When your stomach is upset, the best things to eat are bland, low-fiber foods that require minimal digestive effort: plain rice, toast, bananas, applesauce, boiled potatoes, and plain crackers. But what you eat matters less than when and how you reintroduce food. Starting with clear liquids and working your way up to solids over several hours gives your stomach the best chance to settle down.
Start With Liquids, Not Food
If you’ve been vomiting, the smartest move is to give your stomach a break for a few hours before eating or drinking anything. Then start small: suck on ice chips or take tiny sips of water every 15 minutes. The goal is to see whether your stomach can hold down fluid before you ask it to handle food.
Good options during this stage include water, clear broth, apple juice, sports drinks, flavored gelatin, and ice pops. Avoid anything with milk, pulp, or fat. Once you’ve kept liquids down for a few hours, your appetite will likely start returning on its own, and that’s your signal to try solid food.
The Best Foods for a Sensitive Stomach
You’ve probably heard of the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast. It’s no longer recommended as a strict regimen because it lacks protein, calcium, vitamin B12, and fiber, and following it for more than a day or two can actually slow recovery, especially in children. The American Academy of Pediatrics considers it too restrictive for kids with diarrhea. But the principle behind it still holds: eat foods that are easy to digest and unlikely to irritate your gut.
Low-fiber, starchy foods move through your digestive tract without creating much bulk, which means less cramping, less gas, and firmer stools. Good choices include:
- White rice or plain pasta: easy to digest and unlikely to trigger nausea
- White toast or saltine crackers: the salt in crackers also helps replace electrolytes
- Bananas: gentle on the stomach and a good source of potassium, which you lose through vomiting and diarrhea
- Applesauce: contains pectin, a type of fiber that forms a gel in your digestive tract and helps firm up loose stools
- Boiled or baked potatoes: plain, without butter or sour cream
- Plain chicken breast: a lean protein that won’t overwhelm your stomach
- Oatmeal: cooked plain, it’s soft and easy to tolerate
Applesauce deserves a special mention. The pectin it contains resists breakdown by gut bacteria and holds water in the colon, forming a gel that produces more solid stools. Research in animal models found that when pectin was excluded from a liquid diet, stools became significantly looser and normal bowel contractions decreased.
What to Avoid Until You Feel Better
Some foods actively make an upset stomach worse. Fatty and greasy foods are the biggest offenders because they slow digestion and can trigger cramping or diarrhea. Dairy is another common problem, particularly if you have any degree of lactose intolerance, which is more common than most people realize. Even cheese, which many consider a “binding” food, can worsen symptoms.
Caffeine stimulates the gut and can increase both cramping and diarrhea. Skip coffee, energy drinks, and caffeinated tea until your stomach has fully settled. Spicy foods, acidic fruits like oranges and tomatoes, alcohol, and carbonated drinks can all irritate an already sensitive stomach lining. Raw vegetables and high-fiber foods like beans and whole grains create bulk in the intestine, which is exactly what you don’t want when dealing with nausea or diarrhea.
Ginger for Nausea
Ginger is one of the few natural remedies with real evidence behind it for settling nausea. It works by blocking certain serotonin receptors in both the gut and the brain, which are part of the signaling pathway that triggers the urge to vomit. Most clinical studies have used between 250 mg and 1 g of powdered ginger root daily, often split into several doses.
You don’t need capsules to get the benefit. Ginger tea made from fresh sliced ginger root, ginger chews, or even flat ginger ale (with real ginger in the ingredients) can help. For pregnancy-related nausea specifically, research has typically used about 1 g per day, divided into four doses. Start with a small amount and see how your stomach responds.
How Quickly to Return to Normal Eating
Most people can start reintroducing regular foods within 24 to 48 hours, depending on what caused the upset stomach in the first place. The key is to go gradually. After tolerating bland solids for a meal or two, try adding in cooked vegetables, eggs, or soup. If that sits well, you can return to your normal diet. There’s no need to stay on bland food longer than necessary because your gut actually recovers faster when it has access to a full range of nutrients.
For children, this is especially important. A restricted diet lasting more than 24 hours may slow recovery rather than help it. Once a child can keep food down, offering their normal diet (minus the obvious triggers like greasy or sugary foods) is the better approach.
Staying Hydrated Matters More Than Eating
Dehydration is the real danger with vomiting and diarrhea, not missed meals. Your body can handle a day or two of reduced food intake, but losing fluids and electrolytes without replacing them creates problems quickly. Sip water, broth, or an oral rehydration solution throughout the day. Small, frequent sips are easier to keep down than drinking a full glass at once.
Mild to moderate dehydration responds well to drinking more fluids at home. But severe dehydration requires medical treatment. Watch for these warning signs: diarrhea lasting more than 24 hours, inability to keep any fluids down for several hours, confusion or unusual sleepiness, bloody or black stool, or a fever above 102°F. If you haven’t been able to keep anything down for 24 to 48 hours, that’s a clear signal to seek medical care.
Do Probiotics Help?
The evidence on probiotics for stomach bugs is mixed. One meta-analysis found that a common probiotic strain shortened diarrhea in children by about two days compared to placebo. But a larger trial of 646 children with the same type of infection found no significant difference in how long diarrhea lasted, how often they vomited, or how long they stayed in the hospital.
Probiotic-rich foods like plain yogurt (if you tolerate dairy) or fermented foods are unlikely to hurt and may help restore normal gut bacteria after the worst has passed. They’re a reasonable addition once you’re past the acute phase and able to keep food down, but they’re not a replacement for staying hydrated and eating bland foods in the early stages.