When your stomach is upset, the best foods are bland, low in fat, and easy to digest: plain rice, bananas, toast, broth-based soups, boiled potatoes, oatmeal, and crackers. These sit gently in your stomach without triggering more nausea, cramping, or diarrhea. What you drink matters just as much as what you eat, and a few specific foods can actually speed your recovery rather than just buying time.
Start With Bland, Easy Foods
You’ve probably heard of the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast. It’s a reasonable starting point for the first day or two of a stomach bug, food poisoning, or traveler’s diarrhea, but there’s no reason to limit yourself to only those four foods. Brothy soups, oatmeal, boiled potatoes, unsweetened dry cereal, and plain crackers are all equally gentle on the stomach and give you more variety to work with.
The common thread is simplicity. These foods are low in fat, low in fiber, and don’t require much digestive effort. Fat in particular is worth avoiding: when fat reaches your small intestine, it slows the rate at which your stomach empties. That’s normally fine, but when you’re already nauseous or bloated, a slower stomach means prolonged discomfort.
Once you can keep bland foods down for several hours without symptoms returning, start adding back more nutritious options. Cooked squash (butternut or pumpkin), cooked carrots, skinless sweet potatoes, avocado, skinless chicken or turkey, fish, and eggs are all good next steps. They’re still easy to digest but provide the protein, vitamins, and calories your body needs to actually recover.
Why Bananas and Rice Do More Than Fill You Up
Bananas and rice aren’t just bland. They contain a type of starch that resists digestion in the small intestine and travels to the colon, where gut bacteria convert it into short-chain fatty acids. Those fatty acids help the colon reabsorb salt and water, which directly counteracts the fluid loss that causes watery diarrhea. Bananas also contain pectin, a soluble fiber that absorbs water and adds bulk to loose stools.
A clinical trial in infants with persistent diarrhea found that adding green banana or pectin to a rice-based diet significantly reduced the number of diarrheal stools and shortened the duration of illness compared to rice alone. Ripe bananas work too, though green bananas contain more resistant starch.
Hydration Comes First
If you’re vomiting or having diarrhea, replacing lost fluid is more urgent than eating. Small, frequent sips are easier to keep down than gulping a full glass. Water is fine for mild cases, but if you’ve been losing fluids for several hours, you need electrolytes too.
The science behind oral rehydration is straightforward: glucose helps your small intestine absorb sodium, and sodium pulls water along with it. The ideal ratio is roughly equal parts glucose and sodium. That’s the basis of the WHO oral rehydration formula, which delivers 75 mmol/L each of glucose and sodium plus 20 mmol/L of potassium. You can buy oral rehydration packets at most pharmacies, and they work better than sports drinks for significant fluid loss.
Coconut water is another option worth considering. Cup for cup, it contains about 404 mg of potassium compared to 37 mg in a typical sports drink, plus meaningful amounts of magnesium and calcium. It also has roughly a third of the sugar (4 grams versus 13 grams per cup). The tradeoff is lower sodium (64 mg versus 97 mg), so if you’re losing a lot of fluid through vomiting, a dedicated rehydration solution is better. For mild upset stomachs, coconut water is a solid choice.
Ginger and Peppermint for Nausea and Cramping
Ginger is one of the few natural remedies with real clinical backing for nausea. Multiple randomized trials have tested it at doses between 975 and 1,500 mg per day, divided into three or four doses, and found it effective. In practical terms, that’s about 250 mg of powdered ginger four times a day, or a few cups of strong ginger tea spread throughout the day. Fresh ginger sliced into hot water works, as does ginger chew candy, though you’ll want to check that it contains real ginger rather than just flavoring.
Peppermint works differently. It relaxes the smooth muscle lining your digestive tract by blocking calcium from entering muscle cells, which reduces the cramping and spasms that cause that tight, painful feeling in your gut. Peppermint tea is the easiest way to get this benefit. If your main symptom is nausea, ginger is the better choice. If it’s cramping or that clenched feeling in your abdomen, peppermint is more targeted.
What to Avoid Until You Feel Better
Some foods will reliably make things worse. Fatty and fried foods slow stomach emptying, which intensifies nausea and that heavy, overfull sensation. Dairy products are a particular risk: a stomach bug can temporarily damage the cells in your small intestine that produce lactase, the enzyme that breaks down milk sugar. This temporary lactose intolerance can last days to weeks after the infection clears, meaning milk, ice cream, and soft cheese may cause bloating, gas, and diarrhea even after you otherwise feel better.
Also skip caffeine, alcohol, citrus juice, and very spicy foods. Caffeine stimulates gut motility and can worsen diarrhea. Alcohol irritates the stomach lining and is dehydrating. Citrus and spice don’t cause damage, but they can amplify nausea and burning sensations in an already irritated stomach.
Sugary drinks, including fruit juice and regular soda, can also backfire. High sugar concentrations pull water into the intestine through osmosis, which can make diarrhea worse. If you want juice, dilute it by half with water.
Probiotics Can Shorten Recovery
If your upset stomach involves diarrhea, certain probiotics can cut the duration by about a day. The yeast-based probiotic Saccharomyces boulardii has the strongest evidence. A meta-analysis of five studies in children found that it shortened diarrhea by an average of 1.1 days compared to placebo. In one trial, children who took it recovered in about 3 days versus nearly 5 days without it.
The typical dose is 250 mg twice daily for adults, taken for the duration of symptoms and a few days after. You can find it at most pharmacies under brand names like Florastor. It’s particularly useful for antibiotic-associated diarrhea, since antibiotics don’t kill yeast-based probiotics the way they kill bacterial ones.
A Simple Timeline for Recovery Eating
For the first few hours when nausea is at its worst, focus only on small sips of water, ginger tea, or an oral rehydration drink. Don’t force yourself to eat.
Once you can keep liquids down, introduce bland foods in small amounts: a few bites of plain toast, a quarter cup of rice, half a banana. Eat slowly. If that stays down for a couple of hours, eat a bit more. By day two or three, you can usually expand to soft-cooked vegetables, plain chicken or fish, eggs, and oatmeal. Reintroduce dairy, fatty foods, and raw vegetables last, giving your gut another few days to fully heal. If dairy still bothers you a week or two later, that temporary lactase deficiency hasn’t resolved yet, and it’s worth sticking with lactose-free alternatives a while longer.