When your stomach hurts, bland, low-fat foods like bananas, plain rice, toast, and broth are your safest options. The key principle is simple: choose foods that require minimal effort from your digestive system so your stomach can recover without working overtime. What you eat (and when) depends on how bad you feel and whether you’re also dealing with nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea.
Start With Liquids, Then Work Up
If you’ve been vomiting, don’t eat anything right away. Give your stomach a few hours of rest first. Start by sucking on ice chips or taking small sips of water every 15 minutes. Once you can keep water down, move to clear fluids like broth, watered-down electrolyte drinks, ice pops, or gelatin.
After you’ve tolerated liquids for a few hours, your appetite will likely start coming back. That’s when you can begin introducing small amounts of solid food. The goal is a gradual progression: clear liquids, then soft bland foods, then a more normal diet as your stomach settles.
Best Foods for a Sore Stomach
The classic BRAT diet (bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast) has been the go-to recommendation for decades, and those four foods are still solid choices. They’re soft, low in fiber, and unlikely to trigger more nausea. But you don’t need to limit yourself to just those four. Plenty of other gentle foods work just as well:
- Brothy soups provide fluid and a small amount of protein
- Plain oatmeal is easy to digest and more filling than toast alone
- Boiled or baked potatoes (without butter or sour cream) offer starchy, stomach-friendly calories
- Saltine crackers help absorb excess stomach acid
- Unsweetened dry cereal gives you something to snack on without irritating your gut
The common thread is that these foods are bland, soft, and low in fat. They also provide more balanced nutrition than the strict BRAT diet, which is actually quite limited. A review from the University of Virginia School of Medicine found the BRAT diet is extremely low in protein, fat, fiber, vitamin A, vitamin B12, and calcium. Following it for more than a day or two can leave you short on the energy and nutrients your body needs to heal. In one extreme case, a three-year-old developed severe protein malnutrition after just two weeks on the BRAT diet. The takeaway: use BRAT foods as a starting point, but expand to other bland options as soon as you can tolerate them.
Ginger and Peppermint for Nausea
Ginger is one of the most reliable natural options for calming nausea. It works by improving how quickly food moves through your digestive tract and by acting on the same pathways in the brain and gut that trigger the urge to vomit. Clinical trials have used doses ranging from 250 mg to 1 gram per day, split across three or four servings. Interestingly, higher doses (around 2 grams) didn’t work better than 1 gram, so you don’t need much. Fresh ginger tea, ginger chews, or even flat ginger ale can help, though real ginger (not just ginger flavoring) is what matters.
Peppermint tea can also soothe an upset stomach by relaxing the muscles of your digestive tract. One important caveat: peppermint relaxes the valve between your esophagus and stomach too, which can make acid reflux worse. If your stomach pain feels like heartburn or burning in your chest, skip the peppermint and stick with ginger.
Foods That Will Make It Worse
Some foods actively slow your recovery or intensify pain. Fatty foods are the biggest offender. Dietary fat slows digestion significantly, which keeps food sitting in your stomach longer. That creates a heavy, overly full feeling and increases pressure on the valve at the top of your stomach, making heartburn more likely. Skip fried foods, cheese, cream sauces, and fatty meats until you feel fully recovered.
Spicy foods containing capsaicin can trigger indigestion and heartburn even in people who normally tolerate them well. When your stomach lining is already irritated, spice makes it worse. Dairy is another common problem, especially if you have any degree of lactose intolerance (which affects a large portion of adults). Without enough of the enzyme that breaks down milk sugar, dairy causes gas, bloating, cramping, and diarrhea. Even if you normally handle dairy fine, a temporarily irritated gut may struggle with it.
Also avoid caffeine, alcohol, carbonated drinks, and highly acidic foods like citrus and tomatoes. These all stimulate acid production or irritate the stomach lining directly.
Apple Cider Vinegar Is Not the Answer
You’ll find countless recommendations online for apple cider vinegar as a stomach remedy. There is zero published clinical research supporting its use for stomach pain or heartburn. Harvard Health Publishing has noted the complete absence of medical journal data on this topic, despite how widely it’s promoted. Vinegar is acidic, and drinking it when your stomach is already irritated can make things worse. Stick with proven options.
Probiotics Can Speed Recovery
If your stomach pain is part of a stomach bug or food poisoning that includes diarrhea, probiotics may help you recover faster. A large Cochrane review found that probiotics shortened the average duration of diarrhea by about 30 hours and reduced the risk of diarrhea lasting beyond three days by roughly a third. Yogurt with live cultures (if you tolerate dairy), kefir, or a probiotic supplement can all help restore the balance of beneficial bacteria in your gut that gets disrupted during an infection.
You don’t need to take probiotics while you’re actively vomiting. Wait until you’re keeping liquids and light foods down, then introduce them as part of your recovery diet.
When Stomach Pain Needs Medical Attention
Most stomach pain from a virus, food poisoning, or mild indigestion resolves within 24 to 48 hours with rest and careful eating. But certain patterns signal something more serious. Seek emergency care if your pain is severe enough to prevent you from functioning normally, if you can’t keep any liquids down despite repeated attempts, or if you’re unable to have a bowel movement alongside worsening pain.
Pain that starts around your belly button and migrates to your lower right abdomen over the course of 12 to 24 hours is a hallmark of appendicitis, especially when paired with fever, loss of appetite, and nausea. Severe, constant upper abdominal pain with nausea, fever, and a rapid pulse can indicate pancreatitis. Both require immediate medical evaluation. If your stomach pain feels different from anything you’ve experienced before, or is dramatically more intense than usual, that alone is reason enough to get it checked.