t give you much potassium or glucose, so it works best as a complement to other fluids rather than your only source of rehydration.
Diluted Fruit Juice
Small amounts of fruit juice diluted with water (roughly half and half) can provide glucose and potassium. The dilution step is critical. Full-strength juice contains enough sugar to make diarrhea worse, not better. More on that below.
Drinks That Can Make Things Worse
Sugary Drinks and Full-Strength Juice
Sugar stimulates the gut to push water and electrolytes into the intestine, loosening bowel movements. Fructose is the biggest offender. It’s found naturally in fruits like apples, pears, and cherries, and it’s added to sodas, juice beverages, and applesauce. People who consume more than 40 to 80 grams of fructose per day commonly develop diarrhea. A single 12-ounce can of soda or a large glass of apple juice can easily push you into that range when your gut is already irritated.
Coffee and Caffeinated Tea
Caffeine speeds up gut motility, meaning it pushes contents through your intestines faster. That’s the opposite of what you want after diarrhea. It also acts as a mild diuretic, increasing urine output. Stick to herbal tea or decaffeinated options until your bowel movements normalize.
Alcohol
Alcohol is a diuretic and an irritant to the gut lining. It impairs the absorption of water and nutrients in the small intestine. Even a single drink can set back your recovery.
Milk and Dairy Drinks
Diarrhea, especially from a viral infection, can temporarily damage the cells in your small intestine that produce lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose. This means you can develop sudden lactose intolerance even if dairy never bothered you before. If you drink milk during this window, the undigested lactose can trigger a fresh round of bloating, cramping, and loose stools. This secondary lactose intolerance usually isn’t permanent. Once your intestine heals, you can gradually reintroduce dairy to see how your system responds.
Probiotic Drinks and Recovery
Probiotic beverages may help shorten the duration of diarrhea, particularly if it was caused by a virus. A meta-analysis of children with rotavirus diarrhea found that those given Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG recovered about two days sooner than those given a placebo. Drinkable yogurt-style products and fermented beverages contain live cultures, though the specific strains and doses vary widely between brands. Look for products that list specific bacterial strains and colony counts on the label. Fermented drinks like kefir are another option, though you should start with small amounts given the dairy concern mentioned above.
How Much to Drink and How Fast
Sipping slowly is more effective than gulping large amounts at once. Drinking too fast can overwhelm a sensitive stomach and trigger vomiting, which only deepens dehydration. Aim for small, frequent sips, roughly a quarter cup every 15 minutes if you’re an adult. Increase the volume gradually as you start feeling better.
Your urine color is the simplest way to track your hydration. Pale, nearly colorless urine means you’re well hydrated. Medium yellow means you need more fluids. Dark yellow urine in small amounts, especially if it has a strong smell, signals significant dehydration that needs aggressive fluid replacement.
Sports Drinks vs. Rehydration Solutions
Sports drinks like Gatorade are better than plain water, but they’re not ideal after diarrhea. They’re designed for athletes losing sweat, not for replacing the electrolytes lost through the gut. Most sports drinks contain less than 20 millimoles of sodium per liter, well below the 45 to 75 millimoles found in medical rehydration products. Research confirms that beverages with sodium levels below about 40 millimoles per liter don’t produce meaningful rehydration benefits compared to plain water. Sports drinks also tend to be high in sugar, which can pull water into the intestine and prolong loose stools.
If a sports drink is all you have, it will help more than nothing. But given that Pedialyte and generic oral rehydration powders are inexpensive and widely available, they’re the better choice for recovering from diarrhea specifically.
Signs You’re Not Rehydrating Fast Enough
Most adults recover from a bout of diarrhea within a day or two with proper fluid replacement. But some warning signs suggest your body is losing fluid faster than you can replace it by drinking: dizziness when standing up, a dry mouth that doesn’t improve with sipping fluids, urinating very little or not at all for eight or more hours, or a rapid heartbeat at rest. Young children and older adults are especially vulnerable because their bodies have less margin for fluid loss.