When your stomach hurts, the right foods can ease the pain while the wrong ones make it worse. The general strategy is simple: stick to bland, low-fat, low-fiber foods that require minimal effort from your digestive system. What you eat depends partly on the type of pain you’re dealing with, whether it’s nausea, cramping, bloating, or general soreness.
Start With Fluids Before Solid Food
If your stomach pain came with vomiting or diarrhea, replacing lost fluids is the first priority. Sip small amounts of clear liquids rather than gulping large volumes, which can trigger more nausea. Water, broth, diluted fruit juice, and sports drinks all work for most adults. Saltine crackers can also help replace electrolytes alongside fluids.
For older adults, anyone with a weakened immune system, or people with severe diarrhea, an oral rehydration solution like Pedialyte provides a more precise balance of glucose and electrolytes than water alone. These aren’t just for children. If you can’t keep fluids down for more than a few hours, that’s a sign you may need medical attention.
Best Foods for an Upset Stomach
You’ve probably heard of the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast. It’s fine for a day or two, but Harvard Health notes there’s no research showing it works better than other bland options, and it’s too nutritionally limited to follow for long. A broader selection of easy-to-digest foods will help you recover faster.
Good choices include:
- Starches: white rice, boiled potatoes, oatmeal, crackers, refined white bread or pasta, unsweetened dry cereal
- Fruits: applesauce, bananas (not overripe), melons, canned fruit
- Proteins: plain scrambled eggs, skinless chicken or turkey, baked whitefish, tofu, creamy peanut butter
- Vegetables: cooked carrots, butternut squash, pumpkin, sweet potatoes without skin
- Soups: broth-based soups, especially plain chicken or vegetable broth
- Other: gelatin, popsicles, pudding, graham crackers
These foods share a few traits: they’re low in fat, low in fiber, and unlikely to stimulate excess acid production. Fat slows digestion and can worsen nausea, while fiber and roughage force your gut to work harder. Cooking vegetables rather than eating them raw makes a noticeable difference.
Foods to Avoid Until You Feel Better
Anything greasy, fried, or heavily spiced will likely increase discomfort. Dairy can be tricky: low-fat or fat-free versions are generally tolerated, but full-fat milk, cheese, and ice cream can make things worse, especially if you have any degree of lactose sensitivity that flares up when your gut is already irritated.
Skip raw vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and high-fiber cereals until your stomach settles. Citrus fruits and tomato-based foods can aggravate acid reflux. Caffeine and alcohol both irritate the stomach lining and increase acid production. Carbonated drinks may feel soothing but often introduce gas that adds to bloating and cramping.
If Bloating and Gas Are the Main Problem
When your stomach pain feels more like pressure, fullness, or sharp gas pains, the issue is often fermentation in your gut. Certain carbohydrates ferment more easily than others. Apples, watermelon, and stone fruits (peaches, plums, cherries) are common culprits. Grapes, strawberries, and pineapple tend to cause less trouble. Even bananas depend on ripeness: a very ripe banana is higher in the sugars that feed fermentation, while a slightly underripe one is better tolerated.
Beans, onions, garlic, broccoli, and cauliflower are notorious gas producers. If bloating is your main symptom, stick to cooked carrots, zucchini, potatoes, and rice until the discomfort passes.
Ginger and Peppermint: What Actually Helps
Ginger has the strongest reputation among natural stomach remedies, and it holds up reasonably well. It’s effective enough for nausea that the American Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology lists it as an acceptable remedy for morning sickness. Oncologists also use it to help reduce nausea after chemotherapy. Fresh ginger root and dried ginger powder both work. To make ginger tea, slice the root into thin pieces, pour boiling water over them, and let it steep for at least 10 minutes. This is a better option than commercial ginger ale or ginger beer, which typically contain very little actual ginger and a lot of sugar.
Peppermint can help with cramping and spasms because it relaxes the smooth muscle in your digestive tract. There’s a catch, though: that same muscle relaxation can loosen the valve between your stomach and esophagus. If your stomach pain involves heartburn or acid reflux, peppermint may make it worse. Enteric-coated peppermint oil capsules are designed to dissolve in the intestines rather than the stomach, which reduces the heartburn risk, but plain peppermint tea doesn’t offer that protection.
Easing Back Into Normal Eating
Once your pain starts to improve, don’t jump straight back to your regular diet. Add foods gradually over two to three days. Cooked vegetables, lean proteins like chicken and fish, and avocado are good transitional foods because they’re nutrient-dense but still gentle. Pay attention to how each new food makes you feel. If something triggers a return of symptoms, set it aside for another day or two.
Eat smaller portions more frequently rather than three large meals. A full stomach stretches the organ walls and increases acid production, both of which can reignite pain that was starting to fade.
When Stomach Pain Needs More Than Food
Most stomach pain comes from something temporary: a virus, something you ate, stress, or mild indigestion. But roughly 10% of people who see a doctor for abdominal pain need immediate treatment. Severe, sudden-onset pain is the biggest red flag, especially pain that feels out of proportion to anything you’ve experienced before. Fever, a rapid heartbeat, vomiting blood, or blood in your stool all warrant urgent evaluation.
Pain that starts around your navel and migrates to your lower right side could signal appendicitis. Rigidity in your abdomen, where the muscles feel locked and guarding, suggests inflammation of the abdominal lining. Adults over 65 deserve particular caution because serious conditions like blocked blood flow to the intestines can cause severe pain with very few external signs on examination.
Stomach pain that recurs regularly over weeks, even if each episode is mild, points to something that dietary changes alone won’t fix. Persistent pain after eating, unexplained weight loss, or difficulty swallowing are patterns worth investigating rather than managing with bland food indefinitely.